A stairway rises from the floor. One step up. Two steps up, three, and so on. Then, at the ninth step, an abrupt end. A final step, only eight steps shy of the second floor. The pedestrian stands on the inadequate final step, some five feet off the ground, neither fully on the first floor, yet unable to attain the second.
What manner of half-assed structure is this? the abortive pedestrian asks. Did the architect fail to calculate the number the steps in the flight of stairs correctly? Did the building contractor run out of lumber at this point? The unfinished stairway is just complete enough for a person to fall from, but insufficient to use for ascending entirely from one floor to another.
Picture it, the incomplete stairway, standing on its own in a museum gallery or a sculpture garden, for it is in fact a work of art. It is an avant-garde stairway, refusing to answer the pedestrian’s desire, not out of spite, but from the simple instinct to be itself. It owes you no explanation, no more than it owes you its utility. It owes you nothing. It exists in defiance of humanity’s petty needs.
Does it not remind us of the words of Texas politician, Tim Boyd, who resigned as mayor of Colorado City, Texas after the weeklong deadly power outage two years ago. In response to frustrated constituents complaining about freezing to death, Boyd wrote: “The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING!” A government and a utility service defying the people’s calls for something in exchange for their tax dollars? That’s called avant-garde government. [You can hear or read about that fiasco in my essay from March 4, 2021, here: “The Quiet Part Out Loud.”]
Are these not the hallmarks of a new aesthetic in the official philosophy of problem solving? Another municipal analog was last week’s record storm and flooding in South Florida. Broward County, where Fort Lauderdale is located, got over two feet of rain. This could be due to the trend of global atmospheric warming. Warmer air can hold more moisture, a commonly understood cause for storms dumping unusually destructive amounts of rain.
Whatever the reason for the massive amounts of water, they’re doing something about it in Broward County. The most rainfall in a single day Fort Lauderdale’s streets are built to manage right now is three inches. 25 or so inches of rain, needless to say, is going to complicate things.
Not to worry, however. Fort Lauderdale is on track to improve their ability to move stormwater out of the streets of the city. At the end of this current run of design improvements, instead of a mere three inches of stormwater, their new system will be able to handle a whole seven inches! Then a twenty-five inch rain would put them at only eighteen inches below adequate. If you’re going to get your house flooded, better to do it in a city submerged a mere eighteen inches deep instead of twenty-two.
That is some avant-garde improvement.
Ever been on welfare? Good luck surviving on it. Food stamps? You get almost enough to inadequately feed your family. But maybe you’re one of those model citizens who has a job and even health insurance. You will often find leave and treatment for illness or accident suffered by you or a family member, or leave for pregnancy, to offer insufficient time or services to care for yourself or your loved ones. And of course public education, public libraries, and most public services are notoriously, sardonically underfunded.
Even the US military doesn’t offer its troops sufficient food. And during the recent wars in the Persian Gulf, private companies pocketed taxpayer dollars rather than supply troops with the vehicles and body armor, facilities and food they’d been contracted to provide. Not stepping up to the job is the model of behavior set by corporations and the government cash cow they own and which lays golden cow pies for them.
And then they complain that “no one wants to work anymore.” Look in the mirror, oligarchs. Government is getting the people it deserves.
Half measures as official policy are a fascinating behavior, a theatrical way for the stewards of a society, whether elected or self-appointed, to resign themselves to incompetence and defeat. We'll surely see many more such absurdist Pyrrhic gestures worldwide as coastlines submerge, forests burn, mass shootings escalate, famines and wars drive mass migrations of peoples, etc. The wildest thing to me is how much effort and expense goes into doing that which is less than meaningful.
Even the bread and circuses are half-assed. The iPhone is buggy and unwieldy, and it tortures and exploits those who make it. Products routinely fail to deliver what they promise, and that is exactly what’s expected of them. Instead of bread, we work and obey for bitter, undercooked dough. Where circuses are advertised we are greeted by rusted scaffolding from which hang moth-eaten mildewed shreds of canvas. Acrobats tumble from shoddily-made equipment but continue to go through the motions of performing on crutches, in bandages, bone-setting hardware, and prosthetic limbs. It humbles me, your socialist leisure correspondent. It puts my small efforts and non-efforts to shame.
The rulers are proving to be true masters of half-assery as a mode of operation. The rulers are the avant-garde. We artists are merely the shadow trailing after them.
The day had been a tough one for Larkin René Parquet de Parque. It had been full of disappointments. Though he lived in a timeline in which global warming had been reversed in a timely fashion through concerted effort among nations – which meant of course the weight of opinion of the greedy and their ability to manipulate the weak-minded had been countered by overwhelming passion for preserving all life now and in the future – no amount of good will on the part of others could guarantee that there wouldn’t be days when unforeseen difficulties would dominate the hours and thus defeat one’s inclination toward a good mood. Such a day was this.
Not even the ultimate defeat of the capitalist domination of economies could forestall the inevitability of such a day. The switch from plastics to various renewable configurations of carbon and glass was key to diminishing and ultimately eradicating the pollution of land, water, and air. One would think such a switch would somehow minimize the chance of having a bad day full of bad difficulties. And it may have, but minimizing a chance and preventing an inevitability are two entirely different things.
Larkin René Parquet de Parque did one thing and one thing only: he went from town to town, neighborhood to neighborhood, with a very large rock tumbler. He would send out notices a few days before his impending visit urging people to bring their empty glass bottles. Usually such bottles were recycled by the municipality. De Parque would arrive, not to supplant such services, but as a compliment to them. The bottles that were brought were shattered in a bin, tumbled in de Parque’s rock tumbler, and artificially turned into “beach glass” for use in people’s vases, landscaping, and terrariums. Sometimes he would stay more than one day if there was sufficiently high demand.
He had recently taken his rock tumbler in for a tune up, and the following day, in front of an entire neighborhood of beach glass enthusiasts who’d saved their prettiest-colored bottles for the entire year, the rock tumbler refused to tumble. Its motor was on the fritz. It turned out that the mechanic tuning it up had failed to replace an important washer. The mechanic had been too lazy to double-check her washer checklist. Don’t assume it was the absence of a profit incentive that caused it. The mechanic was part owner of that shop, as was the case with most businesses. Laziness occurs in humans for a variety of reasons. Even a compassionate economy can’t prevent it. And certainly an abusive, coercive one won’t.
So the day was a wash. The rock tumbler would have to go back to the shop, where the mechanic would discover her mistake and own up to it because there was no punishment for telling the truth except embarrassment, and she vowed to herself, her co-worker/owners, and de Parque that she would be more mindful. De Parque, for his part, decided to push his schedule back a month and take a month’s vacation starting the next day. Maybe he would join his three spouses, who were already on a camping trip. There would be no inconvenience to him nor those who relied on him to turn their bottles into beach glass, except for them having to shlep their bottles back home to await another day.
On his bullet train homeward he found the train people had decided to replace the popular Biscoff biscuits with a type of madeleine he wasn’t fond of. Lotus Bakery in Lembeke, Belgium had been continuously baking the things since the 1930s. His fellow passengers were unhappy with the replacement as well, and many a complaint was lodged. In the meantime he had little choice but to opt for a Michigan company’s version of the Dutch stroopwafel instead.
The last straw was when he went to the bar that evening and ordered a “Last Word” cocktail. He was told the bar was out of green Chartreuse, a key ingredient. The “Last Word” was made with equal parts gin, fresh lime juice, maraschino liqueur, and green Chartreuse, just as it is in our own timeline. It was the most popular craft cocktail in North America at the moment. Chartreuse was made according to a five-hundred-year-old secret recipe vouchsafed to the Carthusian order of monks. The monks at the French alpine Carthusian Monastery, however, had decided that catering to the North American thirst for green Chartreuse was a lower priority than their ecclesiastical studies and monastic rituals of devotion. The result was that the mixologist decided, with de Parque’s permission, to substitute Pernod. The result was inferior.
It was just that kind of day. De Parque’s wife, husband, and fluid third spouse were all off on a weeklong camping trip together, so before retiring to bed he read to the children of the neighborhood from a dystopian novel about an alternate timeline where fascism was rising all over the world, multiple wars were being fought to benefit arms makers and dealers, and a global climate crisis was looming with the world’s governments intransigent and their populations manipulated by for-profit propaganda corporations. A small class of über-wealthy oligarchs owned most of everything, including the legal system. Surveillance was wall-to-wall, day and night, one hundred percent continuous and ubiquitous. Slavery was a common form of labor arrangement, the seas were depleted of oxygen, the rivers were unswimmable, and resources and opportunities were kept in a state of artificial shortage, doled out parsimoniously to the great masses of people. Every attempt at social improvement was sabotaged by the infiltration of secret police.
The children found the book hilarious. Each new indignity, injustice, or instance of cruelty was greeted with the delirious uproar of childish laughter. It all seemed so outlandish and impossible.
And that’s the Moment of Truth. Good day!
Sitting at the seder table alongside three women: a movie star, a small business owner, and a landscape architect, I eavesdropped on their conversation as I ate my matzoh ball soup. And the businesswoman mentioned that some of her workers took time off when they had their periods. She could understand it in the case of one of them who had a medical condition that caused her immense pain and discomfort, but the practice had become habitual among workers she wasn’t sure required it.
All three women began chiming in about the virtues of pushing oneself past one’s perceived limitations when feeling unable or reluctant to expend the effort to accomplish something, particularly something athletic like waking up for a dance class at six ay em or dragging oneself to the bathroom after an insufficient night’s sleep or exercising past the point of pain or exhaustion.
They lost the thread of the workers wanting time for themselves, but implicit behind all this self-congratulation for being such tough, rigorous women was that millennials these days didn’t want to do that pushing-through-limitations thing. I was thinking, “How do you know that they’re not pushing themselves in some other arena of activity unrelated to their jobs?” Because being a waiter or bartender or member of a kitchen staff might not necessarily be their passion. That might lie elsewhere. And when they’re taking time for themselves, they may not just be groaning with cramp pain, but might be using the time for a purpose of which you are entirely unaware.
I didn’t say that, of course, because all three women were, by common standards, far more accomplished than I have ever been or ever will be. And it is well known that my political doctrine of non-excellence, non-participation, and non-achievement has put me in the precarious economic position where I now find myself. I did take the opportunity to praise napping, though. But it brought home how misunderstood my calls for a universal work stoppage was destined to remain.
It also brought to mind Gayatri Spivak, the Indian feminist literary critic, and the concept from Gramsci of the subaltern, about which I understand very little. The subaltern, as the notion has developed from Gramsci through Spivak and now through my misbegotten filter, is anyone or anything who is left out of the assumptions of a given discourse by virtue of their power inferiority. So much less are they than the selves discussing themselves that they don’t exist enough to speak or even to have what they might say, if they could, considered. Discussions of ethics and morals in dominant circles tend to be carried on as if the dominant circle were the only group that matters. Left out are the lesser people whose voices can be ignored simply because they don’t appear in the territory under consideration as its map has been constructed. The subaltern is an unacknowledged part of the landscape.
The workers under discussion, for example, are not thought to be doing something else valuable in the time they aren’t at work. They’re simply not at work, which means they don’t have a material existence on the map the boss is looking at. The map the three women were looking at was a geography of where they felt these people who weren’t living up to what they considered the noble or correct or fulfilling goal should unquestionably be. The goal in life is to be happy. One does what one needs to do with passion, and what needs to be done is what these three women had decided were the activities necessary to achieve fulfillment.
Spivak is a fan of Jacques Derrida, or has at least made expressions favorable to him and deconstruction, because he interrogated texts to understand how they undermined their own assumptions. The deconstruction of a text reveals what the makers of the text are hiding from themselves. That’s what I was doing to the discourse of these unwitting women conversing next to me. But I wasn’t just the deconstructor. By feeling it necessary to keep my discovery to myself, I was also the subaltern, the lesser, the not included being: invisible and unheard.
The thing about people is that they conjure the invisible into existence by ignoring it. There’s an empty space where a questioning voice should be. Nature abhors a vacuum. Nature abhors me, inasmuch as a I am a vacuum. Therefore I am the voice that the void in a three-way self-congratulatory conversation is doomed to conjure. Whether I speak or not is irrelevant. Just the fact that my questions exist to fill the void in conversational awareness is enough. The questions take shape in the void whether the questions are spoken or left silent.
I don’t know how much you listeners know about Passover. Nested in the Passover expression of breaking the chains of slavery is an eschatological wish, expressed at the end of the seder. לשנה הבאה בירושלים L'shana haba'ah v'Yerushalayim: “Next year in Jerusalem” was what they used to say, back before Jerusalem became the capital of Israel, subject to ethnic cleansing to evict its Palestinian inhabitants. The Messiah, Mashiach, will come one day, announced by the prophet Elijah, so the rumor had it. The seder table used to have an empty chair with a place setting and a kiddish cup, a prayer cup, full of wine, designated for Elijah, should the time of Mashiach come during the seder and the prophet come stumbling in and need a nosh of chopped liver or gefilte fish, or even something more Sephardic like spicy lentils or whatever they eat.
It was the movie star’s first seder ever. Everyone else at the table was Jewish. At one point in the meal the movie star mentioned that her ex-boyfriend, very much ex, had texted her that day. It was a text asking a favor. She said, “I’m just going to ignore it.” We all agreed that such a response was appropriate. I had met the fellow a few times and was not particularly partial to him.
I said to her, “You know we have a seat reserved at the table for Elijah,” which bewildered her, because Elijah happened to be this ex-boyfriend’s name. We Jews at her end of the table laughed and immediately let her in on the humorous coincidence.
I don’t think I’ve ever been to a seder that’s left a full-size place setting and an adult chair reserved for Elijah. Here it didn’t even come up except as a joke. Not only was Elijah absent, he didn’t even have a place ready if he decided to show up, although I’m sure we could have hastily arranged to accommodate him if he did.
Also absent, at a ritual meal to commemorate the Israelites rising up from slavery and Exodusing from Egypt, were the Palestinians, who had been the victims of settler violence, vandalism, and theft back in the territories in recent weeks, as well as mosque desecration, beatings, shootings, and gassing from the Magavnikim, the Israeli border police or more accurately the cruelty police, who didn’t police cruelty but used cruelty to police. This had been reported only the day before that first night of Passover.
Although they were acknowledged fleetingly during a blessing that night, their suffering and the injustice of their mistreatment was far from adequately described, conjured, let alone understood. They were the true subalterns, and I would like to say I was holding a place for them, that I at least made a gesture of doing so, but of course it was as if I had done nothing at all. After all, who am I to tell their story? I can only point in the direction of the breeze that whispers of the storm churning so far away, with breath almost depleted of force by the time we celebrants feel it on our well-fed cheeks.
The well-off went on congratulating themselves, I among them, ever confident in their self-definition as authors of their own destinies, while the voices of the subalterns, at least on a conscious level, blew past unheard.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!
Sitting at the seder table alongside three women: a movie star, a small business owner, and a landscape architect, I eavesdropped on their conversation as I ate my matzoh ball soup. And the businesswoman mentioned that some of her workers took time off when they had their periods. She could understand it in the case of one of them who had a medical condition that caused her immense pain and discomfort, but the practice had become habitual among workers she wasn’t sure required it.
All three women began chiming in about the virtues of pushing oneself past one’s perceived limitations when feeling unable or reluctant to expend the effort to accomplish something, particularly something athletic like waking up for a dance class at six ay em or dragging oneself to the bathroom after an insufficient night’s sleep or exercising past the point of pain or exhaustion.
They lost the thread of the workers wanting time for themselves, but implicit behind all this self-congratulation for being such tough, rigorous women was that millennials these days didn’t want to do that pushing-through-limitations thing. I was thinking, “How do you know that they’re not pushing themselves in some other arena of activity unrelated to their jobs?” Because being a waiter or bartender or member of a kitchen staff might not necessarily be their passion. That might lie elsewhere. And when they’re taking time for themselves, they may not just be groaning with cramp pain, but might be using the time for a purpose of which you are entirely unaware.
I didn’t say that, of course, because all three women were, by common standards, far more accomplished than I have ever been or ever will be. And it is well known that my political doctrine of non-excellence, non-participation, and non-achievement has put me in the precarious economic position where I now find myself. I did take the opportunity to praise napping, though. But it brought home how misunderstood my calls for a universal work stoppage was destined to remain.
It also brought to mind Gayatri Spivak, the Indian feminist literary critic, and the concept from Gramsci of the subaltern, about which I understand very little. The subaltern, as the notion has developed from Gramsci through Spivak and now through my misbegotten filter, is anyone or anything who is left out of the assumptions of a given discourse by virtue of their power inferiority. So much less are they than the selves discussing themselves that they don’t exist enough to speak or even to have what they might say, if they could, considered. Discussions of ethics and morals in dominant circles tend to be carried on as if the dominant circle were the only group that matters. Left out are the lesser people whose voices can be ignored simply because they don’t appear in the territory under consideration as its map has been constructed. The subaltern is an unacknowledged part of the landscape.
The workers under discussion, for example, are not thought to be doing something else valuable in the time they aren’t at work. They’re simply not at work, which means they don’t have a material existence on the map the boss is looking at. The map the three women were looking at was a geography of where they felt these people who weren’t living up to what they considered the noble or correct or fulfilling goal should unquestionably be. The goal in life is to be happy. One does what one needs to do with passion, and what needs to be done is what these three women had decided were the activities necessary to achieve fulfillment.
Spivak is a fan of Jacques Derrida, or has at least made expressions favorable to him and deconstruction, because he interrogated texts to understand how they undermined their own assumptions. The deconstruction of a text reveals what the makers of the text are hiding from themselves. That’s what I was doing to the discourse of these unwitting women conversing next to me. But I wasn’t just the deconstructor. By feeling it necessary to keep my discovery to myself, I was also the subaltern, the lesser, the not included being: invisible and unheard.
The thing about people is that they conjure the invisible into existence by ignoring it. There’s an empty space where a questioning voice should be. Nature abhors a vacuum. Nature abhors me, inasmuch as a I am a vacuum. Therefore I am the voice that the void in a three-way self-congratulatory conversation is doomed to conjure. Whether I speak or not is irrelevant. Just the fact that my questions exist to fill the void in conversational awareness is enough. The questions take shape in the void whether the questions are spoken or left silent.
I don’t know how much you listeners know about Passover. Nested in the Passover expression of breaking the chains of slavery is an eschatological wish, expressed at the end of the seder. לשנה הבאה בירושלים L'shana haba'ah v'Yerushalayim: “Next year in Jerusalem” was what they used to say, back before Jerusalem became the capital of Israel, subject to ethnic cleansing to evict its Palestinian inhabitants. The Messiah, Mashiach, will come one day, announced by the prophet Elijah, so the rumor had it. The seder table used to have an empty chair with a place setting and a kiddish cup, a prayer cup, full of wine, designated for Elijah, should the time of Mashiach come during the seder and the prophet come stumbling in and need a nosh of chopped liver or gefilte fish, or even something more Sephardic like spicy lentils or whatever they eat.
It was the movie star’s first seder ever. Everyone else at the table was Jewish. At one point in the meal the movie star mentioned that her ex-boyfriend, very much ex, had texted her that day. It was a text asking a favor. She said, “I’m just going to ignore it.” We all agreed that such a response was appropriate. I had met the fellow a few times and was not particularly partial to him.
I said to her, “You know we have a seat reserved at the table for Elijah,” which bewildered her, because Elijah happened to be this ex-boyfriend’s name. We Jews at her end of the table laughed and immediately let her in on the humorous coincidence.
I don’t think I’ve ever been to a seder that’s left a full-size place setting and an adult chair reserved for Elijah. Here it didn’t even come up except as a joke. Not only was Elijah absent, he didn’t even have a place ready if he decided to show up, although I’m sure we could have hastily arranged to accommodate him if he did.
Also absent, at a ritual meal to commemorate the Israelites rising up from slavery and Exodusing from Egypt, were the Palestinians, who had been the victims of settler violence, vandalism, and theft back in the territories in recent weeks, as well as mosque desecration, beatings, shootings, and gassing from the Magavnikim, the Israeli border police or more accurately the cruelty police, who didn’t police cruelty but used cruelty to police. This had been reported only the day before that first night of Passover.
Although they were acknowledged fleetingly during a blessing that night, their suffering and the injustice of their mistreatment was far from adequately described, conjured, let alone understood. They were the true subalterns, and I would like to say I was holding a place for them, that I at least made a gesture of doing so, but of course it was as if I had done nothing at all. After all, who am I to tell their story? I can only point in the direction of the breeze that whispers of the storm churning so far away, with breath almost depleted of force by the time we celebrants feel it on our well-fed cheeks.
The well-off went on congratulating themselves, I among them, ever confident in their self-definition as authors of their own destinies, while the voices of the subalterns, at least on a conscious level, blew past unheard.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!
The bartender at the Surly Goat used to walk his dog after his shift at around 2:30 am. It was a good time to walk his dog because no one else was out walking a dog. The bartender’s dog, whose name was Governator, did not get along with other dogs. Worse yet, when he spotted another dog on a walk, Governator would lie down and pretend to be submissive and eager to play. Other dogs would be fooled by this ploy and come near enough for Governator to leap to his feet and bark angrily in the other dog’s face, sometimes even biting them. As a dog, Governator was a dick.
Usually during these walks the off-duty bartender would take Governator strolling down an unpaved alley. It was a sandy road with a high wall on one side behind which were a Tudor house that was the home of an aged ingenue and a grove of magnolia and sycamore trees. On the other side were two big estates with gated driveways letting out onto the alley. The gates were sliding walls that opened electrically.
Each gate had about four inches of clearance at the bottom. When the backyard lights were on, that light would come through the clearance space at the bottom, and whenever Governator would walk past these gates his paws would be illuminated. The surrounding night was often dark enough that one could almost imagine those paws were disembodied animal feet strutting along by themselves in the shadows.
Sometimes the bartender would stop and look up through a rear window of the Tudor home of the aged ingenue. There was only one window visible to him. It appeared to look in on a small room. When the light in the room was on he could only see only the ceiling of the room, as he was looking into the window from at least fifteen feet below. It was a vaulted ceiling symmetrically divided into four teardrop-shaped vaults, very medieval in appearance. This went along with his feeling that the aged ingenue was some sort of witch.
She was extremely pale. She had been just as pale when she was younger, when she had been the romantic partner of an actor who began his career playing an old west gunfighter in many Italian westerns and an extremely violent cop in slightly later films. She was so pale her skin verged on transparency, like that of a fetus. It was an especially frightening look for an elderly woman. Her age, transparency, reclusiveness in the Tudor house, and the vaulted ceiling together contributed to a ghastly, spectral air about her being. To the bartender she was not just a witch of some kind, but a witch half in and half out of our plane of existence.
Our bartender, whose name, by the way, was Hadrian, had never met the aged ingenue, yet for some reason he had a feeling she disapproved of him. All the bartenders at the Surly Goat were unpleasant people, and Hadrian was no exception. He was brusk with customers and had no time for questions. When anyone had the temerity to ask one, he often lied if he didn’t know the answer, and sometimes even when he did.
Hadrian was impatient with Governator now and then. He tried not to be, but sometimes he just couldn’t help himself. Governator was a rescue dog, and his previous owner must have beaten him, because his first instinct when anyone reached out their hand to him was to cower. But he always came around to being amiable, at least with people. Hadrian was careful to respect Governator’s boundaries, but not always as careful as he should have been.
One day Governator was fussy about eating, about going out for a walk, and about having a bath. Hadrian wasn’t being mindful of his own temper. He sort of shut down while dealing with Governator on this fussy day and didn’t notice if he was being impatient or short with the dog. On the evening walk, Governator bolted away, pulling the leash from Hadrian’s hand and darting out into the street where he was struck by an Amazon truck and killed. During the events of the accident and death of Governator, the yanking and darting and screeching of brakes too late and the striking down of the dog, Hadrian could swear he saw somewhere in his field of vision a flash of the image of the transparent aged witch. He knew her animosity toward him must have played a part in the awful proceedings of the day, culminating in Governator’s death.
For weeks afterward, Hadrian mourned the death of Governator. He didn’t change his behavior, though. He was still a dick to customers at the Surly Goat, but his heart wasn’t in it. He was a dick to everyone. Mostly, though, he stayed in his apartment in Studio City, moping and brooding.
I wish I could say Hadrian was a big fan of Elon Musk, but he wasn’t. I wish I could say he was a fascist, but he was more of a centrist Democrat in spirit and political leaning, which is certainly bad enough. Really, though, he wasn’t an evil sort, just a bit petty at times, but often quite generous. He could even be a delightful friend when he put in the effort. He certainly didn’t deserve his fate. But does anyone deserve their fate?
You see, one moonless night he was walking back from picking up a jug of cheap vodka from the Mini-Mart. He was walking through an alley, not the one where he used to walk Governator, more of a typical urban alley with garbage and asphalt. There were no lights in the alley, and what luminance spilled in from the perpendicular streets abutting it was sparse at best. It was all the more eye-catching when Hadrian’s peripheral vision picked up a flash of light. He turned his head and saw disembodied paws walking in a perky gait through the alley.
He followed the luminous paws all the way to the end of the alley and out onto the street, but the rest of the animal’s body wasn’t suddenly revealed in the light. It remained only the feet, glowing about twice as bright as any other object in the area, strutting jauntily down the sidewalk. Hadrian asked a fellow pedestrian, “Do you see that?”
“See what?” asked the transparent elderly ingenue, whose sudden manifestation shocked Hadrian so much that he began to gag on his own spit.
At that point a crazed entourage of well-to-do tweakers beat Hadrian to death with lengths of rebar. It was such a meaningless end. The entire trajectory from Hadrian’s adoption of Governator to his being pummeled by a tweaking entourage was an amoebic blob of random moments without a shred of sense to their happening.
Even his bitchy friend Agnes, another bartender at the Surly Goat, who had an annoying habit of saying, “Everything happens for a reason,” couldn’t think of a reason for any of it. Agnes also said things like, “The energy you put out is what you get back,” and, “If you can’t take me at my worst you don’t deserve me at my best.” In the opinion of many people she should’ve been the one to get pummeled to death.
But as the Book of Job implies, justice is the creation, and therefore the responsibility, of humans. Nowhere else in the universe does it exist.
Are you feeling yourself today? Lucky you.
There’s a small part of the population that’s feeling sick today. There’s also a small part that’s feeling down or alienated or grumpy. There’s also a small part of the population that feels like they’re not in the right body today.
Gender dysphoria is a real thing. It’s been described to me by those who’ve had to deal with it, as have the feelings of affirmation on discovering the source of the problem and doing something about it. We counterpose gender, as in gender roles imposed by society, as a quality separate from sex, which we have been taught is biologically determined at birth and inherent in an individual’s genetics. We’re taught there are two sexes, male and female, the infamous “sexual binary.”
Certain political movements, standup comics, evolutionary biologist atheists, and authors of whimsical childhood wizardry adventures seem to believe that transsexuality is the act of using the costume of gender to disguise oneself as a member of the opposite sex. They also seem to believe things even more wrong, but delving into that morass is a topic for another day.
Biological sex is more flexible than its common definition: xx chromosomes equals woman, xy chromosomes equals man. To quote from an article by Claire Ainsworth published in Nature magazine eight years ago and reprinted in Scientific American:
“Gene mutations affecting gonad development can result in a person with XY chromosomes developing typically female characteristics, whereas alterations in hormone signaling can cause XX individuals to develop along male lines.”
She goes on to describe many different instances where hormonal signals governed by varying activity or occurrences of some genes, or the sensitivity or insensitivity of some cells to certain hormones, can blur the lines between the two sexes we generally talk about as having solid boundaries between them. Changes can occur from as early as a few weeks into an embryo’s gestation to a decade or two or more of living in the world.
The conclusion of biology is that sex, not just socially-constructed gender, is a spectrum, that the rigid dichotomy probably doesn’t apply to most people, and demonstrably not to at least one person in a hundred. And those are just the people doctors define as having intersex conditions, or DSDs, “disorders of sexual development,” medically speaking. When we add to that number those with a powerful psychological sense, not genotypically reinforced, of being miscast as belonging on one side or the other of the oversimplified biological dichotomy, the number of our transgender friends and relatives multiplies.
The gender dichotomy was already understood to be a Procrustean diagram at least by the late 19th Century. The feeling even some of my most sophisticated friends have that this is happening “all of a sudden” comes from the increased visibility trans people have been demanding for generations and are now finally receiving. And it is the least they are due because, for all the centuries they’ve been treated as invisible, their existences were easily erased by the cruel, the phobic, the violent, and the opportunistic who capitalize on the cruelty and fear-driven violence of others.
Gender costumes and behavior should not be a prison imposed by society. For that matter, no type of conformity should: no job should, no status in any family should, no position in an institution should. I mean, really, prison shouldn’t be a prison imposed by society either, but as I observed last week, we’re a society of condemnation.
How the world dearly loves a cage, as Ruth Gordon said in Harold and Maude, speaking of Dreyfus imprisoned on Devil’s Island. That’s a film from the 70s very much about gender roles as prisons. It’s all to keep up appearances, isn’t it, the fascists’ demand that others submit to the imprisonment they insist is a rightful, natural place? And if a person won’t submit, they make up lies about their demands being immoral. They make up lies about them grooming, indoctrinating, or drinking blood from innocent children. Folks eat that stuff up. They’ve been eating it up for centuries. They’ll volunteer for your terrorist militia or torch-wielding mob for sure if you feed them that slop!
The first institution for treating victims of sex misassignment was founded in Germany in 1919. It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. And just yesterday, ninety years later, the governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, put his signature on a law that makes gender affirming medical care for minors a felony. It categorizes as child abuse any care that includes hormone treatments or puberty blockers, meant to aid a minor “to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent” with their assigned sex at birth. “Purported identity?” “Live as a purported identity?” What exactly is being called into question by that language? Ah, yes, it’s not a real identity, it’s a disguise. It’s just a trick to help a prisoner escape.
Health professionals around the world recommend the healthcare Tennessee just banned for treating gender dysphoria. It can mean the difference between a teenager coming to accept themselves in the world or taking themselves out of the world through suicide. The law goes into effect a year from now, at which time all minors in Tennessee receiving such care must stop.
Governor Bill Lee coincidentally shares an identifying moniker with the nom de plume under which William S. Burroughs, the homosexual poet, wrote his first novel, Junky. Governor Lee on the same day banned drag shows on public property, an act that might be his indirect gambit to privatize libraries. Then again it might be an ironic homage to Burroughs, meant to make us imagine what he might say were he alive to witness this abomination. Like, “that fascist son of a bitch must be snortin’ Saniflush or something.”
This new resurgence of bigotry around the world is depressing, but there is reason for hope. The Tennessee laws and other similar ones being enacted in other states – let’s call them Vicious Blue Laws – are not going to be implemented without facing legal challenges that have already been prepared. Yes, the Supreme Court is made up largely of exactly the type of prison-loving jurists who would support the Vicious Blue Laws, but they’re also cowards, and current events show popular support for brutal closed-mindedness falling. The white supremacist “Day of Hate” was a no-show burger of nothingness. Likewise the audience for this year’s CPAC conference. Since Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity were recently exposed in emails as liars mocking the intelligence and beliefs of their own audience, things just haven’t been the same.
But it’s a crime of abuse that individuals merely struggling to be the person they feel they’re intended to be have to face victimization during this decade’s rightwing temper tantrum. It’s also a crime that women’s bodies and health are being booted around the political arena. It’s a crime of abuse that poor people have to continue enduring the indignities and violent barriers the profit-over-people system puts between them and opportunities to escape into a better future. It’s a hate crime when police decide to escalate violence toward citizens because they’re Black. It’s easy for me to say, “Just hang on, we’ll get through this,” because I’m a lot less likely to die than those exemplars as a result of these spasms of fascism’s restless leg syndrome, especially now that I’ve been vaccinated against the plague.
But lately, I feel we’ve all been showing how much we hate these disguises they make us wear. It’s like “The Emperor’s New Clothes” in reverse. It’s “The People’s Painfully Uncomfortable Uniforms.” I don’t mean to commandeer the struggle of trans people as a metaphor, more to look to it as an inspiration. A trans journalist described what it would be like to be forced to inhabit their previously assigned sex, now that they’ve taken steps to become the person they always needed to be, as akin to wearing a skin suit. We know the rulers aren’t wearing anything special if they’re wearing anything at all. They have no right to enforce a dress code of ill-fitting skin suits.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!
Revisiting Willy Wonka’s Racism
Hi, in the background you might hear the sounds of the the ongoing “power tool and mariachi polka on the radio” festival. That’s live radio!
It’s quite a coincidence that, right on the heels of my Moment of Truth about world leaders dissolving in bathtubs, a kerfuffle has arisen about making the language in Roald Dahl less offensive to today’s children. Or their legal guardians. I’m not big on censoring the past. Atrocities of yore should be preserved in museums for study, like the flag of the Confederacy or Robespierre’s final lobster bib. But in this case I agree with making Dahl sanitary for today’s little baby liberal snowflakes. Hear me out.
Parents are raising their children to frown on bullying. No one ever liked bullies, and we had plenty of bullies when I was growing up. Had there been the weight of common moral discourse on the victims’ sides our lives might have been a little less horrible. Some of us might even have enjoyed athletics instead of being bullied out of participating in them. I myself might have been less of a bully about the things I’m a bully about. Then again, I might not be as attracted to women who resemble Irish bullies in the Little Rascals, which would be a minor tragedy.
Aside from the tight controls imposed on a child’s time and location – and of course the mass shootings, especially in schools – almost everything I perceive of how children are being raised seems better today than when Roald Dahl was writing endearingly about transporting pygmies in crates with holes in them – I’ll explain in a second. Progressive values seem to have made it a better time to grow up than when I did. Yes I resent it, because I was raised to resent first and feel empathetic joy only after a period of forcing myself to swallow my gigantic, jagged pride.
Roald Dahl has been criticized for his old-school social attitudes since his writing was first published, and his already published work was edited for unpleasant content – by his own hand, no less – back in the seventies, so this is not new. When the NAACP first called out the racism in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, he said he felt they were acting like Nazis. He had to be convinced by a concerned literary friend to make a big change. It’s a good thing she prevailed on him to realize that a British capitalist shipping Africans from their homes to live and labor in his factory was offensive rather than adorable. Dahl altered Charlie and the Chocolate Factory accordingly. And it wasn’t for the Gene Wilder movie. It was three years after that came out. It's called fixing it.
As I mentioned in the Moment of Truth, “Dissolving Leadership,” in original editions of the book, unlike in the movie, the Oompa-Loompas are portrayed by illustrator Joseph Schindelman as diminutive black Africans. They wear animal-skin mini-togas even in the chocolate factory, where they live and work and sing like happy little slaves, in an artificial wilderness-cum-Garden of Eden, having been rescued from jungle squalor by the white savior capitalist Wonka, and compensated for their labor with all the chocolate they could eat.
Yes, along with his racism, avowed antisemitism, and pro-colonial capitalist triumphalism, there was and remains plenty inherent in Dahl worth repairing. He was a weird and imaginative guy whose imagination somehow failed to foresee a world in which not all his readers would be white and English.
White, English, Church of England, upperclass, and sympathetic to the idea that British imperialism was a civilizing influence on the areas of the world from which it extracted wealth. He was slightly less enlightened in that respect than even Rudyard Kipling or Queen Victoria.
Dahl definitely intended the words “fat” and “ugly” to be derogatory and signify a lack of "good breeding," and if it allows more people to enjoy his work than ordinarily would have, other expressions can and should be found.
In James and the Giant Peach, after the untimely death of his parents, the relatives James has to live with are a species of "chavvy" class caricature that was always offensive in postwar 20th-century England. In the JK Rowling universe, incidentally, the lower-middlebrow muggle relatives who raised the orphaned Harry Potter were cut from the same tacky fabric. The nasty, rude, overweight, unattractive substitute family is a well-worn trope in these narratives of the orphaned Special Child. It’s like the way wicked stepsisters in countless fairytales lack the natural grace and innate etiquette of the heroine. It’s not unusual to find in Dahl equally disagreeable characterizations of women, other races, and working people.
Free speech absolutists complain about “sanitizing” and “bowdlerizing” his work. Hey, Shakespeare he ain’t. He was a festering pit of elitist garbage ideas. All right, so, a little like Shakespeare, but not canon. Generations haven’t committed his words to memory, thank Oberon. He could well use a delousing, never mind a sanitizing. Eff that guy. Clean up his retrograde bigotry and make his writing fit for human consumption.
When I was a kid it was very strange to me at first when the Gene Wilder movie came out, with its orange-skinned, jodhpur-wearing, Gilbert O’Sullivan-coifed Oompa-Loompas, because the edition of the book we read in school (I'm old) contained the "deepest darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before" origin of the Oompa-Loompas, who, it was vaguely hinted, were not only incredibly fond of chocolate, but might even have been partly made of it. I grew up just two miles north of Detroit, where race was not an issue one had no opinion on, even as a kid. I understood a bit even then why they'd excised the jungle caricatures for the movie, but only recently researched and found that Dahl himself had changed them a few years after the film’s release from chocolaty hobbits to some kind of golden-haired whimsical folk from an island somewhere in an absurdly named region of one of Earth’s oceans.
Yet even in this there’s a hint of xenophobia against rural Germanic/Scandinavians in his remedial caricatures. They smell a little like the murderous cultists in the movie Midsommar. His disdain for the Nordic via the Germans and their (imperialist) gluttony is understandable considering his childhood in the 1930s, but Augustus Gloop doesn't wear the allegorical significance as comfortably as he used to, and now reads as just the author saying mean things about a kid with an eating disorder.
The current discussion of Roald Dahl's unpleasant attitudes mostly ignores the 5 (at least) preceding decades of discussion of his unpleasant attitudes: about people of other genders, races, religions, economic classes, ethnicities, etc., and I don't understand why.
The guy was a cesspit, albeit an imaginative and now dead cesspit. Granted, this has everything to do with whatever Netflix deal his estate is getting ready to make, is in the process of making, or has already made. Well, I'd love for kids to read his work without absorbing their author's odious habits of judgment and without parents recoiling at how much nastier the books are than their screen versions.
Dahl really is a great storyteller, despite himself. In my opinion, though, these breaches of kindness are not the equivalents of Mark Twain's uses of the N-word in Huckleberry Finn, which elucidate, as far as Twain was able, something revealing about the United States slavers' argot that needs not to be hidden. The fact that the word strikes the present-day reader as even more offensive now underscores his purposes all the more boldly. Twain had his foibles as a social commentator, but he approached his society with an eye to inclusiveness. His humanist impulse is evident in spite of his failures. Dahl, on the other hand, had no such inclusive impulse. His impulses were exclusionary. He was an almost reflexive bigot. He needs to be rescued from himself so generations can enjoy what was good in the vile, dyspeptic bastard's work.
Now if we can get JK Rowling to stop denigrating trans people long enough to revise the antisemitically caricatured goblin characters who run all the wizard world’s banks … maybe if I wave this wand.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good Day!
The philosophy of my obscure political party, The Socialist Leisure Party, is being proven right again. It’s been proven righter and righter with each passing day. The Socialist Leisure Party must become the dominant political party in the world, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to get off my ass to do anything to make that happen.
You might ask, “What is The Socialist Leisure Party’s philosophy?” Jesus Christ, really? Can’t you just figure it out? Do I really have to – ?
Oh, all right. The SLP’s philosophy of history is that history’s real winners are the ones who achieved the least. The ones who got the most sleep. The ones who somehow worked it out to secure the most time to do nothing but stare off into space or make brownies with the kids. The ones who stopped to listen while the grasshopper fiddled. The goldbrickers down at the poolhall.
“But what about the SLP’s platform of universal luxury communism?” you might ask. “How can luxury be produced or maintained if no one’s willing to work? And how is the abundance in the economy of abundance visualized by the Socialist Leisure Party supposed to come about if no one’s going to work to grow and accumulate the surplus for the public?”
These are great questions, but I’m tired. The easy answer – and the SLP is all about easy answers – is that to create luxury requires time, which is itself a luxury. A luxurious building made for the public to enjoy displays the time required to create every part of it. It is not created under the whip of the efficiency supervisor screaming “time is money, you lazy drones.” It’s created by artists and craftspeople who eat healthy, good food. They live comfortable, dignified lives. When they look in the mirror they can respect themselves.
We currently grow and process more food than we eat because of our emphasis on getting the most material out of every action we take. The über-wealthy pay a little extra for higher quality goods but even they waste about half of their over-sized portion of global food wealth.
It’s not a secret that unequal distribution of everything – whether necessities or luxuries – is the lingering issue creating most of the intra-species problems among human beings. Our inability to divide our living and agricultural spaces fairly or wisely also causes problems between species. It’s not that efficiency shouldn’t be a high priority, it’s that misplaced efficiency shouldn’t be a higher priority than alleviating hunger and misery and environmental destruction and the uglification of the world.
A lot of our objection to work is that it seems pointless. The work available to most of us benefits those who want to control us more than it benefits us or the people in need of our help – even if it’s our job to help those people.
Have you heard about these “long-termists” who are supposedly taking the long view of humanity’s future in a kind of steroid-enhanced utilitarianism? Elon Musk, our favorite tech dingleberry, is one of them. Long-termists have this vision that the utopian end goal for humanity is to populate with human intelligence-bearing entities in sustainable living situations all the stars in the galaxy. This they call “humanity’s full potential” or “greatest potential” or “ultimate potential” or some BS.
To aim at the goal of this ultimate destiny there might come a time when triage has to be performed on humanity, especially in the decades immediately to come. If predictions about the climate crisis causing sea level rise and mass migrations come true, rather than pause the output of our technical ingenuity to save aspects of the world necessary to human civilization in, say, the global South, we might have to allow the people who can’t get out of the way of disaster to simply be sacrificed. I mean, in order to keep progress toward our optimal future of comfortably miraculous interstellar transportation and accommodations on track, we may just have to drown or even more efficiently exterminate half of humanity.
It's unpleasantly obvious who the theorists behind such a social engineering vision assume will be making the tough logical, mathematical decisions that must be made. It’ll be fragile, childish, vain egos like our doofus of the decade Elon Musk who imagine themselves superior to run-of-the-mill humans. What other kind of a-hole would arrogate to themselves the godlike fiat power not only to envision the preferred destiny of the human species from now until the heat death of the universe but to decide which lives are obstructing such progress to the point that they must be allowed to perish or be jettisoned as ballast.
It is for this reason that one of the main planks in the Socialist Leisure Party platform is disobeying the dictates of finance efficiency and visionary capitalism. Capitalism is institutional unfairness when it’s not simply institutional cruelty. That the so-called Captains of Industry are so swollen-headed as to demand that the public recognize and acknowledge them is a great advantage to the SLP and like-minded citizens of the world. We can use the whims of these dung-for-brains self-appointed Thought Leaders as a metric. We use our consciences as weathervanes when Elon’s or Thiel’s or Bezos’s winds start blowing. Whichever way they’re blowing, we chart a course in the opposite direction.
Yes, there’s a lot of blowing. World Leadership wants to blow us all in the direction of obedience to the market or prevailing social judgements of the über-wealthy and über-vain under penalty of homelessness and starvation. The winds of hard authoritarianism, like the kind advocated by, say, Erdogan or Orban or General Mike Flynn, or the winds of softer authoritarianism like the ones sweeping in from Davos or the White House or the World Bank or the Federal Reserve must be defied. It’s all a big old wind. Going against the big wind sounds difficult and it is. That’s why it’s called “resistance.”
If the Covid-19 plague and lockdown taught the SLP anything, it’s that the rightwing unempathetic Captains of Extraction and their mouth-flapping toadies were fine sacrificing the lives of millions of vulnerable people in favor of the needs of capital. Those who complained most about taking the virus seriously whined about being inconvenienced or uncomfortable when “forced” to take measures to be careful. Some complained about their small businesses being hurt but were infuriated by any suggestion that the government might make their or anyone’s lives easier by providing material support. Many threatened violence and brought weapons into legislatures to intimidate, claiming they had the Constitutional right to do so, and the rightwing mouth-flappers egged them on with torrents of demagogic vocal slurry.
And this for the relatively minor economic and behavioral inconveniences of trying to keep the elderly, the working poor, and ultimately everyone from contracting an unknown but sometimes fatal virus. Imagine what horrifically violent tantrums will be thrown when food and shelter must be meted out to climate refugees.
We don’t even have to imagine. We’ve seen it happen already. We saw the violence visited on the migrants – yes, even the white ones – during the Great Depression. We saw the vicious ungenerousness of those with calculated interests in profit.
But, contrarily, we also saw resistance to the selfish utilitarianism of the age. We need that resistance now.
We need to say, no, our time and our motivations are our own. It’s our communities that deserve our loyalty, not the owners of the worldwide franchises commandeering housing and businesses and public space. We need a general strike for the good of the air and water and wildlife and domestic life. We need to put our feet down or up and say, “Not today. We’re taking a global health day. Or week. Or month. Or year. Or decade. This land is ours and the food that we’ll grow on it will be ours. It won’t be made into corn syrup or corn plastic or corn flakes to sell 5,000 or 12,000 miles away. We’re not making your stupid hyper-loop or working in your fulfillment gulags or your whitewashed history indoctrination camps. Whatever you’re selling, we ain’t buying it and we sure as hell ain’t helping you manufacture, sell, or transport it.”
A message from the Socialist Leisure Party.
I wept no bitter tears when Scott Adams’s “Dilbert” cartoon was dropped from the Cleveland Plain Dealer after he posted a video wherein he declared:
"Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the f*ck away… Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed. So I don’t think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no longer a rational impulse. So I’m going to back off on being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off.”
My non-existent tears remained unembittered when several other papers followed the Plain Dealer’s lead, even though I know we will all miss Scott’s noble contributions to the Black equality discussion and his substantial aid to Black communities. Even though I feel like we’ve lost Paul Robeson, Fred Hampton, and Muhammed Ali all over again.
But then I realized Scott wouldn’t have wanted me to feel any such loss anyway. He isn’t about feelings. He’s about offices and data and demonically elitist dogs in computer chairs.
I come not only to condemn Scott Adams, creator of “Dilbert,” but to bury him.
We are a nation of schadenfreude. That’s the kind of audience we are. When a bigot or bigshot gets taken down, as Andrew Tate was in Rumania, the audience laughs and cheers. Tate’s case is especially funny because the cause of his downfall was his own preening ego which led to his unprovoked reactionary attack on a teenage climate activist. I mean, there’s not much funnier than Tate being grabbed for sex trafficking by Rumanian law enforcement tipped off to his presence in the country by his braggadocious video with a locally branded pizza box in the camera frame, unless it’s Greta Thünberg’s parting words to seal the flame war: “this is what happens when you don't recycle your pizza boxes."
The bully was an obvious bully, the victim refused to be a victim, and in the end the “good guy” won in a way that was highly amusing and poetically just.
However, when good guys and bad guys are not so easily distinguishable, but a clearcut distinction in imposed on the conflict anyway, the amusement transforms from enjoyable schadenfreude through the chrysalis of questionable hostility to emerge as indefensible hatemongering. And I don’t like that. Because it leads to unfair condemnation. And most of us tend to have sympathy for the unfairly condemned, regardless of their crimes.
I loved mocking Scott Adams, the creator of “Dilbert,” while newspapers including the Chicago Tribune on Monday were dropping the comic strip like a hot Manhattan Project demon core. The shunning was in response to his inarguably racist public remarks.
Despite myriad such examples of villainous, mustache-twirling behavior, especially from the right these days, there are times even currently when things just aren’t that simple. And that is tragic, because then they aren’t as funny. We all know that the best way to ruin a joke is to explain it. Too much dissection of a premise throws a wet blanket on humor. Brevity is the soul of wit, and brevity is best expressed with economy of verbiage.
But certain social phenomena require examination, discussion, nuance, details, finding dots and connecting them, and even a willingness to entertain that arguments from the other side, assuming there is at least one other side, are plausible.
How can we tell whether an argument or a person is worthy of being shunned or must be given a certain amount of respectful consideration? I’m not sure I know the answer. In fact, I’m sure I don’t know the answer. I’m still examining, discussing, trying to be sensitive to nuance, groping for details, and searching for all the dots with a view to connecting them in this regard. And I often fail.
However, it should be apparent that condemnation has become the new national pastime. There are entire cable infotainment channels devoted to it with varying standards of fairness and accuracy. We can forgive these public nuisances their immoral, shoddy methodology because we’ve lived under capitalism all our lives, we’re acclimated to lies as a form of communication, and understand the purpose of these outlets is not to inform honestly but to make money.
We are less forgiving when we encounter individuals who have evidently been pilled one way or another by these cole slaw-brained marionettes. We think, “How can you believe that? How can you perpetuate that? How can you even understand how to breathe when your soul can assimilate such toxic succotash? Do you even have a soul?”
I’ve been emailed or told in person many – like more than six – horror stories from friends in academia or other areas wherein people fear for their jobs. Yes, they are all men and all but one of them is white. None of them is disabled. They are all but one pretty financially precarious, though. And while none of my female academic friends has expressed such immediate fears, they do back up the men’s experiences of having to navigate a minefield of often unspoken rules and to cater to certain demands they find excessive, if mostly manageable. I’ve also been in progressive groups and found myself under pressure to adhere to an ingroup etiquette at the risk of being psychologized, shunned, or publicly humiliated.
I want to believe all victims, but not all victims are honest, despite the risks they might take simply for speaking out. Further, in a room full of victims, there is often pressure to honor the one who makes the case for representing a social identity that’s the most victimized, systemically and experientially. I’m for the triumph of victims over their oppressors. But the victim competition. I condemn it. I’m over it.
I like to think that if I were in a group exploring alternatives to the unfair constructs we and those more vulnerable than us must endure, we would be tolerant and fair to a Scott Adams or an Andrew Tate until they had proven themselves to be intolerable beyond a reasonable doubt. I like to think I would demand fairness and tolerance from others in the group but that we would come to something like consensus once the Rubicon of insensitivity and dehumanization had been crossed.
Then, and only then, would we condemn. That’s what I’d like to think about the company I keep. Let’s avoid making martyrs of our enemies. They’re good enough at declaring their own martyrdom based on the crazy lies they invent. Let’s not help them.
It should be easy to see that this is not a blanket condemnation of condemnation. I love condemnation. Who am I to speak out against the national pastime? And I trust that overreach and exaggeration, unwarranted castigation and stigmatizing from the left is far less frequent or destructive or systemic than that constantly hailing down from the rulers and their tools on the right. Even though it comes from a place of defending our allies and our siblings and our comrades and our principles, I want us to be more forgiving than those who fuel the engine of global and human destruction. Just not tolerant or forgiving to a fault.
And that’s how it is with the majority of true activists among you. With all an oppressive economy can throw at us, I see most progressives, leftists, left-liberals, socialists, et al – at least outside the confines of Twitter and the podcast judgment machine and cable infotainment – being brilliantly constructive at best and at worst at least taking care to minimize harm to the vulnerable. As fractious and obnoxious as our fellow travelers may often be, we are a credit to the tradition of holding the powerful accountable when we are careful to be at our best.
Condemnation is only one tool for chipping away at the hegemony of the greedy, powerful, and violent. It can also be fun and educational. Let us honor it and participate in it as such. Down with the bastards who would dare to keep us down!
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!