Opinion
i love you, we’re dead meat
My student apologized to me for voting for Donald Trump. He regretted it, he said, because he hurt me, and he never thought it would hurt someone like me.
The week before, he sat with me for almost an hour in my office, and we bonded over poverty. He told me how hard it was to be in college with rich friends, to be so different than them. He felt alone.
He’s talented, and I told him so. He’s funny, and aside from some trouble with comma splices, he’s a good writer. He told me that he’s majoring in business, but he wants to be a journalist. I encouraged him to do that.
He’s talented, and he’s sensitive, and he voted for Donald Trump.
***
Let me be clear: this isn’t an essay about bonding with someone who has opposing beliefs or about how people can defy stereotypes. My student is talented, and he’s sensitive, but he still voted for Donald Trump. My student hurt me, and he did it because he’s kind of stupid.
I don’t mean that in a cruel way. He’s stupid in that way that many 18-year-olds are, the way that I was stupid when I was 18. He’s full of good intentions, and he hopes for the best, even from the worst. He voted for Trump because he didn’t believe Trump really meant all those racist things. He hoped–and continues to hope–that Trump will be better than his disgusting rhetoric.
But he says that now he can see how Trump’s victory hurt me, and so many others, and, with that same hope, he hands me his apology.
And I hold this hopeful, well-intentioned apology, as I’ve held apologies before, and I just don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do with it.
***
I live in Manayunk, Philadelphia, a predominantly White working class neighborhood at the edge of the city. When I walk to the bus stop each day, I see a large red pick-up truck; on its window is a decal of Calvin peeing on the name “Hillary.”
When I walk back home late at night, usually after teaching class, I worry someone in this White neighborhood will think I’m a criminal, simply for being in a White neighborhood (this wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened to me). They’ll call the cops. The cops will kill me.
Or maybe someone, anyone–or, I should say, anyone White–will see me, grab me, beat me. Kill me.
But now I wonder what my sorry student will think, if my corpse could mean anything to him. If somehow that will teach him a lesson, finally, about what an apology and good intentions are really worth.
***
The day I talk to my students about the election, I play them recordings of poets reading their poetry: Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Maya Angelou’s “And Still I Rise,” Eve Ewing’s “Epistle for the Dead and Dying,” Ross Gay’s “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.”
And then I show them a small excerpt from a book, and I have a student read it out loud.
Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knowns, but no poetry.
I ask if anyone can identify it; they can’t. It’s Thomas Jefferson. I ask: what else did Jefferson write?
The Declaration of Independence, a student responds.
What does it mean, I ask, to live in a world where the government is founded by a man who believed that Black people didn’t possess the ability to write poetry? What does it mean when a man who owned and abused human bodies, what does it mean when his face is on your money, when you can take the train right now and stop off at Jefferson Memorial Hospital?
A Black student, one of two in my class, says simply, It means America wasn’t meant for us.
I don’t think we should look at Jefferson with our modern moral lens, a White student says. If, in a hundred years, everyone decides to stop eating meat, wouldn’t they think we’re monsters?
People aren’t meat, I tell him. People aren’t food. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with calling Jefferson a shitty person for enslaving human beings.
Another White student tries again: what if in the future, people think I’m a bad person for believing that there should be gender neutral bathrooms? Does that mean I’m morally wrong now?
He’s trying to appeal to my progressivism, but I tell him that that’s a straw man. A human life is not a bathroom.
We veer away from Jefferson, and return to Trump, to the election, to America at large, but later, as we wrap up our class discussion, I turn back to Jefferson: what is most notable about this quote?
I’m doing the thing where I have something in mind that I want the students to say. They don’t say it, so I do: he was fucking wrong.
He was fucking wrong, I say again. And you all know it, because you heard Black poetry at the beginning of class.
I stumble my way through an impassioned speech about the power of words, the persistence of poetry, even in times of suffering and oppression. Etc.
***
But this essay also isn’t about how poetry will save us. It hasn’t thus far. And I distrust anyone who salivates for art in the time of fascism. I’ve read all about what happened to Federico García Lorca. I know how that story ends.
Art is a wonderful, beautiful, powerful thing, but it isn’t a human life. It’s a bathroom. It’s meat. It’s good intention. That doesn’t stop a professor from telling me: take hope; punk rock will be really good under Trump.
***
I feel as though I’ve been saying I love you a lot lately, but maybe that’s not true. Maybe I simply feel it more acutely when I say it now, as though each time I say it to someone I love, I mean it desperately; my love is clawing at the air as it sinks into quicksand.
I feel as though I’ve been angry a lot; this is certainly true. I’m mad at Nazis, racists, Trump and his supporters, of course. This is a given. But there’s something particularly painful about the supposed allies who never see or hear you.I’m frustrated by White liberals, debating safety pins and economic woes; I’m frustrated by limp apologies and tears; I’m frustrated by neoliberal mourning.
They are so full of good intentions, but none of it makes me feel any safer.
This isn’t to say that there’s absolutely no comfort in good intentions. A classmate handed me a note the other day.
Phil,
How are you? I’m sorry if the conversation sounded dumb/unproductive/unhelpful. (Whichever best applies) (You don’t have to answer)
And I laughed, and it did make me feel a little better. I put it in my wallet as a reminder of good intentions. And I think of my student’s apology. And I think of poetry. I think of good intentions.
But I still feel like I’m going to die. I worry about my body becoming nothing more than a symbol, one that racists won’t give a shit about, one that White liberals will baptize in their tears. They’ll argue over my corpse and what it means; then I’ll be forgotten again, buried in good intentions and twisted straw men.
***
I’ve been trying to write this essay for days now, and I’m still not quite sure what it’s about. It seems since Trump’s election I’ve been reading about so many things, about so many silver linings, about so many good intentions. Yet the writers seem little concerned with the reality we face: we’re fucked.
We’re fucked, and they want to feel good about it. We’re fucked, and out of self-defense, out of privilege, they seek comfort and conclusions. We’re fucked, and they say: here’s how you can feel less fucked.
They make a mess, and then they want to feel comforted about the mess they made. But this isn’t about them. This is their mess, and I hope they never fully feel comforted about it. A mess is a problem; problems should cause discomfort. You should be uncomfortable.
And while it isn’t about them, maybe it’s about their mess. Or rather, it’s about us, the ones who find ourselves in this mess, the mess that wasn’t made for us, but the one we are nonetheless in.
Maybe this is about the student who approached me after class, who talked with me for almost an hour–not the regretful Trump supporter, but the young Black woman who said: America wasn’t made for us.
After class, she told me proudly that her grandmother tried to sue a descendent of Thomas Jefferson for reparations.
We talked. I thanked her for sitting through class, as I know it’s hard sometimes to sit through what White colleagues can say.
She said, I want to yell at them sometimes. But then I know they’ll think I’m just an Angry Black Woman. They probably already think that.
That’s how they get you, I tell her. If you’re silent, and you take it, then they’ll never stop ; if you’re angry and you say so, they stereotype you, and they’ll never stop. They try to keep you running.
She nods. I think I just lost hope, she says and laughs.
There’s always poetry, I tell her, for whatever that might be worth.
She smiles and tells me good night, and we part ways; her, back to her dorm, and me, back to my neighborhood, to the house where I will continue to live.
Tags: Donald Trump, Eve Ewing, fascism, Langston hughes, Lithub, maya angelou, Philadelphia, racism, Ross Gay, Thomas Jefferson
[…] I love you we’re dead meat […]
I know it’s not worth much, but I’m white, and I cried.
Thank you for this, P.E.
There’s debate on the Left—and much more debate on the center-Right that often passes for ‘Left’—on what to do about working-poor and middle-class whites, reasonably afraid of downward mobility, who won’t quit voting against their direct political-economic interests (and indeed, against empirically valid conclusions: global warming is a ‘hoax designed by “China” to wreck the American economy’?). We are, liberals tell each other, best served by listening to the voices of hard-pressed whites, by taking into account the validity of their concerns, by addressing those concerns in terms of respect for their perspectives.
I agree (I think) with Garcia’s characterization of “stupid”: how, without enabling the idiocy and exploitation themselves, is one to respect the voices, concerns, and perspectives of people who believe nakedly idiotic things, and who place their hopes in someone unambiguously exploitative of hopes like theirs for his whole commercial life? How is a politics supposed to incorporate the magical thinking that characterizes retail conservatism—and, in my view, the supposed intellectuality of, say, fiscal conservatism—into an argument for rational solutions?
I mean that you can talk to a geocentrist about many things, but not about astronomy: helio- versus geo- isn’t 50/50… —it’s not 99/1: geocentrism is a 0%-scientific point of view.
As far as the misogynistic, racist, and homophobic crap, conservative elites (mostly, but yes, yes, not exclusively, Republicans) have been running this software (often, but not always, surreptitiously), since at least Goldwater ’64 (who used—maybe for its first time—the phrase ‘hunt where the ducks are’ to talk about getting white middle-class voters to identify with the interests of people unlike them in every way—except racially). —and as women came, for many reasons, to have more real power and responsibility (at roughly the same time), and women’s lib came to sound more and more rational, to marginalize images of powerful women (specifically and generally) among those middle classes. —and likewise with discourses of non-heterosexual citizen-equality, and the material reality of undocumented-worker citizenship.
An intersectional shitstorm of blaming someone, anyone — except upper-class shotcallers, and on the grounds of class itself.
I think I understand Garcia’s dilemma: he respects and likes his student, sees him as a genuine friend, of sorts, and (I’m guessing) wants not to violate the trust that his—Garcia’s—position of authority depends on. (And maybe it’s not in Garcia’s character to say cruel things to friendly people.)
Well, think of that dilemma this way: since the mid-’50s—its court decisions, mass actions, entrances of blacks into institutions formerly segregated against them, and so on—, liberal (and even progressive) discourse has agreed with conservatism about black self-destruction: blacks should be discouraged—stopped, by gosh!—from behaviors and attitudes that worked against themselves. (Malcolm X, for example, in case you’re thinking of the worst of white condescension.)
Okay! …but why, then, is one to coddle the self-destructiveness of white people?? I mean, how would such concessions be respectful?
Also, I doubt the jargon of ‘alliance’: ‘ally’ indicates ‘power struggle dressed in “enemy of my enemy” clothing’. Rather than the sentimental discourse of ‘alliance’, common interest, in my view, is the best way to form coherent action: who wants what I want enough—not 100%, but not too much compromisingly less—for me to vote for, to organize with, to be helped by and help, and so on.
‘I don’t want to be your ally—you should want to be my ally.’ —to put what I mean by relations-of-force in a nut-shell.
[…] a friend posted this blog post/essay from P. E. Garcia, a college professor in Philadelphia. There are things about this […]
can you just shut the fuck up for once, dude? Just let this beautiful essay be without having to piss all over it and everything you read here?
I pissed on nothing, empathy bro; I offered two opinions—one in agreement, and one in qualification—in response to Garcia’s “opinion” piece. What do you think of (especially white) Trump voters from the classes that he’s exploited and ripped off and tax-evaded his whole adult life? And how would you form ‘alliances’ with people—with whom you share identity or not—who seem constantly to be disciplining others’ discourses?
beautiful essay. thanks for writing. I just keep listening to this over and over https://vimeo.com/5453316
“what to do about working-poor and middle-class whites who won’t quit voting against their direct political-economic interests”
nothing. “what to do about”? what does that even mean? they aren’t livestock, they’re people. you engage them, listen to them, talk to them, start conversation & see what happens– common ground is invariably shared humanity, because all people are more similar than different. look for the person– the FRIEND– behind disagreement, prejudice & bad ideas. disagreement doesn’t require warfare & people DO change their minds. thinking of people as something you have to “do something about” (i realize this isn’t necessarily your view, but the one you’re addressing in this comment) reveals a false conception of your role in life. it attributes an authority to yourself that you don’t actually possess. no one is the authority on what to think or how to correctly vote. & attempts to claim such authority invariably create resistance.
also, “voting against their direct political-economic interests” is actually your (or “your”) characterization of their behavior, based on your own opinions. it assumes they’re ignorant of their own situation, presuming superior knowledge on your part. that you know what their interests should properly be, or that the interests you see are ‘truer’ or more correct than the ones they see. that’s a paternalistic attitude that’s inescapably arrogant. if someone considers a social issue like abortion to be more important than their own economic prosperity, who’s to say they’re “wrong”? that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try talking to them or even persuading them to change their mind, but it does mean dropping presumption & arrogance so that you can talk to them more humbly, on an equal level.
social growth & evolution happens by communication & cooperation. we’re not here to “change” or “do things” about each other, but to teach & learn from each other, as equals.
You didn’t get past the first sentence before you found something you felt comfortable taking offense at. That’s fine, but let’s look at that sentence again: “There’s debate on the Left […] about what to do about etc.” Not ‘what to do with’, as though people were “livestock” or instruments. As far as “what does that even mean?”—incredulousness that doesn’t evince a search for common ground—, the ‘what to do’ in the comment clearly means ‘how to talk to’… —as in, ‘what to do about geocentrists?’ (an analogy I make further than that first sentence).
As I refer to it, it really is a question many on the Left have been asking for years: how should people exploited by elites be convinced that their identification with the point of view of those elites is self-destructively magical thinking?
You’ve acted on the conception that your role in life is to take authority over what my conception of my role in life is. Why, then, would you assume that your role in life is not also to do as Garcia has done in his essay (though perhaps not face-to-face): to tell Trump voters that they’re “kind of stupid”?
What’s happened for decades (Ronnie ’80, Rove/Cheney 2000) of engagement with, listening to, talking to, and conversing with white middle-class conservatives, is that they’ve consistently blamed the hollowing-out of the (majority-) white middle class on black misbehavior, women’s lib, environmental, occupational-safety, and consumer-protection regulation, and undocumented labor. Surely now is a good time to call delusional, easily manipulated attitudes what they are: kind of stupid.
It’s not paternalistic or an illegitimate arrogation of perspective to insist, for example, that global warming is a fact, or that exercising white privilege is more materially effective than exercising the privilege of non-white grievance, or that there’s no Infrastructure Fairy and cutting taxes for rich people doesn’t create jobs.
If someone has arguments against these fact-claims, they can go ahead and make them. We’ll be growing socially and evolving and communicating precisely by discovering, cooperatively, that one view is in fact not equal to the other, but rather, superior. (That’s not what happens when I say I like a movie and you say you don’t—but opinions about movies are not like divergent ‘opinions’ about matters of objective impingement on subjectivities.)
You seem to be arguing—oddly, in an effort to “change” my opinion—for a relativism, that global warming, for example, happens only to people who think it’s happening at all. My argument is that while people who deny global warming are equally able to understand its factuality, they don’t—and therefore their ‘opinion’ is wrong. With respect to global warming, it doesn’t matter how “humble” (??) anyone is. In my view, what’s illegitimately arrogant is rejection of empirical compulsion.
We can go on about ‘life’ supporters—about the consistency of compulsory incubationists’ concern for fetuses—, but you’re wrong if you think their own perspective is that they’re choosing compulsory incubation and poverty over reproductive liberty and prosperity (which is how you’ve framed “abortion to be more important than their own economic prosperity”): social conservatives don’t see this trade-off, but rather, are convinced that compulsory incubation coexists with tax cuts for (much) richer people trickling down to them.
In this interaction (between you and me), it isn’t a case of arrogance versus humility: you’re arrogating permission to yourself to tell me I’m wrong. That’s great! (—though inaccurate…) That’s the position Garcia arrogates to himself in saying that Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia and its confused (tormented) racial assertions, is “fucking wrong”, and that his student, like millions of Trump voters, is “kind of stupid”. The student was! and they are! —and thinking that voting against oneself is really voting for oneself, that’s wrong and stupid, too.
thank you.
[…] “…this essay also isn’t about how poetry will save us.” New writing from P. E. Garcia at HTML Giant. […]
“You didn’t get past the first sentence before you found something you felt comfortable taking offense at.”
i replied to the first sentence, that doesn’t mean i didn’t read the rest of it. i replied to that sentence because it seemed to represent an attitude i’ve seen elsewhere & felt like the most worthy part of your post to reply to. i also wasn’t offended by it. i disagree & take issue, but i’m not offended.
“As far as “what does that even mean?”—incredulousness that doesn’t evince a search for common ground”
no incredulousness. i was asking honestly: what is *even* (i.e when those saying it really think about it) meant by that language?
“the ‘what to do’ in the comment clearly means ‘how to talk to’…”
it doesn’t. it means what it says. if you meant “how to talk to”– & wanted other people to gather that meaning also– then you should’ve said that.
“how should people exploited by elites be convinced that their identification with the point of view of those elites is self-destructively magical thinking?”
i see your point here, & i actually agree with it, but the way you’ve framed this question reveals your problem. people don’t want to “be convinced”. people resist being convinced. people don’t let go of beliefs easily, even if they make no sense. if you see convincing people as some sort of PROJECT, you invariably become self-important, & it will backfire. if you want to convince people, just DO IT. talk to them & give it a shot. how many poor white Republican voters has the average “Left” person or liberal actually spoken to or tried to engage with? i think people are throwing up their hands & acting like they’ve tried everything, that these people are beyond convincing, when in reality they’ve barely even tried talking to them.
a better question to ask, in my opinion, would’ve been “how can (i / you / we) convince people exploited by elites that their ideas are self-destructive?” & the answer, again in my view, would be “just talk to them & figure it out.”
“You’ve acted on the conception that your role in life is to take authority over what my conception of my role in life is”
i’m not the authority. you can think whatever you want about your role in life. i can air my objection while also respecting your freedom to think whatever you want
“Why, then, would you assume that your role in life is not […] to tell Trump voters that they’re “kind of stupid”?”
if might be. but is that really going to convince them, or will it just piss them off even more? the antagonistic clash of opinions tends to polarize people & drive them further toward radicalism. it also exacerbates the communication breakdown between the different “sides”. i think when people are clinging to their beliefs & defending them violently, you have to try a gentler or more subtle approach.
“Surely now is a good time to call delusional, easily manipulated attitudes what they are: kind of stupid.”
sure, but don’t do only that & act like it’s enough, or all that you can do.
“You didn’t get past the first sentence before you found something you felt comfortable taking offense at.”
i replied to the first sentence, that doesn’t mean i didn’t read the rest of it. i replied to that sentence because it seemed to represent an attitude i’ve seen elsewhere & it felt like the most worthy part of your post to reply to. i also wasn’t offended by it. i disagree & take issue, but i’m not offended.
“As far as “what does that even mean?”—incredulousness that doesn’t evince a search for common ground”
no incredulousness. i was asking honestly: what is *even* (i.e when those saying it really think about it) meant by that language?
“the ‘what to do’ in the comment clearly means ‘how to talk to’…”
it doesn’t. it means what it says. if you meant “how to talk to”– & wanted other people to gather that meaning also– then you should’ve said that.
“how should people exploited by elites be convinced that their identification with the point of view of those elites is self-destructively magical thinking?”
i see your point here, & i actually agree with it, but the way you’ve framed this question reveals your problem. people don’t want to “be convinced”. people resist being convinced. people don’t let go of beliefs easily, even if they make no sense. if you see convincing people as some sort of PROJECT, you invariably become self-important, & it will backfire. if you want to convince people, just DO IT. talk to them & give it a shot. how many poor white Republican voters has the average “Left” person or liberal actually spoken to or tried to engage with? i think people are throwing up their hands & acting like they’ve tried everything, that these people are beyond convincing, when in reality they’ve barely even tried talking to them.
a better question to ask, in my opinion, would’ve been “how can (i / you / we) convince people exploited by elites that their ideas are self-destructive?” & the answer, again in my view, would be “just talk to them & figure it out.”
“You’ve acted on the conception that your role in life is to take authority over what my conception of my role in life is”
i’m not the authority. you can think whatever you want about your role in life. i can air my objection while also respecting your freedom to think whatever you want
“Why, then, would you assume that your role in life is not […] to tell Trump voters that they’re “kind of stupid”?”
if might be. but is that really going to convince them, or will it just piss them off even more? the antagonistic clash of opinions tends to polarize people & drive them further toward radicalism. it also exacerbates the communication breakdown between the different “sides”. i think when people are clinging to their beliefs & defending them violently, you have to try a gentler or more subtle approach.
“Surely now is a good time to call delusional, easily manipulated attitudes what they are: kind of stupid.”
sure, but don’t do only that & act like it’s enough, or all that you can do.
“We’ll be growing socially and evolving and communicating precisely by discovering, cooperatively, that one view is in fact not equal to the other, but rather, superior.”
i agree. but that’s a gradual process that will happen by conversation, not by decree.
“You seem to be arguing—oddly, in an effort to “change” my opinion—for a relativism, that global warming, for example, happens only to people who think it’s happening at all.”
when did i say anything about global warming? that’s one issue among dozens, & the issues themselves are only one factor affecting people’s voting behavior.
global warming is an issue of fact, & definitely everyone who knows those facts should insist on them, but even when something’s an issue of fact there are other things that can rule their thinking. definitely insist on the facts, but know that the facts aren’t always enough to persaude people.
“In this interaction (between you and me), it isn’t a case of arrogance versus humility: you’re arrogating permission to yourself to tell me I’m wrong.”
not really, because i was only replying to the ideas your comment seemed to suggest, i wasn’t sure whether you yourself held those ideas. but of course i have permission to tell you you’re wrong, everyone has permission to tell anyone they’re wrong because everyone has permission to say whatever they want.
that’s the thing– i’m not even saying that people shouldn’t fight or use combative language to argue, i’m just saying people resist having their minds made up for them & their opinions decided for them.
(& again i’m not saying that was your POV, but it *is* a paternalistic element that is often quite noticeable in “liberal” attitudes, whether anyone wants to admit it or not)
trying to change minds is good, but there are ways of doing it that are more effective & ways of doing it that are less effective.
No, I “should” use varieties of expression that are understandable in their context—regardless of tactical or malicious potential misunderstandings. I asked directly, “How is a politics supposed to incorporate [conservative] magical thinking […] into an argument for rational solutions?” And as I say, I went on to put the context in an analogy: “[Y]ou can talk to a geocentrist about many things, but not about astronomy[.]”
The way you explain your advice to ‘talk to them, just talk to them’ reveals your problem: your PROJECT of convincing me to talk to them, just talk to them, assumes that I don’t talk to them. Maybe 4/5 of the white people I talk to every day get their ‘news’ only from Fox, believe crazy shit about Obama and Clinton, and don’t believe easily demonstrated facts about conservative lies (I live in central Florida).
We’re asking the same question.
You’re confusing an angry, frustrated moment with an argument for the Only Thing To Be Done. Of course calling people ‘stupid’ puts their backs up, and of course voting, organizing, boycotting, presenting facts calmly, and so on, are all part of what’s to be done (even when one’s side wins an—after all, temporary—election). Look again at the form of my response to Garcia: it’s all a question, namely, how does one talk to people who a) reject empirical compulsion? and b) identify with the values and priorities of their victimizers? Not to say it in a self-defeatingly direct way, but in the teeth of that rejection and that commitment, your recommendation ‘just to talk to them’ is insipid.
Yes… that’s my starting point: how do you talk to people who are impervious to empirical impingement?? “Decree” isn’t the right word for ‘plain statement’; there just isn’t an astronomy argument for geocentrism, and I think that, similarly, there isn’t an argument against the existences of global warming, white privilege, male privilege, cis privilege, the toxicity of frack water, the economic value of infrastructural investment, and the progressive side of a host of ‘social’ issues (a diminution of STDs and unwanted pregnancy among teens when sex education is part of schooling, and so on and on). One doesn’t have to be like a cruel high-school math teacher, but sometimes, when an ‘opinion’ is wrong, saying so bluntly is okay—even if, at first (and maybe lastingly), it sounds contemptuous.
When I mentioned global warming, I said “for example” because you hadn’t brought it up: it’s a good go-to for something concretely factual. In the differently premised case of, say, someone who thinks that homosexuality is Bad, or that blacks are inferior to whites, or women, to men, I don’t think one can even reach the—one hopes, temporary—impasse of ‘You’re factually wrong.’ I think those commitments can only be transformed by some… illumination, an experience of compassionate identification with another that pierces and strips that shell of hatred. But that intractability isn’t what Garcia was faced with in the student’s regret. Nor what I (and maybe you) are faced with when cool people suddenly (to me) start Gish-galloping stupid shit about Nobama and Killary and #Benghazi and emails and, what, “Chinese” atmospheric-physics hoaxes and Trump bringing jobs back to America.
It’s the question we both have asked: how can one just talk to these people who believe stupid shit?? Because, as Garcia says, the racism embedded in the effective history of Jeffersonian self-contradictory delusion is fucking wrong, and middle-class and working-poor people who vote to harm themselves are being catastrophically stupid.
yes to the real day and the people and the facing and the accounting // great piece, P.E.
Thank you for this.
((replying to this earlier comment because it looks like we’re running out of space with the indentions))
“your PROJECT of convincing me to talk to them assumes that I don’t talk to them”
well, i did sort of assume that based on your language (which i shouldn’t have– apologies) but i was really meaning to speak more generally. “you” being everyone who’s amazed or bewildered or frightened by the things their neighbors & fellow citizens believe & proclaim, & who wish they had some way of changing their minds so they might stop voting for Anti-Reality candidates before the world explodes. & while yes, i apologize for my combativeness, or maliciousness, or insipidness, i stand by my statement that the best way to do it is personally: face-to-face, or tweet to tweet, however it might be, by dialogue.
i think a trend toward increasing disconnection is observable in every facet of American life. in matters of cultural opinion, it manifests as the POLARIZATION of the populace into two groups which, despite having little real contact with each other, are completely antagonistic & hateful toward one another. the more they antagonize each other, the further polarized they become. i realized a few months ago that it works by an analogous process to the buildup of static electricity: the same way rubbing two materials together generates friction which creates an imbalance of charge, the dissonance & clashing of opinions between two ‘sides’ of a cultural issue makes them increasingly antagonistic & hateful toward each other– i.e, increasingly POLARIZED IN CHARGE.
that’s only my own model of course for what i see happening– i don’t mean to sell it too hard. but i’ve noticed that even though culturally-divided people sometimes ENGAGE WITH each other, they rarely actually TALK to each other. it’s more how like 2 soldiers “ENGAGE” each other with machine guns. cultural division seems to create these self-contained BUBBLES, like cells with an impermeable membrane, with minimal absorption or osmotic flow across the boundary.
how many times have you heard people saying things like, “ugh, Thanksgiving, gotta go home & listen to my racist family” or something? as totally understandable as that is, it reveals this lack of connection.
i think it’s a fact of history that the situation of progressivism is more difficult & precarious. human nature is skeptical of it & the human condition seems to contradict it. i think wondering how you can possibly communicate with the status quo is totally sensible. like the Kafka quote– “a first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die”. if it doesn’t seem impossible, you’re probably not trying very hard. i live in Alabama myself & i’ve dealt with that frequently.
i do think humility is important, as naive as that might sound, because it allows communication to be a FLOW rather than a clash. instead of two jet-streams of water impacting one another, you get two inter-blending flows– a blend of perspective. even when it’s a matter of facts, we shouldn’t resist other’s perspectives– because perspective is also a fact: the fact of the existence of that perspective. even though the perspective is flawed, it traces back to real things. why should the facts fear lesser facts? maybe they succeed when they say “i see your facts, but consider the importance of these other facts– they might change your view”
i think when a person lacks humility, they’re rendered blind in some way. they’re blocked from 2-way communication. instead it becomes them trying to PUT their views *ON* to the other– the blindness of missionaries & zealots all through history. & i realize i might seem to be doing this myself. but this is what causes the flame wars of insult & back-&-forth interminable argument we see everywhere online: lack of humility.
i’ve seen that when it comes to political debate people on the Left & right both can become obsessed with hoarding information & arguments, similar to the way that governments hoard weaponry. it becomes a kind of arms race where the objective is to gain a superior footing over the opponent, on the level of argument. in the information economy this plays out as a “War of Media” which eventually degenerates into myriad shouting matches, with each side trying vainly to talk over its opponent, squeezing various rhetorical postures for all they’re worth in order to conjure an aura of victory & dominance– all largely for the sake of the audience, because “that’s what the camera wants”.
i could go on, & there were a couple of other things i wanted to talk about (what i meant by “decree” for instance (the element of social ordainment often detectable in “liberal” views– NOT with things like global warming, but things commonly associated with the term “political correctness”, which trend as a whole has created a widespread inferiority / persecution complex among conservatives. there’s been happening, & is happening, a national backlash against “political correctness”, & i think it’s a large contributor to support for demagogues like Trump.)– i could go on, but this is already TLDR & i’m sure i’m off-topic & repeating myself anyway. it’s in consideration of all this that i believe a more collaborative method of communication is essential for moving forward. people will hear the facts eventually, but they have to WANT to hear them first. their ears have to be open.
for some reason my reply to this comment keeps being detected as “spam”. if it doesn’t come up later, i’d like to email it to you– my email is raccoonzappa@gmail.com.
“And I hold this hopeful, well-intentioned apology, as I’ve held apologies before, and I just don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do with it.”
I’ve been advising well-intentioned Trump voters that if they want to make reparations, they must do so. They must do everything they can to block him from throwing us all under the bus. Phone calls and protests and being willing to put their own bodies and own homes on the line to protect vulnerable people. Actions, not platitudes.
You—and not me?! —ha ha. Maybe you used two or three words that, in the same comment, trigger the spam filter; try the same argument again with different phrasing?
Or maybe you were just trying to sell a pocket lawn mower-slash-home dentistry kit…
“how many poor white Republican voters has the average “Left” person or liberal actually spoken to or tried to engage with?”
These constructions always seem to ignore the many liberal/progressive people who grew up in whole families and communities of Republican voters, and whose left-ward journey was a survival mechanism in response to the soul-killing, maybe even literally-killing environment all around them, who have done almost nothing BUT talk to Republican voters every time they engage with their family.
Show me even one dead conservative kid who killed themselves out of despair over their progressive family’s wholesale rejection of them as a valid human being, and I’ll show you a hundred queer, trans, feminist, atheist, humanist, etc. etc. folks who couldn’t take the rejection any more.
i know– & you’re right, & that’s an important point, but i still think most people largely associate with those who are “on their side”, people who agree with them or are like them, particularly on the internet which is increasingly how people communicate. i saw that in myself after the election– on twitter clicking to read replies on Trump-inspired hate crimes & things like that, seeing all the conservatives opposing & arguing it & realizing “wow, i NEVER talk to these people.” i’d effectively been sealed away from those people in how i engage with the internet. & then i thought of how i don’t talk politics with certain people in my family, how my impulse is always to “let it go”, how i don’t talk about it with neighbors or the people down the street, how in the all jobs i’ve had i’ve rarely talked about it with coworkers, etc etc…
i think your points relates to how the progressive position has usually been more “besieged” by the world– so then the urge becomes to create your own world how it SHOULD be & sort of seal off everything bad about the reality that lags behind. i think the pervasiveness of those attempts are what made the election result so surprising for so many people.
you’re totally right though.
i’ll try keeping my capitalization to Normal Business Hours, converting my ampersands to the One True Faith & segmenting my response for easy handling in mail.
on second thought FUCK YALL imma do me
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/50183eaad992f07f79e2000e30dd1fd7722a60ce493197d7a99c0a93aa24dd14.jpg
here is a picture of it. :)
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5a62a84d083d5db3d080edeed2b3dc8128b949dec0e7f2bdd4e6e1c31104b1b2.jpg
for posterity if nothing else
Thanks, that’s fine—not at all tl;dr, ha.
To start with the last, first, I agree that “political correctness” as hijacked by the grievance-privileged is a power trip at the expense of justice. But a) to focus perspective of social justice on excesses that contradict its premises seems to me to throw out the baby with the bathwater (in the manner of, say, denying racism by way of insisting that white people suffer, too); and b) accepting white grievance, when white people in America have so many advantages over pocs (criminal justice is only the most visible example), while complaining about grievance-mongers-of-color, seems to me odiously one-sided in favor of the favored.
As far as polarization, at some point, one side is factually accurate where the other isn’t. This isn’t the case just with global warming, frack-water and frack quakes, and other issues whose policies should be grounded in physical science; fiscal conservatism fails to comprehend or address real-world consequences of conservative tax-and-spend policies, social conservatism’s religiosity is unConstitutional in its cruelties, and neo-conservatism’s militarized diplomacy and domestic ‘security’ policies are proven again and again to produce results opposite to even neo-cons’ claimed goals.
It’s not just shouting-back-louder, and it’s not 55/45 instead of 50/50: the progressive side in issue after issue after issue is factual, and the conservative, rooted in resistance to empirical compulsion.
In my view, that is, you’re asking for the reasonable side to meet the irrational side halfway, in dialogue, hands reaching across the aisle to get things done… and there’s no one there to talk to. At this point—since Reagan, really, but certainly at this point—, it doesn’t take two to fight: one hand on the steering wheel is committed to the delusion that the road goes horizontally after the cliff, and the plunge over that cliff obliterates any sense of a compromise on destination.
That’s what I mean by “insipid”: I’m providing examples—global warming is a fair model, I think—of the impossibility of genuine conversation in these policy cases.
Garcia’s student, if I understand Garcia’s portrayal, is attracted by this kind of argument: we don’t need an EPA that measures pollution and guides regulation according to legislated rules, because the marketplace, driven by self-interested consumers, regulates pollution by itself. Likewise, we don’t need laws against discrimination, because discriminators will be adequately punished by consumers in the marketplace (this is, with respect to race, Rand Paul’s explicit argument). If pocs feel they’re being treated unfairly (by, say, police, prosecutors, judges, prisons), then the electoral ‘marketplace’ is where they should seek redress—not enforced codes of law. There’s no such thing as a “hate crime”; there are criminal acts and non-criminal acts. —and so on.
Well, the student somehow saw—and suddenly cared about—the vulnerability that many people feel with the unambiguous white-nationalist cast of Trump’s appeal and, apparently, his administration. Maybe now he’s open to seeing how stupid conservative policy arguments are!
—but before this student had contact with a compassionate ‘li-brul’ figure of authority—one whom he trusted enough to see—, how to listen and talk to him, if not, as you say with military figures of speech, with information and arguments ‘hostile’ to his point of view?
Glenn Beck seems to be saying that, in the context of Trump, Michelle Obama’s poised, intelligent, gracious public conversation illuminated him, and now his vile, nonsensical views have been transformed. Maybe so! —why not. Does the country have the time to wait for tens of millions of Confederacy nincompoops to, well, listen to reason?
You can do more than that, out in society, out in politics, out in your neighborhood, to help us all. Then it’ll be worth something.
Apologies are just a request for forgiveness- they fix nothing. The apologies from Trump voters (such as my father in-law) seem more like demands for closure and erasure of their mistakes. They are painful to me as a bisexual woman, and they must be much worse to the people Trump has identified as acceptable targets for his supporters who overflow with self-loathing and rage.
But as frustrating as they are, I’m almost as frustrated with my fellow liberal friends, and how we approach racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and religious bigotry.
I’m tired of people only caring after a tragedy has occurred. We accomplish nothing unless we prevent it. White liberals like me always talk about justice, but they forget that justice is not pre-emptive, it is reactive. Justice would not prevent the poisoning of Flint or the violation of Native lands- at least not without tragedies that initiate an investigation.
Justice comes when someone has been killed, and their killer is sought. Justice asks why they killed, but not why killing is common, and never why certain people are targeted more. Justice tracks down the individual who killed while ignoring the society that taught them to kill. White liberals talk about justice because we are reactive in our efforts to be allies- so much so that I wonder if we should just call us “Reactivists.”
We cannot be satisfied with a trial for the killer and a funeral for the fallen. Our tears will revive no-one, and it will offer no comfort to those who believe they may be next. Prevention, or at least active efforts to try to prevent tragedy, is the only way we can rise above the sort of performance art that our justice system has become.
We have to stop calling it Social Justice. We cannot be content with finding and punishing the individual perpetrators of crimes while ignoring the system that creates them. Justice only comforts those so invested in a system that produces injustice. If reforming such a system feels like more of a threat than the injustices it produces, that is the heart of privilege. Being an ally means throwing aside your fear of destabilization in the face of change- of welcoming uncertainty if it means greater security for others.
(rant done, been building up a bit. grrr)
Something to be done: Audit the Vote
The last day to audit the vote is NOV. 23. The DOJ is currently tallying requests for this. If you haven’t yet, please call the Dept. of Justice Public Comment Line 202-514-2000, press 4 to leave a message, and tell them you want the votes audited.
Script: “My name is ___, and I’m a registered voter. I’m urging you to support the call to audit the vote, investigate voter suppression, particularly in North Carolina, Florida and Wisconsin, and investigate Russian tampering of US election results.”
By yesterday morning (11/23), Stein and the Greens’ initiative had reached $2 million to pay for recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (they’re now aiming for more than twice as much money). ‘parently, citizens pay to have their votes counted—and have to pay again to have that tally checked carefully. Not sure why Florida and North Carolina weren’t on that list; wanting to avoid winning battles that only lose the war by way of overprosecution? Also not sure why an anti-Trump billionaire (Buffett; Cuban) couldn’t have put up enough to recount half a dozen close states with statistically anomalous ‘results’—and done so farther before the 23rd.
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