Category: Current Events

Friday Roundup

On By JonathanIn Current Events, Politics, WarLeave a comment

Yes, It is a Police State: ‘Since 9/11 the biggest threat to the American people is not radical Muslim terrorists, nor deranged domestic terrorists, but the terrorists with the blue uniforms, badges, and body armor. Their weapons of mass destruction are not bombs, but state-approved guns, latex-gloved hands, and a profound disregard for our rights. Until we stand up and say, “Enough!”these terrorists will keep winning and our rights will continue to be lost.’

A Trojan Horse in ‘Higher Education’: Nothing terribly new here, but still good analysis with considerable justified heat: ‘higher ed’ as we know it has long been a racket, the dual streams of state and big capital flowing in and out of the academy, leaving it in ruins.

Prison Break: ‘Certainly the incarceration of people who have violated no rights is an important part of America’s prison problem. But I don’t think that covers all of it. There are also moral problems, I think, with the incarceration of rights-violators — which means that high incarceration rates are going to be something worth complaining about even when the prisoners are guilty as hell.’

‘Public Service?’ I’m Taking my Business Elsewhere: It’s not the sort of service anyone needs; it’s certainly not indispensable as our progressive friends seem to think.

U.S. Special Ops Troops Deployed in Mexico, Leaked Briefing Confirms: Not really all that surprising.

When Only the ‘Crazies’ See the Bank Bailout for What it Is: A good leftist review of one of the American State’s most spectacular interventions on behalf of financial ‘capital’ (one hesitates to call it capital, which implies something substantial…): ‘From the outset in 2009, the Obama Plan has been to re-inflate the Bubble Economy by providing yet more credit (that is, debt) to bid housing and commercial real estate prices back up to pre-crash levels, not to bring debts down to the economy’s ability to pay. The result is debt deflation for the economy at large and rising unemployment – but enrichment of the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population as economies have become even more financialized.’

Friday Roundup

On By JonathanIn Current Events, PoliticsLeave a comment

Dialogue With a Young Communist: A good overview of market anarchism and its relationship with other forms of libertarian thought and praxis.

Budd on the Fourth Amendment, The Home, and the Poor: The welfare-warfare State never acts with mere benevolence. Welfare is as much a device of control as anything else; in this case through acts of supervision and invasion of privacy.

Hayek in Tuscaloosa: Market anarchy at work: not individualistic scrambling for gain and advantage over one’s neighbors, but voluntaristic and mutualistic working together for common good- without a central entity with coercive force directing and compelling everyone. Examples like this are one of the most potent counter-arguments to statists who argue for the necessity of a strong and omnipresent State, or any State at all for that matter. This is not an isolated example, either: read stories from the tornado outbreak in the Midwest, or go back to stories from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina a few years ago. Order did not in fact break down (there was no epidemic of rape and murder and such in the Superdome, for instance, despite fevered media reports); if anything, order and social cohesion increase in these situations.

Mom-and-Pop Stores vs. Big-Box Stores in the Food Desert: ‘Unfortunately, we will get what we measure. The $400 million that the Obama administration has set aside to create greater food access in these so-called food deserts will likely go to attracting full-service grocery franchises that heap upon our children megatons of empty calories like those in high-fructose corn syrup and corn oil — yes, the very products that emerge from Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack’s own great state of Iowa. But the profits made in those big-box stores will drain away from our neighborhoods and communities, bound for distant corporate headquarters, further impoverishing most food producers and consumers.’

Practical Rules, Strategies, and Tactics For Building a Civilization of Life and Love: Older but good. ‘How to build a just and sustainable society within the shell of the collapsing ruins of the old unjust and unsustainable culture of death and its associated structures of sin and violence. This is a non violent little way of justice and peace.’

On Teaching and Education I: Learning and Coercion

On By JonathanIn Culture, Current Events, Philosophy, Politics, University Life1 Comment

I’ve been in the education industry now, off and on (but mostly on) since 2007, in a range of capacities: substitute teacher in public high schools, teacher’s assistant in a large public research university, an instructor in a tiny historically black private college, and, in a couple months, a grad student and TA at a wealthy private research university. Besides my work as a teacher I have experienced a wide range of educational settings as a student: a small private school (kindergarten, though because of my family moving, I never officially graduated), followed by a couple of years in public school. I disliked school and my parents, thanks be to God, didn’t compel me to continue a compulsory public education, and instead let me be homeschooled. Homeschooled is a bit of a misnomer, since my childhood and adolescent education took place in lots of different settings and with lots of different teachers, besides my day-to-day ‘formal’ curriculum. I learned painting and woodcarving under the relatively informal and very personal tutelage of wonderful, experienced teachers; I spent a great deal of time hiking and exploring and camping; I participated in a (rather disorganized and not very badge-driven) Boy Scout group and in 4H; I joined a railroad history group; sat in on graduate classes in history my father was taking (and used the university library); and so on. That I have turned out a market anarchist is not really a surprise when I reflect on it: had I been forced to spend most of my waking hours in a state institution of mass education, my political, economic, cultural, and religious views would probably be much more ‘mainstream’ and malleable to State and Capital. Which is, I suppose, the point, whether intentional or unintentional. But more on that question later.

Now that I’ve briefly set out the history of my own experience with teaching and education, I’d like to reflect a little on some of the lessons I’ve learned (pun intended) over the past several years, focusing primarily on my experiences as a teacher. First, my experience in public primary-school education, the most limited of my experiences, lasting for a semester plus a few extra weeks in the second semester. I had recently finished my bachelor’s degree and wanted to begin grad school, but knew that I needed to begin learning Arabic. I also wanted to do some more traveling, so I decided to go abroad to study Arabic. In order to pay for said expedition, I took up a couple of jobs and lived with my parents; in addition, my father was deployed to Iraq so I felt a certain imperative to stay at home with my mother and youngest brother. Anyway, I took a job working for a shoestring budget skating rink; once the school year rolled around I signed up for substitute teaching, which in Mississippi at least does not require any rigorous training. I ended up teaching at a couple of schools on a regular basis: a semi-rural, semi-urban high school, and the so-called alternative school, the holding cell for ‘troubled’ students, which as often as not meant the less nasty alternative to jail. I briefly subbed at another high school but lost out on that after pissing off a rabidly militaristic and neocon civics teacher, in my first taste of being blacklisted. But that’s another story.

What follows are some of my observations from this period; none are groundbreaking (as I would later discover, much of what I learned has already been uncovered and discussed by other radical thinkers, Ivan Illich chief among them), yet the entire structure is generally accepted as a given in industrialized Western society, despite the almost blindingly obvious harms inherent in it. I cannot of course hope to list more than fraction of these harms- there are plenty of others I could enumerate. Rather I will stick to those I saw up-close, and even was forced to participate in. Also, do realize that I do not aim to incriminate any one individual, even those who were, even by the standards of the system, particularly atrocious. Rather, it is the system as a whole that I have come to condemn, the structures and procedures whose operation is not dependent upon any one person’s will or intentions.

To preface the particulars: my overall conclusion was that compulsory education is an incredibly anti-social method. Students, far from being encouraged to interact in anything resembling a free environment, find themselves, day after day, in an environment that is at once highly structured and regimented, from arriving on the bus to processing into classrooms to the punctual division of the day into timed blocks, with brief interludes of liberty in between. Students are sorted into age groups, evaluated according to performance on (increasingly centrally directed and evaluated) tests, ranked further within their age groups. Disciplinary figures are everywhere, threatening some form of more direct coercion or another. This does not mean that the students respect these impositions of authority and regimentation: in fact, they tend to resent it, and try to find ways of evading it at all turns, all the while both fearing this authority and internalizing its inevitability (as they see it, as they are drilled to see it). Students organize themselves within the interstices of the regimented day, and they extend these organizations beyond the school day. Sometimes the pent-up aggression at continual coercion bursts into open acts of belligerence, even violence, usually against each other, sometimes directed at teachers. Far from creating order, the system tends towards barely contained disorder. Substitute teachers are soft targets for strategies of evasion, though I was able for the most part to at least keep my classrooms civil, if not exactly engaged in meaningful learning.

Which brings me to another consistent pattern: the amount of ‘busy work’ designed to keep students occupied, and the complete lack of instruction in some classes. The latter reflects what I imagine, though don’t know to be, a regional variation: football and to a lesser extent basketball coaches who also teach are notoriously exempt from any standards. But neither of these problems strikes at one of the central, maybe the central, evil of the entire system, an evil that I dealt with while subbing and one I continue to deal with in colleges and universities. Simply put, students are taught to associate learning with coercion. The things that we in the humanities hold dear- literature, history, philosophy, music- become, for the average student, weapons in the hands of a power structure that operates on them day after day, year after year. I know because I had to yield them as such for this job- certainly, I was able to engage the students voluntarily, more or less, on many occasions; I tried as often as I could to avoid the tactics I saw being employed by full-time faculty. Yet even I, in order to keep things moving through the day, to go from one period to the next, as often as not had to effectively compel students to read their Shakespeare (which most of them did not understand at all, but it was on the day’s schedule) or whatever it was at hand.

For the especially bright students, or the well-connected and favored ones, all of this may not be an especially terrible experience. For them- especially the brighter kids- it is the broader anti-social atmosphere of high school that chafes them: asinine teachers, bullies, the grind of busy work, of confinement to a standardized (industrialized!) curriculum, the creation and clashing of cliques. They manage to disassociate learning with the coercive structure, or discover ways of learning that lie outside of the school’s control. For the rest, learning is physically imprinted in them (through these bodily actions, day after day after day) as an activity imposed from the outside, a method of control, humiliation even. That they reject all semblance of ‘higher culture’ upon escaping from the educational structure is not surprising; even for those who do not reject all learning, their further experiences with educational structure are forever imprinted by their years of experience in school. It is not that they reject the necessity of school: they’ve had it drilled into them, year after year; nor do they reject the authority, which they have also had drilled into them year after year. Rather, they resent it, chafe under it, and, crucially, do not desire learning. The world of learning has little or no wonder available to it; the discipline and tests and ranking and regimentation have crushed it out of them.

It is this crushing of desire and wonder, this awful associate of learning with a system of continual coercion, that I find most destructive. Certainly, for those of us teaching in colleges and universities, we face student bodies that are often times close to functional illiteracy, or who are at the very least incapable of most of the skills necessary for basic humanities courses (I can say nothing of math and science, but I would not be surprised if a similar situation obtains there as well). Opening discussions in class (which is a primary task among teacher’ assistants) is doubly difficult: the students have rarely read the assigned material nor do they especially comprehend it. If one can get them to discuss, it is nearly impossible to engage them, since they will not- in class at least!- counter-say a teacher, not without lots of urging. They do not love the authorities over them, nor do they respect them, but they will not gainsay them. For a teacher’s assistant trying to stimulate a discussion about the Venerable Bede, it’s a depressing scenario, but one repeated over and over again. But for an operator of the authority of state or corporate capital, it’s the perfect scenario: unhappy subservience, but unquestioning subservience.

But before I spin off another tangent, let me return to, and end with, the most troubling environment in which I worked, the alternative school. These were students who had been caught in the teeth of the system, and were being slowly shredded to bits. The threat of actual prison- juvie, then adult- was always over their heads. Many of them- freshmen, sophomores, mind you- had lost count of the number of times that had been hauled in by the cops or disciplinary officers. The roots of their problems were various: most came from deeply troubled homes, nearly all had been caught in the crossfire of the drug war, all, so far as I could tell, were from chronically poor backgrounds. Their lives were chronicles of all the state institutions that wage war on the poor: prisons, judges, schools, welfare programs, the projects, cops, alongside the ugly constant of disordered families and utterly fragmented communities, wracked by drugs, poverty, and violence. None of these programs had ‘helped’ them, nor were they supposed to, of course. The alternative school, as I mentioned above, was for the most part a last stop, a last ditch effort. Certainly, in terms of school structure and daily procedure, it heightened the coercive nature of schooling: pat-downs, metal detectors, locks on everything, constant surveillance. Not that I entirely minded it, mind you- some of these kids had committed violence in the past, and for a skinny white twenty-something guy having backup nearby gave a measure of reassurance. That said, the environment in the actual classrooms was, in some ways, less coercive and oppressive than in ‘normal’ schools. Certainly, some of the teachers seem to have missed out on a career as prison-guards, but they were the exception- the teachers were, for the most part, genuinely kind and decent. Classes were relatively loosely organized, compared to ‘normal’ school, and since classes were (for reasons of security probably more than anything) small I got to know the students and other teachers pretty well. Some of my most enjoyable times of teaching took place there, in large part I think because my class periods gave the students a little glimpse outside of their otherwise deeply disordered lives shuttling between one coercive authority after another, with stops in utter disorder and violence in between. Teaching tended to be relatively informal; sometimes I would just read passages from books to my students, stopping to gloss difficult bits. It was also a heartbreaking experience: here were kids who had already been passed through the larger educational and judicial mills, and- I knew in the back of my head- were almost certainly going to end up behinds bars, or murdered, or dead from an overdose or cop’s bullet or alcohol, or living in cyclical poverty. I could offer my miniscule cup of compassion, but that was it.

To be sure, all is not terrible: I came across plenty of bright spots as well, smart and engaged students, students who refused to simply swallow everything fed them, teachers who genuinely loved to teach and even managed to impart some of their love of learning to their students. Certainly the anti-social and anti-learning tendency of compulsory, centralized education does not always destroy learning and creativity and so on- it’s not an utterly total system, nor an always consistent or homogenized one, thank God. Some components are far more negative than others, and individual teachers, students, and others can make a considerable difference. But for all of the particular and personal examples one can summon the overall system looms supreme and ultimately dominating, operating just as well- perhaps better- with these positive blimps in the radar existing. The system does not need mere reforms, as politicians of both statist parties will content: it needs to be demolished, and teaching and learning need to be re-imagined and re-built from the ground up.

Singing Scripture

On By JonathanIn Culture, Current Events, Gospel, Music, Poetry1 Comment

John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats has been turning out beautifully crafted, insightful songs for quite some time now. On nearly all of his projects there are continual echoes and allusions to Biblical themes and verses; Scriptural language permeates his songs in a way rarely matched by other contemporary musicians (including the explicitly confessional ones!). Darnielle is himself a self-described lapsed Catholic, who has- whatever the current state of his religious practice and devotion- assimilated Scripture to a remarkable degree, enough that it simply is there in his music- not a forced presence, but integral to the stories he tells in his music.

While most of his albums have been full of Scripture, this year he has put out an album that is entirely composed of songs developed out of his interaction with specific Scripture verses. Lest there be any ambiguity in the project, titled The Life of the World to Come, each song is titled with the verse reference. So far I’ve only listened to the free track- Genesis 3:23 (get it here, left side bar)- but will hopefully get a hold of the full album before too much longer, and perhaps offer a more detailed evaluation. This song, at any rate, is quite good: Darnielle meditates on the loss of Paradise, his Adam breaking into the place he used to live but knowing he cannot really return. The Garden is not really there, it is no longer home and cannot be. Darnielle’s Adam here is not an epic character- few of Darnielle’s lyrical characters are, but rather ordinary people caught in the immensity of a fallen world with occasional glimmers of grace. The emphasis for Darnielle though is usually on the desperation, the longing, the search for signs of redemption in a world that very obviously is in need of it.

If Darnielle has only this year gone to direct Scriptural exegesis of a sort, John Ringhofer’s project Half-Handed Cloud (several free tracks on the right hand column there) has produced a whole commentary on the Bible, built out of quirky (sometimes really, really horns and toy piano and found sounds swirling all around quirky), short (almost never over two minutes in length) songs that usually draw directly upon a Scriptural verse or story and expound upon them. Ringhofer moves just as well in the familiar stories and great Christian themes as he does in the more obscure and difficult Old Testament stories. In all of them, his exegesis is deeply Christological, tying Eden and Abraham and Levitical regulations into the mystery of Christ. The quirky, psychedelic even (and certainly not for everybody), disjunctive nature of his music serves as one of his best exegetical devices, if you will, startling the listener into a new appreciation of the text, as the often times familiar passages and verses are transformed into new-yet-old texts, meanings bursting to sudden life- and then moving on into another joyous meditation, exploration of another Scripture passage.

One of the important functions of good exegesis must surely be to draw the reader/listener back into the text, to refresh the Scripture in her mind and heart, so that her reading/recitation/listening does not, as al-Ghazali puts it, simply exist on the lips, but enters into the heart. Or rather- the heart becomes present to the words, they become a single unit, Scripture and the heart united and alive. I could list similar understandings across the spectrum of late antique and medieval writers, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim: true understanding must pass from the surface to the heart, must break through the ease of familiarity and rote reading. I suspect that our ancient exegetes would have understand what John Ringhofer’s Biblical songs are doing: joyously connecting with the heart of Scripture, and through this exploration of the Bible, reaching out to God and rejoicing in His grace and incarnated presence. For Ringhofer is always directing the listener, through his psychadelic two-minute singing Scripture exegesis, to the grace and love of Jesus:

Not that I know,
But that I’m known,
You told me I’m Yours and now You’re making me Your own,
And it’s a gift
Because You lifted me out of the past

I tried to honor
What You commanded with my labor,
But now I haven’t just been told
I have been loved.

Throw Your arms wide,
Taking Your bride,
Making us like Yourself and cleansing us inside,

We wore out our sponge,
The dirt didn’t budge
‘Cause the fudge was all cake-on and corroded,
And we just wouldn’t let You hold it,
That’s when we found You pure but messy with our blood.

Oh in the past we tried to honor,
What You commanded with our labor,
But now we haven’t just been told
We have been loved.

Now that I’m known

Al-Ghazali on Funerals

On By JonathanIn Current Events, East & West, History, IslamLeave a comment

As I was reading today the last section of al-Ghazali’s Ihya ‘Ulum al-Din (The Revivification of the Religious Sciences)- Book XL, Kitab Dhikr al-Mawt wa-ma Ba’dahu (The Remembrance of Death and What is After It), I was struck by how apropros the following two passages seemed in light of the past couple weeks’ spate of well-publicized deaths and funerals:

1. ‘Know that funerals are a lesson to the man possessed of insight, and a reminder and a counsel to all save the people of heedlessness. For these latter are increased only in hardness of heart by witnessing them, as they imagine that for all time they will be watching the funerals of others, and never reckon that they themselves must needs be carried in a funeral cortege. Even if they do so reckon, they do not deem this to be something near at hand. They do not consider that those who are carried now in funeral processions thought likewise. Vain, then, are their imaginings, and soon their allotted lifespans will be done.

‘Therefore let no bondsman watch a funeral without considering that he himself is the one being borne aloft, for so he will be before long: on the morrow, or on the day that follows: it is as if the event had already occurred.’

2. ‘The properties of attending funerals include meditation, heedfulness, preparedness, and walking before the pall in humility… One of these proprieties is to have a good opinion of the deceased even if one he had been corrupt, and to have a poor opinion of oneself even if one may outwardly be pious. This is because the last moment is a perilous thing the true nature of which is unknown.

‘It is told of ‘Umar ibn Dharr that one of his neighbours once died. He had been extravagant with himself, and for this reason many people refused to attend his funeral. However, Ibn Dharr attended it and took part in the prayers. When he [the neighbour] had been lowered into the grave he [Ibn Dharr] stood beside it and said, “May God show you mercy, O father of So-and-so! For throughout your life you kept with you the testimony to Divine Unity, and begrimed your face with prostration. Although they called you a sinner and a transgressor, which one of us is not a sinner and has no transgressions to his account?”‘

Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali, in The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife (Islamic Texts Society, 1989), 97, 98.

Papers, Please

On By JonathanIn Culture, Current Events, Philosophy, WarLeave a comment

One of the most effective means of State control is the relentless production of required papers, permits, documents, and so on, from business licenses to drivers licenses to Social Security numbers. When a person has not met the vast number of government requirements the State has the “right” to harass and commit violence against that person. And since we are taught, virtually from birth on, that filling out papers and carrying our documents and meeting every jot and tittle of government regulations is not only necessary to avoid physical pain, but also morally good (how would society function without it?), we rarely question the value or justice of the endless regulations and documentation the State requires. The documentation regime- an integral part as well in the bureaucratic sense of totalizing control, in which every object under the State’s rule is documented and accounted for- is continually expanding, as the State seeks to extend its tentacles into every last aspect of life. And once established, one can hardly just decide to ignore it; in this both State and Capital are willing partners, as government documentation becomes necessary for transactions in the “private” sphere. Part of this, of course, is just the State’s desire to expropriate as much wealth as possible; hence anything that is “undocumented” is evil. Undocumented workers and undocumented transactions generate little or no revenue for the State and are hence evil. And when persons and entities ignore the documentation regime, they become less visible to the State and increasingly harder to control. Most importantly, when we ignore the documentation regime, when our lives are not tied into the control mechanisms and papers of the State and Capital, we begin to feel less a part of their systems, and begin to feel that our existence is not so directly tied to their existence. We begin to question, consciously or unconsciously, the legitimacy of an all-embracing State.

All of that is apropos of this article: Texas pastor protesting traffic stop arrested. The pastor and his congregation made several “mistakes” vis-a-vis the State. The accused driver lacked one of the many offical papers required for movement; as any centralized State knows, controlling and regulating human movement is absolutely vital to maintaining power. The church, apparently, also lacked proper papers, in this case an “occupancy license” required to hold services. Again, undocumented anythings are a danger to the State, even- perhaps especially- churches. Just ask the Chinese State- properly documented, “law-abiding” churches are not a threat; it is the congregations that refuse to be absorbed into the system that pose the true threat. Finally, the pastor made the mistake of a genuine protest: he was directly confronting the excercise of State power. Protest in the sense of marching on the Mall or something is no threat to the State; it serves in fact as a catharsis, an outlet for popular anger. Some governments, of course, savage all forms of protest, from petitioners to street marchers; other, arguably more savvy ones, integrate protest. But only within limits. This pastor overstepped those limits and met the consequences. For while governments, here and everywhere, largely rely upon the built-in acceptance and acquiesence to their policies, the threat of real physical violence is ultimately the source of power and authority. Papers or pepperspray, or worse.

One last point- the documentation regime is only part of the tendency, on both the part of governments and big capital, to reduce the person to a number, a aggregate of data, for purposes of control and marketing. Gabriel Marcel, the Catholic existentialist of the last century, wrote in several of his works about this tendency of the modern world to subsume all other aspects of human identity in offical information and data; the tendency continues and has arguably increased in the internet age, particularly for marketers. However, the internet also poses a challenge,since it is considerably harder to control, and is hence the cause of endless anxiety for governments from Washington to Beijing. At any rate, the documentation, person-reducing tendencies of State and Capital stand in stark relief to the iconic, “personalist” ideology of the Church. An icon, for example, is not a passport photo; it is not a reduction of the person into a mass of statistics and numbers. Hagiography is not, to the frustration of historians for the past couple of centuries, raw information, but is instead closer to a hymn or poem directed at the saint being honoured and held up as an example of transformed, Deified humanity. Even monastic life, which at first glance seems to be the most regulated aspect of Christian life, reveals a surprising latitute unallowable by modern governments, as abbots and spiritual directors mold their judgment and suggestions for each individual under their tutaleage. As the letters of two solitaries and spiritual directors from sixth century Gaza, Barsanuphius and John, reveal, the “rule” for one spiritual disciple may be entirely different from another, as one disciple is encouraged to fast more or pray a certain number of times, while another is directed in an entirely different manner. John and Barsanuphius, of course, are not relativists in any way; rather they recognize the differences between different people, different states (in Sufism a similar practice is embraced under the idea of differing maqam, stations of the spiritual life, that vary from one person to another).

Finally, the presence of Christ in the Church is in general disruptive to attempts by both State and Capital to exert their control; again, the most expansively totalitarian regimes of recent years understood this quite well and sought to control and co-opt the Faith as much as they could. Jesus does not carry papers; or rather, His “documentation” in the world ultimately moves in channels different from and ultimately uncontrollable by any temporal State. The central action of the Eucharist breaks into a world of data and person-control, as an undocumented Savior offers His Body and Blood for each person in His Body, food and drink “without cost,” in Isaiah’s borderless gathering of the peoples on the Mountain of God. From Baptism to Eucharist, Christ offers an identity rooted, not in regulations or marketing or fear or lust, but in a Living Savior Who unites each person with Himself and calls Him to theosis, to transformation in God. And surely anyone genuinely living the baptised life, inhabiting the world not of endless documents and statistics and advertising campaigns, is a far greater threat than any violent revolutionary or marching protestor.

Criminalizing Everyone

On By JonathanIn Culture, Current Events, North & South, Peace, WarLeave a comment

A few posts back I discussed the disturbing trend in some parts of the American political landscape to categorize all “right-wingers” as being in some way inherently dangerous and violent. The more radical “liberal” voices in America have called for surveillance, pre-emptive arrests, and other measures that only a few months ago they would have decried. But a few months ago the other Party was in power. Now their Party is in power, and that makes all the things Bush et al did completely kosher. Because one’s own Party can do no wrong.

But I digress. Going back to the subject at hand, part of this trend to vilify “conservative” or “right-wing” elements includes such glorious acts of legislation as the “Hate Crimes Bill” that Alexander Cockburn has rightly condemned for its brazen assaults on free speech, as well as erasing the whole idea of equality before the law. Some animals are more equal than others. Measures like “hate crime” legislation, as well as the whole cultural milieu that reeks with disgust and loathing for lesser Americans- that is, conservative, right-wing, rural, uneducated, excessively religious, and so on; Americans who do not share the cultural, religious, and moral norms of the American elite and their followers. Many of the “wrong sort” of Americans are in the South, and many of them are lower-middle class or poorer whites, but not all. African-American Pentecostals in northern urban areas are just as frightening to the Great and the Good, though harder to attack and loathe due to their membership in one of the ostensibly “protected” groups.

But the usual target, or intended target anyway, of elite loathing and disgust is probably white, probably lower-middle class, somewhat educated perhaps (but not sufficiently in any case), “reactionary,” and dangerous. Particularly when they have guns- and God knows a bunch of them have guns. Sometimes their guns and their Bibles meet, and that’s a perfect storm of scariness, as in this weekend’s (rather bizarre to be sure) Kentucky guns in the church-house event. Everything about the situation is incomprehensible and frightening to many other Americans- the liberal elite, the “creative classes,” the Great and the Good in general. Read the comments at the New York Times article- the readers hailing from the East Coast, West Coast, Midwest maybe, but mostly the urban, elite, and educated seaboards- to gauge the levels of fear and disgust. The basic drift: these people are dangerous. They have guns, they have Bibles, they are not like us.

It follows then that these people, these backwards, Bible-toting and deer-killing crackers, need, at the very least, regulating, controlling. Some of their actions- whether it’s “hate speech” or gun-toting or child-raising- must be criminalized. Some of them need to be locked up, whether it’s as part of the war on hate or the war on guns or whatever.

Criminalizing vast swathes of the American population is of course nothing new. Many of the inhabitants of our inner cities and our outer rural hinterlands are part of a vast criminalized class as part of the war on drugs; occasional stabs at “reform” are occasionally made, to be sure, and some states are trying to reel back the extent of their criminalization of so much of society, but only because of rising costs and declining revenues. No one is particularly worried about the fact that we have consigned so many people to be perpetual “criminals,” always subject to the violence of the State and the violence of the drug-market and all its related evils, from broken households to prostitution to unstable inner-city economies. No one is worried because the inhabitants of this criminal class are also the wrong sort of people, are unattractive people, and, crucially, right and left pretty much agree on this. The left might moderate its language and sometimes its actions with weak calls to “reform” or greater emphasis on “rehabilitation,” but that’s about it. Undocumented immigrants comprise another “criminal class,” but their criminalization is at least somewhat more controversial, probably because many “illegal immigrants” are, after all, rather hard to condemn: hard workers, thrifty, family-oriented, and perhaps even physically attractive (certainly more so than, say, an inner city hooker or meth addict).

But to the already existing criminalized classes, some in this country would very much like to add another: the gun-toters, Bible-thumpers, intolerant hicks, however you want to label them. And at least some of the gears are in motion, certainly the ideological.Will the effort to create a new criminalized class succeed? Perhaps. But at the same time it could well overburden the system: there will increasingly be few people left in America who have not been criminalized, as whole states are in effect consigned to the outer darkness, their inhabitants condemned by the Great and the Good for any number of infractions. And the newly criminalized are unlikely to just lay down their guns- literally and metaphorically- and accept their lot; even more unlikely are they to reform their thoughts and accept their legislated proper behaviour. Rather, one should expect “blowback,” just as our meddling and cultural imperialism in other parts of the world have had less than pleasant consequences. Treat anyone like a colonial subject and he will react; if you continuously inject violence into a situation do not be surprised at the results. The strain of criminalizing so many in so much of American could perhaps prove to be too much for the system to bear- how many people can one nation realistically lock up? How much of the population can the State directly antagonize before it loses its ability to control and coerce all of them? How long before blowback, violent or otherwise? To be clear, I do not want to suggest that we will face, say, vast swathes of rural Southern America producing terrorists or something, anymore than most Muslims have become raging jihadis after years of American provocation. Nor is it likely- though I may be wrong- that the criminalization of “right-wingers” will ever reach the extent of the criminalization associated with the drug-war.  But in the event of any ongoing campaign for mass criminalization, the results will not be pretty, and will certainly not contribute to a more decent and more just society.

On ‘Right-Wing Terror’

On By JonathanIn Culture, Current Events, Gospel, North & South, Peace, Politics2 Comments

The following are a few thoughts, more or less in order but of fairly rough outline, on the looming specter of ‘right-wing terror.’ Comments or corrections welcome.

I am struck by how similar the current establishment left campaign to vilify the entire conservative movement and everyone else on the right and the (on-going) efforts by the right to do the same sort of thing to the Muslim world. Both are preposterous; both are rooted in a desire to see one’s political enemies as one massive, undifferentiated (and hence quite faceless) horde that can then be easily attacked through the worst examples inhering in said horde. Thus, in the current campaign of anti-rightist hysteria (for examples, just take a look at Krugman and Rich in that bastion of rational peace-mongering, cough, the NYT) everyone on the right is placed in the same box of ‘right-wing’: paleoconservatives to Tea Party types to white nationalists to neo-Nazis to pro-life activists. It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to notice the vast discrepancies that lie between these different groups, including the fact some of them have nothing more in common than some common enemies and, usually, shared melanin content. A Tea-Party neoconservative sort and a neo-Nazi anti-Semite- come on. Glenn Beck and Stormfront are not the same thing, even if they happen to converge on some points; only through the simplistic device of ‘left and right’ can they be at all grouped together. The same logic would equivocate Hillary Clinton and Murray Bookchin (assuming one could be a convincing case for a Clinton being at all on the left; just barely maybe…), and would be equally flawed. And the same logic, going back to my comparison, has been used to mass all Muslims together as being either outright or secretly violent and just waiting to go crazy, for either inexplicable (‘they hate our freedom’) reasons, or because of religiously inherent animosity towards all non-Muslims and especially America. Salafists become al-Qaeda become Sufis. A similar sort of reckless essentialism and equivocation is going on, if not as deeply or widely- for now- against right-wing and conservative Americans, and with it calls, some explicit and some implicit, for the State to start busting heads.

Particularly gregarious are the attempts, some more obvious than others, to equivocate genuine hard-rightists (in the classic, European sense of the term) of the neo-Nazi variety with the average conservative, or, for slightly more comparative purposes, particularly intense conservatives. Such an attempt is, of course, an attempt to smear the broader right with the charge of antisemitism, which, at first glance, seems a promising venture. After all, much of today’s conservative movement has at least ancestral roots in the old Southern segregationist movement (though this does not necessarily mean much of anything, but that’s another topic), which wasn’t exactly known for being pro-semetic, to say the least. But the present is rather different: the modern South is, if anything, a rabidly prosemitic place. And I don’t just mean pro-Israel- sure, no doubt one of the significant reasons for Southern evangelical (and I suppose evangelicals elsewhere in the US, but my lived knowledge base of American Christianity is mostly limited to the South) support of Israel and hence prosemitism developed out of a very particular interpretation of dispensationalist theology that places a high value on Israel and the Jewish people. But it would be false and unfair to suggest that Southern evangelicals only support Israel and ‘like’ Jews as part of an apocalyptic scheme to bring Jesus back. Growing up evangelical in the South, I was taught- both explicitly and implicitly- to value not just Israel but Jewish people and Judaism in general, even as the distinction was maintained between the two. Say what you will of groups like Jews for Jesus, but having Jewish people in rural Southern churches acting out Jewish ritual- that’s pretty significant. And it’s pervasive- I’ve encountered a fair amount of anti-African American sentiment in the South, and some anti-Latino sentiment, but I can recall having witnessed only a couple instances of antisemitism. Maybe some of my readers have encountered more, maybe it’s lurking out there somewhere- if so, probably outside the orbit of Southern evangelicalism. But therein lies part of my point- right-wing conservative evangelicals are, if anything, rabidly prosemitic; advocating limits on Jewish settlement expansion borders on the blasphemous. Yet we’re supposed to imagine them and neo-Nazis on the same scale, as somehow being part of the same movement?

Of course, there are the genuine out-and-out white nationalists and the members of the paleoconservative right who tend in that direction- and some of these people probably are genuinely racist and possibly even antisemitic. But again, lumping them together, first of all part of some cognent unified movement of- what, paleoconservatives?- is artificial and inaccurate, and become even more gregarious when trying to bring the ‘mainstream’ conservative movement into it. Trust me, the average right-winger in America has probably never heard of V-DARE and probably hates Patrick Buchanan almost as much as he hates Barack Obama. But again, we’re expected to group them altogether and be sufficiently afraid of all of them.

Ditto on the pro-life movement: we’re supposed to imagine pro-lifers all being rabidly waiting to blow up or shoot (God knows those people are armed to the teeth, not like civilized White people) saintly abortionists like the Martyr Till. It’s not a huge leap, of course, to move from such hysterical diatribe to demanding the prosecution of all ‘radical’ pro-life activists, with the parameters of ‘radical’ being stretched further and further. First rosaries, then firebombs, right?

In the end much of comes down to a simple fear of especially, though not exclusively, a certain sort of American, usually rural or perhaps suburban (but imagined no doubt as rural), evangelical, possibly Pentecostal (the scariest sort), likely Southern and white (but not White, naturally), uneducated (or at least in the right way), and heavily armed. God, the guns- nothing is as frightening as their guns. Crackers with guns. They have ideology- ideologies if you’re being slightly fairer and not entirely collapsing them into one mass- which makes them even more frightening; they have grievances, they listen to idiots on the radio, like the wrong music, and read the Bible far too much and take it far too seriously.

Maybe I exagerate a little, but not too much, I think. And let me add the caveat- certainly, I can’t stand much of what goes on and is accepted and advocated in various corners of the right. I find the near and outright xenophobia and racism of the paleoconservative right disgusting and destructive, along with similar manifestations elsewhere in the more mainstream right; the warmongering of the neoconservative right is equally repulsive. Certainly, elements all along the right have engaged in ugly tactics and advocated awful things; they have also and continue to advocate many good things, whether on behalf of the unborn or against aggresive foreign policy or in favour of free markets (though one rarely finds all three of these in one place on the right…). There is nothing dangerous or particularly wrong about pointing out the sins of the right. But the tone and intentions that seem to lie behind the ongoing campaign against an undifferentiated right-wing in general- from Stormfront to Bill O’Reilly- is deeply troubling and dangerous. Letterman’s recent crass jokes at Sarah Palin’s expense- a politician, it should be obvious, I have some serious issues with myself- are a snapshot of the prevailing attitude in America’s elite and in much of the centre-left. There is a hatred for conseratives, in particular, because they are the wrong sort of people. They vote the wrong way, they have outdated notions, they can’t accept change. They’re like natives in a colonial state, they’re like the image of Muslims that right-wingers had crafted as part of the ‘war on terror’: ignorant, different, dangerous, a horde. Sure, maybe they feel threatened by Federal policies, by changing culture- that’s because they’re natives, uneducated, different, violent.

And like natives in any good colonial state, they must be controlled before they lash out. For their own good, of course. We’ll see how far the current hysteria carries- it may well die down and things chug along with mutual hatred and miscomprehension, which would be better than a ramped-up police state and random acts of terrorism. For if you treat people like colonials they’re likely to respond; and one should not forget that Ghandi was something of an exception in anti-colonial struggle. The possibility for xenophobia and outright racism certainly exists all along the right; persecuting and vilifying people isn’t going to help things. The average right-wing American is not violent, even if some folks get hot on internet forums; indeed, not unlike with the Muslim world, if even a small percentage of right-wingers were willing to carry out mass violence, we’d be in trouble.

In closing, one of the things that has for some time struck me as both ironic and tragic is the way in which both Islamic societies and Southern white culture are so often construed in similar ways, even as Southern whites enlist and are enlisted into campaigns against Muslim peoples (I doubt whether most Muslims have any awarness of the South or Southern whites as distinct but if they did no doubt perceptions would be equally bad). The Southern white and the traditional Muslim are both cast as backwards, inherently violent, religion-bound, incapable of dealing with change or ‘progress,’ wedded to their traditions, and in need of paternalistic (or perhaps not so paternalistic) care. In both cases, one can easily enough find examples to flesh out the stereotype, and thus enforce the faceless image of a foreign, deadly threat. And sure, if one looks one can find unsavory views and attitudes in both the average Southern white and the average traditional Muslim (along with views and attitudes you’re not taught to expect in either); but this does not prove in either case that average Bubba or Ahmed is out to wreck and kill, and it certainly does not justify dehumanizing reduction to a faceless other.

The great Bill Kauffman has often articulated a vision of society in which the ‘wrong sort of white people,’ like our much-maligned crackers with guns, can join forces or at least stop sniping at other ‘wrong sorts of people,’ whether commune hippies growing their own food or Latinos in the rural barrios of the South. These various groups- for so long played off and playing themselves off against each other- could then work for their genuine interests, united in so many things that they share in common. It’s a beautiful, humanistic vision, and Mr Kauffman remains fairly optimistic about it. Mass lumping of conservative Americans, of all stripes, into the category of the violent irrational Other does not move us any closer to a humane goal like Kauffman’s; it only serves to perpetuate the divisions and excaberate the already existing hatred and mistrust. Add in the sorts of police-state measures some people are advocating and it will only grow far worse. If we try, on the other hand- all of us, whether conservative or socialist or libertarian- to see our neighbors as genuine human beings who carry concerns and harbour fears like the rest of us, we move much closer to a more humane and livable future. God knows it can be hard- God knows I’ve felt some pretty nasty sentiments towards people in my native South, I’ve gotten frustrated and angry, I’ve failed miserably at loving my closest neighbors, much less my more distant ones. I’ve shot back with all but bullets, and being a contrarian libertarian sort, I usually end up shooting in all directions… But it remains that, as cliche as it sounds, fighting fire with fire, xenophobia with xenophobia, is only a recipe for more pain, for more violence, from all sides.

God have mercy on us and teach us to love our neighbors, or at least to stop shooting, with bullets or otherwise, at them.

Rising From the Ashes

On By JonathanIn Culture, Current Events, Gospel, History, North & South, Peace, Politics, Travel, WarLeave a comment

I spent part of this week in and around Atlanta, the ever-expanding capital of the ‘New South.’ I’d not been to Atlanta in years, other than in passing while traveling; this week I wandered around the city some, both intentionally and unintentionally, since I didn’t get a hold of a decent map until the last day of my visit. It’s a big city; most of my experience in urban navigation has been in ‘Old World’ cities where my means of transport was my own two feet, and in New Orleans, a city set apart from pretty much every other North American city I’ve visited. Atlanta is, I suppose, the South’s paradigmatic example of the modern city- big, ever-expanding, new and shiny (in the up-scale parts anyway, never mind the poor parts for the moment), with precious little of any considerable age, even for North America. Of course, General Sherman bears some blame for that, but not very much; there wasn’t a whole lot there back when my unfortunate ancestors were getting shot up at Kennesaw Mountain and Peachtree Creek.

There are of course some sections of the city that are fairly old and historic, and feel it. Auburn Avenue, which was the center of African-American life and commerce after the imposition of segregation in the early twentieth century, has some wonderful old and funky buildings; the Episcopal Methodist Church with its hodge-podgy neo-Gothic and big blue neon ‘Jesus Saves’ sign on the steeple is singularly wonderful, and is still in good shape. Further up the street, the Park Service has purchased and renovated a whole neighborhood worth of old buildings associated with Martin Luther King Jr., who was born and spent his boyhood in one of the old houses. But the stretch of street running back from the historic site is, with all its lovely old structures and venerable history, pretty decrepit. As my friend and I walked up from downtown towards the MLK site, we were approached by a homeless man offering an impromptu tour, followed by a request for donations. The whole area is now run-down, boarded up buildings and heavily armoured likker and mini grocery stores here and there; our homeless tour-guide told us he lived back up under an overpass of the interstate which now dissects the area.

The historic site is quite nice itself however, a sudden imposition in the immediate landscape, neatly trimmed shrubs, a rose garden, a fairly new looking museum, as well as a new Ebeneezer Baptist Church (the old one is still there, though it is at present closed up for renovations). There are signs up in the National Historic Site warning visitors against giving anything to ‘panhandlers,’ reminding one of signs in less urban Park Service sites prohibiting the feeding of bears.

The area went down, as we say, in the late sixties; before it had been a thriving center of African-American businesses, churches, and residences, with it’s own economy and tradition of mutual aid. If the segregationist regime rejected their money, the entrepreneurs of Auburn Avenue reasoned, it was their loss- so they built up their own economy, and thrived. Dr. King’s family came out of this milieu, and the determination and communal (but deeply personalist) sense of mutual aid and support would go a long ways towards the successful challenging of the segregationist regime and its systematic but ultimately untenable oppression. This was one of the things that struck me most as I looked at the exhibits in the museum, and has always struck me about the civil rights movement, particularly in its early stages- it was community-based, and broad-based, with people of many cultural and socio-economic backgrounds and standings coming together in a truly powerful movement. The men and women who challenged the segregationist State did not have to resort to bombs and guns; they had built up lives and communities powerful enough to take on even a violent and deeply entrenched regime and succeed, without turning to violence and oppression themselves.

Returning to the gritty shot-up feeling streets of which Auburn Avenue is only one, one has to ask- what happened, and what can anybody do about it? Auburn Avenue itself is an icon of what has been happening in our cities and towns for years now, what is happening right now as I write. Desegregation had its part, of course- African-Americans were no longer restricted to their own self-contained economy, and could take part in the wider economy and succeed there- leaving behind in many cases places like Auburn Avenue. But this is hardly the only explanation, or even the primary one. At the same time as desegregation was going into affect other programs, Federal and otherwise, were coming on-line, many under the title ‘urban renewal.’ As one line was erased new ones were laid down, often with the best of intentions, but often resulting in Federally-supported ghettos. The drug war has only escalated and grown more violent and more deeply entrenched; the ever expanding field of operations of the Mexican drug cartels only harbours more violence and destruction, and it’s not up-scale gated communities suffering the brunt of the violence and the corruption and rot.

There are other problems as well- job losses, poor education, and so on- but they all share the quality that few of them are exactly intentional. Much ‘urban renewal’ was meant to help the poor, at least ostensibly, or was at least supported by people who wanted to do good. Of course, plenty of it was deliberate in partionining off the poor, especially but not exclusively minority poor, from the elite enclaves. There is ridiculous highway a few blocks from my neighborhood here in Knoxville that, I am pretty sure, was built primarily to separate downtown from the much poorer, and darker-skinned, east-side neighborhoods; maybe there were no such intentions, but the effect is the same. The drug war is supported by well-meaning people, and I am sure at least some of those carrying it out have only good intentions and genuinely desire to do good. The damage is the same though.

The problem is further presented though- the evils and problems afflicting places like Auburn Avenue are so various that they are hard to fight against. There is no segregationist regime that we can unite against and battle; there are no straight-forward targets, as much as we would like for there to be. There is less ground, too, for people to stand on, as so many urban- and otherwise- communities are shot-up and worn out. The work that is needed- and here I start to really preach to myself as much as anyone else- is personal, is on the ground, and is probably not going to yeild immediate or impressive results any time soon, maybe ever. The great failing of the American elite- who are often very well-intentioned people- is to generally stay safely away from the poor and the decimated places, while sympathizing for them, in the abstract, and proposing solutions that are sure to work in theory, in principal. But while there are some genuine general policy solutions no doubt- the drug war comes to mind- they are only a part of the solution, probably not a terribly important part.

When it comes down to it we have to stop thinking in terms of helping the poor, or saving the inner city, as if the poor were a different species or something (albeit an endangered and valorized one), capable of being saved through the right policy enactments or a sufficiently large charity pay-out. In the end, working to end the violence and destruction of our cities is a struggle for ourselves; it is not a case of our aiding the poor and downtrodden in their struggle; we are all in this together, my struggle is your struggle. I cannot cut myself off from the rest of the world; my sin afflicts my neighbor and it afflicts me, just as the violence and deprivation of endless war and seeping poverty are part of my struggle, against the violence and evil in my heart and the violence and evil that come from outside my heart.

Our Auburn Avenues are not going to be magically transformed overnight; if there is going to be change, it must begin in our hearts- my heart- and work outward, person by person, community by community, in knowledge of each person and place’s particulars, and with love for them, love that, in imitation of the love of God, offers itself in becoming one with the sufferer, by becoming a co-sufferer, from the inside, with all the danger and dirt and darkness that comes with being inside of a suffering world, a suffering humanity.