DagSeoul: Positions, Populations, Punk, Poetics

dagNotes: A simple beginning for a critique of contemporary popular educational and pedagogical practice and the education reform movement

We decide to work with each other in public discourse communities to find a way to agree about certain things. Just this statement is problematic in the US, where most people assume we’ve arrived at public discourse having already agreed. When I teach, I try to promote consensus that permits social difference. After all, we are not all the same person with the same experiences. One of the first things a teacher confronts is whether or not to differentiate instruction. We tend to agree that we should differentiate, though many teachers still insist teaching is merely giving students information they must then work to learn. So, we have an initial problem from which to begin an examination.

Teaching that promotes a consensus or consensuses that permit(s) social difference is a difficult objective to achieve and for many reasons. To be a teacher thinking about practice and pedagogy would be very simple (as it appears to be for so many teachers) were I simply to ignore original social difference. If I were to accept that rhetoric is the means to promote a standard consensus that is predetermined for whatever reason, then teaching would be what it appears reformers think it is: a practice to provide students with a standard set of static skills that all students are assumed to need to possess to succeed after graduation. I don’t accept this and seek to illustrate the absurdity of imposing standards that compose individual students and teachers as the same student and teacher repeated everywhere at every time.

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White capitalist America’s cultural vacuity, its historical inability to nurture or sustain a vibrant “national culture” drawing upon the most creative elements of its various ethnicities, helps to explain the present paradox of desegregation. Millions of white Americans, devoid of their own cultural compass, have absorbed critical elements of African American music, dance, literature, and language. They now accept black participation in professional athletics and extend acclaim to African American film stars and entertainers. In a desperate search for collective identity, whites have mimicked blacks in countless ways, from the black-faced minstrels of the nineteenth century to the contemporary white musical groups who sing reggae and rap.

But whites’ affinity and tolerance for blackness are largely cultural, not racial. Many whites have learned to appreciate African American-derived elements of music, dance, and religious rituals but would not endorse the sharing of power or material privileges-because that would undermine the stratification of race.

For example, the late Lee Atwater, who ran the Republican National Committee during President George Bush’s administration, was the architect of a viciously racist media campaign that was largely responsible for electing Bush. Atwater’s infamous television advertisement of convicted felon Willie Horton linked the specter of the black rapist to the Democrats’ supposed weakness on law-and-order issues. Yet Atwater’s much beloved personal hobby was playing the blues on his guitar, weakly imitating African American blues artist B.B. King.

(Marable, 1998, p. 155)

…Is “weakly intimidating” at the end there supposed to be “weakly imitating”? Can’t find (and probably wouldn’t have access to) the original source, but that seems off. Just pointing that out, because it’s a great quote.

(via rykemasters)

From Manning Marable’s Black Leadership, ”The Rhetoric of Racial Harmony”. And the word should be “imitating”; I changed it above.

(Source: youottercomeagain, via rykemasters)

“Am I the only one who…?!”

No you’re not the only one. You never will be the only one. You can’t be the only one.

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.

dagNotes: On New Criticism and Close Reading

dagseoul:

Close reading really is only an after-thought to New Criticism, a sort of accepted necessity. Isn’t New Crit really nothing more than, at best, the intellectualization of the text as a use-value to be described as a unique aesthetic object or, at worst, a crass attempt at self-justification that led to the creation of an infamously (and excused) under-read and pseudo-intellectual lit-crit market?

Ransom’s initiation, after all, led to the now infamous Intentional and Affective Fallacies. The reaction to the popularity of these fallacies led to Stanley Fish. It’s like a massively problematic slippery slope.

Certainly Ransom’s Vanderbuilt students saw the value in embracing New Crit methodology. For example, Cleanth Brooks’ treatment of Faulkner created a Faulkner industry responsible for a dominant and well-circulated way to closely read Faulkner novels, especially the Yoknapatawpha County novels and stories. Brooks went so far to claim The New Critical Perspective *must* be illusive and undefinable, as if the critic rather than the author were responsible for the way to read the text. In Poetics, we’d contrast this new critical method with, say, “Projective Verse,” where Olson argues that, no matter what we think, we’re always speaking with the poet’s breath, never mind, his or her voice.

Sounds like capitalist culture to me. All of the focus on form and content we accomplish with close reading actually has nothing to do with New Criticism itself. It’s just efficiently implemented method. It’s easy to argue against the anti-dialectical method, the anti-historicism, of New Crit, but I think it’s most glaring flaws are in the ways it promotes critical discourse as the market’s answer to the enigmatic aesthetic object.

dagNotes: What are dialectics?

Dialectics is not thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Stop writing that. Don’t let your friends be that lazy. T-A-S is a fucking scaffold for understanding Hegelian triadic structures; it’s a kind of triad. Certainly, it’s part of his work on dialectics, but it isn’t IT. If you want to understand dialectics, the history of its conception is worth a look, rather than a ridiculous focus on Hegel. (And if you’re going to focus on Hegel, do not overlook Fichte. That’s where Hegel cut his dialectical teeth.)

First, read Heraclitus, who believed everything is in constant change. Read H, think on it, don’t forget it, because the cornerstone of dialectics is gradual change.

Basically, we should insist that dialectics is nothing new. Lot’s of people get stuck in Medieval Dialectics, of which there were many practioners. MD is all about 1) asking questions, 2) recognizing objections to questions, 3) weighing evidence, 4) offering answers to questions at issue, then 4) answering objections. Our academic research writing follows this model. Much Comp/Rhet, high-school English writing-instruction, writing center work at universities, tutoring about essays, workshopping in graduate schools is mired in this kind of dialectical structure. We all know it without studying it. As with many things we know without having really studied, this makes it vital, in my opinion, to actually look at the primary sources.

Hegel’s dialectic, after Fichte, is quite complex and well described here. Someone posted a link to the dialectic for kids that was awesome. I can’t find it in my archives, right now. Too bad, but I’ll keep looking. Basically, the Hegelian dialectic has to do with everything being transient and finite, extended through time, and being composed of contradictions. Gradual changes lead to crises, or turning points, so quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes, and that change is helical rather than circular. Very basic summary of the points. If you like poetry, read Yeats, who was into spirals. Much modernist and high modernist poetry dwells in the quantitative leading to qualitative changes. 

Marxist dialectics is not Hegelian dialectics, which Marx and Engels thought too ideal.

For me, I like thinking about classical, medieval, Hegelian, and Marxist dialectics. If you’re into rhetoric, you’ll love this kind of thinking about concepts and history, and the history of concepts.

Also, I think Frankfurt School is essential reading. Deal.

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.

By Carl Bronski 

19 May 2012

In a May 14 column in the Toronto Star, self-described “socialist” writer Heather Mallick provided readers with another example of the bankruptcy of identity politics. Entitling her article “From anti-gay bullying to would-be president”, Mallick explains that given a choice in the US presidential election between Republican contender Mitt Romney and drone strike “murderer” (in her words) President Barrack Obama, she would choose the latter.

Mallick takes as her starting point the revelation last week that Romney, as a teen-ager, led a group of prep school students in a bullying attack on a fellow student they perceived to be gay. Romney and his friends jumped the victim, held him down and sheared off some of his hair. She then compares the Republican politician’s actions and character with those of Obama:

“Lost in the question of bullying”, she writes, “it’s easy to forget that Obama killed an American citizen, Anwar Al-Awlaki, and his teen-age son in an illegal drone strike, which does technically make him a murderer even if he won’t be charged. On the other hand you completely know that young Obama would never hound, pound and cut a terrified classmate. The bully or the murderer, make your choice … I’ll take Obama the murderer”, she concludes, “Yes, I will”.

What can one say?

Mallick, who has also written for Canada’s Globe and Mail, the New York Times and Britain’s Guardian, has been a principal voice of left-liberalism in Canada for years. She was a gushing supporter of Obama in 2008—although her enthusiasm somewhat waned when the new president appointed only men to key posts overseeing the bank bailout and, lacking “spine”, subsequently squandered his majority in congress and abandoned his so-called progressive agenda. But neither this nor the record of Obama in the “war on terror” is sufficient to drive Mallick from the Democratic president’s fold.

As Mallick indicates, last fall, Obama ordered the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen, in a drone attack in Yemen. Another American citizen, Samir Khan, was killed in the same attack. Two weeks later, Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, was killed in a subsequent US drone strike.

Drones have become infamous the world over as instruments of US military aggression and assassination. Their use has expanded exponentially over the last decade. In 2001, the American military arsenal included barely 50 drones. Now, it has a fleet of some 7,500. Drone strikes have dramatically escalated during the Obama administration. They have claimed nearly 2,700 victims since 2004, the great majority of them unarmed men, women and children.

From the maintenance of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp to the defense of torture, rendition, indefinite detention, domestic spying, secret prisons and state secrets, Obama has deepened the far-reaching attack on democratic rights and processes launched by his predecessor, George W. Bush. He has gone beyond Bush in ordering the assassination of US citizens and asserting his right to do so.

But none of this holds up when compared with the youthful sins of the bully, Mitt Romney. After all, as we have been told in numerous other columns by Mallick, the Republican Party—and their Conservative brethren in Canada—is simply a repository for old, fat white men with sexual inadequacies and “trailer trash” [Sarah Palin].

There is certainly nothing to recommend the positions of big business politician Romney—he too supports the drone assassinations—but here one should note Mallick’s penchant for adopting the unprincipled tactics of far right commentators. Her (and their) modus operandi of often half-baked, personal invective and a barely concealed disdain for wide layers of the population has earned her not only the enmity of right-wing pundits, but snickering approval from a layer of liberal readers.

The dilettante Mallick has made a virtue of a certain cynical, light-minded, satirical writing style that she hopes will insulate her from the rigours of journalistic accountability. She prefers to “generally take light things seriously and serious things lightly and that way you get some bendings in your life rather than just sitting up in horror”. That horror, however, also has a silver lining. “The worse things are”, she once said, “the happier I am because it matches my world-view”. Meanwhile the well-heeled Mallick revels in shopping sprees and regular trips to Paris to sample the fine dining there.

Mallick has spent much of her career promoting issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. For such figures, this is a means of obscuring the basic class questions in society and diverting attention from the reactionary policies of “progressive” parties on every front. In doing so, she seeks to exploit the general support for equality and the expansion of women’s and gay rights, particularly among young people.

The Democratic Party in the United States and the social-democratic NDP in Canada use such issues in the attempt to establish points of difference with their more right-wing opponents, and thus win support in more affluent layers of the middle class, under conditions in which the mainstream political parties agree on all fundamental issues.

The net result of decades of identity politics has been the emergence of privileged layers from within each oppressed group, whose role is to keep expressions of misery and anger from the less fortunate within acceptable bounds. Obama himself is a prime example of the opportunities for personal advancement.

Mallick doesn’t see the systemic attacks on the working class or imperialist interventions as part and parcel of the profit system. Rather, like some Victorian-era philanthropist, what she wants is just some “social justice and my taxes to help the poor”.

This has nothing to do with any socialist tradition. A Marxist such as Rosa Luxemburg understood that the “lack of rights for women (and other minorities) is only one link in the chain of the reaction that shackles the people’s lives”. Socialists have viewed the struggle for those rights as part of the effort to unite and strengthen the entire working population and raise it to the level of its historic task, settling accounts with capitalism.

There is nothing progressive about the purveyors of identity politics. They run interference for those even further to their right. The only question is, how far will they go? In her Toronto Star piece, Mallick has given us another clue. She’ll take a murderer.

dagWeek in Review: Memes

dagseoul:

I get annoyed when bloggers reblog crappy memes about POTUS, Democrats, Republicans, white people (although I love teasing white people, so carry on,) war and peace. A complaint about Obama, for example, that includes a meme about war and the Nobel Peace Prize doesn’t really communicate anything more than what we know about traditional politics and politicians. It implements contradictory trajectories: we often go to war to promote peace, for example.

When I read a blogger I follow reblog a meme or common complaint, I wonder who she’s talking to? Where is her message directed? With whom is she engaged? It can’t be me. After all, I agree: I’m aware of the irony that Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize. Crappy memes are little more than a charm on a bracelet to quickly indicate to others something about personality or affiliation. I see a lot of people with Chrome bags and beards in my neighborhood. I can list their favorite music, literature, politics, food, fashion, et al., without knowing anything else about them. I can likely list the brands of their material existence. The answer to the questions above—to whom are they talking, to whom are they engaged—is always going to be with people who agree with me.

Many folks who claim leftist affiliation (which means what exactly?) are much more interested in creating an exclusive and well-disciplined discourse community much like the libertarian capitalists long ago accomplished. (For an example, see Mises.org.) That is, they wish to organize or to create a community of pissing, sanctimonious dissent that intends to do nothing much more than to disagree with the status quo and occupy a permanent position of predictable and conditional correctness. They say, “We know we’re correct about these things and here’s how to discuss them with others.”

Nothing approaching real work in public space can occur when all efforts are directed at disciplining rhetorical space.

As with the crass libertarian right over the years, I’m struck that The Occupy Movement now resorts to blaming traditional media organizations for not fairly representing their ideas and actions. Their complaints are similar and basically, “You did not correctly cover it.” Blaming traditional and corporatized discourse for a failure of representation suggests Occupy may be an acquiescing liberal struggle seeking popular acceptance in traditional discourse to express a desire to change paradigms about how we represent people who are not visible in our movement. Isn’t that what Obama’s problematic Hope was all about?

Language is important. Let’s examine pronoun use for a moment. When a movement leader suggests We are trying to find ways to talk about what Occupy means and what direction it should take, who is the we he refers to? Is it the General Assemblies? Is it a small group of intellectual activists? Is it an idealized Every One Of Us? Is he talking about The Leaders of the Movement? It’s not clear. (I know this might appear to be a bit of a straw man, but I’ve heard this sentiment expressed in interviews and read it online, and here’s David Graeber expressing it in this discussion with David Harvey.)

I don’t think saying something about an idea illustrates how the idea might work. This is my problem with crass economic libertarianism. The conditional for libertarians is always “Things will improve if and only if we adopt our method” as if the method has already been illustrated to work and that it’s natural. Let’s make an important distinction. For libertarians, the “we” is often “all the others” because libertarians implement a traditional us and them strategy in their discourse. They are the knowledgable outsiders looking for inclusion. Liberals assume inclusion. For liberalism, the “we” is an abstract universal we. It’s meant to be a statement for everyone in a manner everyone should find agreeable. It’s a problematic cornerstone in liberal tolerance. I may get annoyed at liberal reach, but I can’t help but giggle at libertarians who complain about coercive state apparatuses when they refuse to recognize their own goals.

I feel the same way about liberalism I do about crass libertarianism: both practices are expert only at expressing a wish to illustrate how the status quo can actually work well for every one of us. Well, it cannot. Capitalism cannot offer freedom from state coercion as libertarians will argue, and our democracy isn’t going to find a way to promote justice and equality as liberals will insist it can. And that young people resort to memes to recognize a wish for change in others, I wonder if anyone will bother to do more than talk about desire.

dagNotes: We. The Problematic Traditional. The struggle to become popular offers cover for the desire to be correct.

I get annoyed when bloggers reblog crappy memes about POTUS, Democrats, Republicans, white people (although I love teasing white people, so carry on,) war and peace. A complaint about Obama, for example, that includes a meme about war and the Nobel Peace Prize doesn’t really communicate anything more than what we know about traditional politics and politicians. It implements contradictory trajectories: we often go to war to promote peace, for example.

When I read a blogger I follow reblog a meme or common complaint, I wonder who she’s talking to? Where is her message directed? With whom is she engaged? It can’t be me. After all, I agree: I’m aware of the irony that Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize. Crappy memes are little more than a charm on a bracelet to quickly indicate to others something about personality or affiliation. I see a lot of people with Chrome bags and beards in my neighborhood. I can list their favorite music, literature, politics, food, fashion, et al., without knowing anything else about them. I can likely list the brands of their material existence. The answer to the questions above—to whom are they talking, to whom are they engaged—is always going to be with people who agree with me.

Many folks who claim leftist affiliation (which means what exactly?) are much more interested in creating an exclusive and well-disciplined discourse community much like the libertarian capitalists long ago accomplished. (For an example, see Mises.org.) That is, they wish to organize or to create a community of pissing, sanctimonious dissent that intends to do nothing much more than to disagree with the status quo and occupy a permanent position of predictable and conditional correctness. They say, “We know we’re correct about these things and here’s how to discuss them with others.”

Nothing approaching real work in public space can occur when all efforts are directed at disciplining rhetorical space.

As with the crass libertarian right over the years, I’m struck that The Occupy Movement now resorts to blaming traditional media organizations for not fairly representing their ideas and actions. Their complaints are similar and basically, “You did not correctly cover it.” Blaming traditional and corporatized discourse for a failure of representation suggests Occupy may be an acquiescing liberal struggle seeking popular acceptance in traditional discourse to express a desire to change paradigms about how we represent people who are not visible in our movement. Isn’t that what Obama’s problematic Hope was all about?

Language is important. Let’s examine pronoun use for a moment. When a movement leader suggests We are trying to find ways to talk about what Occupy means and what direction it should take, who is the we he refers to? Is it the General Assemblies? Is it a small group of intellectual activists? Is it an idealized Every One Of Us? Is he talking about The Leaders of the Movement? It’s not clear. (I know this might appear to be a bit of a straw man, but I’ve heard this sentiment expressed in interviews and read it online, and here’s David Graeber expressing it in this discussion with David Harvey.)

I don’t think saying something about an idea illustrates how the idea might work. This is my problem with crass economic libertarianism. The conditional for libertarians is always “Things will improve if and only if we adopt our method” as if the method has already been illustrated to work and that it’s natural. Let’s make an important distinction. For libertarians, the “we” is often “all the others” because libertarians implement a traditional us and them strategy in their discourse. They are the knowledgable outsiders looking for inclusion. Liberals assume inclusion. For liberalism, the “we” is an abstract universal we. It’s meant to be a statement for everyone in a manner everyone should find agreeable. It’s a problematic cornerstone in liberal tolerance. I may get annoyed at liberal reach, but I can’t help but giggle at libertarians who complain about coercive state apparatuses when they refuse to recognize their own goals.

I feel the same way about liberalism I do about crass libertarianism: both practices are expert only at expressing a wish to illustrate how the status quo can actually work well for every one of us. Well, it cannot. Capitalism cannot offer freedom from state coercion as libertarians will argue, and our democracy isn’t going to find a way to promote justice and equality as liberals will insist it can. And that young people resort to memes to recognize a wish for change in others, I wonder if anyone will bother to do more than talk about desire.

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.

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.

White People Problems: Liberal Innocence

When you say, “I know people are racists, but not all of us are…” or “I’m one of the good ones,” you’re actually confessing to be one of the bad ones. Both pleas are white liberal revisions of “I’m not racist, but…”.

dagNotes: On Ann Romney’s plea, “We can be poor in spirit,” Ambition, & Capitalist Rhetoric

“And so, you know, we can be poor in spirit. (Laughs) And I don’t even consider myself wealthy, which is an interesting thing. It can be here today and gone tomorrow.” —Ann Romney

Sometimes we can get so much from so little.

I’m interested in how capitalism insinuates its ethics into discussions about everyday life and so how capitalist rhetoric produces social and rhetorical space that Capitalists represent as natural elements of the social order. Ann Romney’s statement is a bit of a naive confession about much more than a flippant attitude towards her social status. Her “we can be poor in spirit” is a plea for an excuse, to be sure, but also recalls her bargain with the social order itself and confesses her desire that we maintain that order so she can be rewarded for her participation in it.

I suggest she’s playing the role of Mr Rich White Man in Lillian Smith’s parable, “Two Men and a Bargain,” from her book, Killers of the Dream (1949). She’s encouraging Mr Poor White Man to permit her riches in spite of his poverty because they are really the same people with the same aspirations. Romney is reminding herself and others of our bargain with white power in capitalism. She sounds like she worries about her financial situation like everyone else does. Ann Romney is nothing like most people and extremely privileged, but we should be willing to examine her plea rather than simply denounce it as patronizing bullshit from an out-of-touch politician’s wife.

When I first watched the clip, I was reminded of Horatio Alger novels. I know it might sound strange that Ann Romney reminds me of Alger’s fiction. After all, his works are written for young, white men. His stories are meant to instruct young men how to prosper, about how to be excellent. Yet, Alger’s characters are always very “poor in spirit.” Romney’s plea, “we can be… ,” is not meant to simply excuse her wealth. She’s speaking to an audience and on behalf of her husband about character and habit in a manner she knows they will welcome. She’s attempting to educate us about how to think about her and so her husband.

Think Progress’s short clip is sure to be denounced by Romney’s support and conservatives, but it illustrates the rhetoric quite well. She’s appealing to practical wisdom in capitalist culture (phronesis), defending the excellence, the goodness, her social status should illustrate (arete), and extending good will to her audience by appealing to her likeness in the daily pursuit of a moral life (eunoia). This is all very important because Romney knows her audience determines whether or not she and her husband have good character and habits.

A note on ambition: Romney implicitly evokes her unearned ambition when she confesses her wealth has little to do with her and could be gone tomorrow. It’s as if she believes her status has been granted. People who inherit their wealth often claim their wealth doesn’t strengthen their positions in society. We might ask, why does she need to make such a plea to people-without-her-status if the status is, in fact, earned and just?

Not only are the heroes poor in Alger’s works, they are earnest in their poverty. Ragged Dick is a street urchin. He’s poor and homeless. Romney is poor in spirit. She implies a nobility of character that’s evoked by proxy. Ragged Dick may be poor, but he is noble. And like all Alger heroes, his nobility is recognized only by a wealthy patron. Thus, we see how nobility and unearned ambition are conferred to the wealthy by the poor. Kind of makes you think about what exactly we mean when we talk about trickle down economics, as if we’re receiving pay for our allegiance to the unearned status of wealthy Capitalists.

So, the wealthy patron recognizes something in the poor boy. He, like Romney in the video clip, is poor in spirit, too. This is where the bargain I mentioned above enters. For Ragged Dick to make it, he needs to accept the hand of a wealthy white male patron. He must enter into a bargain. In Alger’s story, Ragged Dick becomes instantly wealthy; that’s the fantasy in Alger’s fiction. Romney isn’t going to offer anyone wealth. She’s merely interested in securing more status and stability for her and her husband.

When Ann Romney uses this capitalist rhetoric to talk about her poverty-in-spirit, she’s actually earnestly defending the purity of her wealth. In many ways, it’s a sanctimonious rebuke of modest Christian ethics that demand rejecting accumulated wealth and answering a call to ascetic piety. I know she’s Mormon and her status is likely dependent on her husband’s wealth. He may, in fact, be her wealthy patron. I’m aware of the complexities her religion presents. Yet, Romney gleefully confesses she’s entirely dependent on faith in capitalism. So much for hard work and noble ambitions when wealth is “here today and gone tomorrow.” (Never mind we have to ignore that Capitalists regulate the market to insure their wealth and status.) She believes, at least wants to believe, that despite the fact her husband inherited his wealth and profits from the exploitation of others’ labor that he did not even manage, she’s earned her status through his good work in society. Her religion does provide her a sense of destiny that only further bolsters her fantasy of just wealth.

dagNotes: on looking beyond logical fallacies

We often over-focus on informal logic and fallacies. The pamphlet I just linked to is mostly a catalog of fallacies. Sure, it’s good to know what a logical fallacy is, how to see one, what to do about it. Yet, the most annoying arguments are with the dorks policing discourse for informal fallacies.

People participating in discourse often achieve entry into discourse communities possessing different tools: experiences, knowledge, educations, wisdom, et al. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with calling out a guy like Ron Paul, the POTUS, Hegel, or your teacher for using fallacies that form the grounding warrants for their claims. But I stay away from doing it to my students, for example, in classrooms. Although I’ll write about fallacies in responses to writing. On Tumblr, the desire to point out logical fallacies often, not always, betrays a failure to attempt to understand and visualize what a blogger is trying to say.

A good critical thinker is capable of speaking with others in a way that pointing out fallacies may not be necessary to make a point about disagreement with others. I often write the claims of the person I’m speaking with in my own words, carefully paraphrasing or directly citing, and then reply using both reasonable claims and examples. I can fairly represent a claim without implementing logical fallacies that may only be the result of rushed composition or lack of experience creating prose. In other words, I can show that I know what someone is thinking without their mistake(s) in logic in a manner that also shows I know they are, in fact, thinking about something at all. It’s fair, in my opinion. It’s also a way of thinking and writing that permits disagreement while seeking consensus.

On the other hand, I think excellent critical thinking will always be sensitive to unstated assumptions that are left as implied claims, often without reasons. Sometimes we are simply unaware of our assumptions because we haven’t really thought about the meaning of what we’re saying, and for all sorts of reasons. It’s good to point out unacknowledged unstated-assumptions.