The Republic of Dissent

The invention of race

Jamaica Kincaid:

Race.” I really can’t understand it as anything other than something people say. The people who have said that you and I are both “black” and therefore deserve a certain kind of interaction with the world, they make race. I can’t take them seriously. Not beyond the fact that they have the ability to say that you and I are a single race. You know, a piece of cloth that is called “linen” has more validity than calling you and me “black” or “negro.” “Cotton” has more validity as cotton than yours and my being “black.” It is true that our skin is sort of more or less the same shade. But is it true that our skin color makes us a distinctive race? No.

The people who invented race, who grouped us together as “black,” were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong. I don’t see why I have to give them validity, or why I have to approach that label with any kind of seriousness. We give the people who make this category too much legitimacy by accepting it. We give them too much power. They ought to be left with the tawdriness of it, the stupidity of it. It’s a way of organizing a wrong thing, it’s a way of making a wrong thing easy. It’s too easy to say this or that is “race,” and that has been a vehicle for an incredible amount of wrong in the world. (...)race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say “Oh, she’s so angry.” If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes “Oh, she’s autobiographical.” Norman Mailer stabbed his wife, and was not ever described as angry, and nothing he wrote was ever described as autobiographical. And all of these things are, in some sense, ways of diminishing my efforts.

If I describe a person’s physical appearance in my writing, which I often do, especially in fiction, I never say someone is “black” or “white.” I may describe the color of their skin—black eyes, beige skin, blue eyes, dark skin, etc. But I’m not talking about race. I’m talking about a description. What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two.

I agree with Kincaid.

 

Disobedience

From Chris Bertram:

We line up obediently behind Miliband (or Obama, or Hollande) and, having persuaded enough of our fellow citizens to vote for a programme of progressive reform, our social-democrats then enact that very programme. That’s democracy. Except that it very rarely happens like that. What actually happens is that hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of ordinary men and women demonstrate, by their acts of lawbreaking, disobedience, even violence, that there are injustices up with which they will no longer put (I’m channelling James C. Scott here). Neither the US civil rights movement of the 1960s nor the Gezi Park protestors of today are willing just to wait for the next election and hope it all turns out right: rather they want to move the window of political possibility, to make some injustices impossible and to make some concessions inevitable. (And in our “post-democratic” age, the myriad lobbyists and corporate interests aren’t waiting either. Typically they are trying to box in all elected governments to programmes of neoliberal “structural reform”.)

So here’s the worry. Just as the FBI tried to discredit Martin Luther King, so government agencies, equipped with all the latest surveillance techniques, will attempt to damage lawbreakers in pursuit of social justice. There’s nothing new about this, just the tools to do so are far more powerful.

An eloquent community organizer? Which websites did he visit? Or, failing that, which websites did his close associates and family members visit?

An environmental activist? How come she was searching for guidance on mental health issues? Did she have an abortion? Do something that can be portrayed as less than green?

So it goes.

And so we know the end of this awful movie!

De-Americanization

I agree with Professor Bainbridge on this:

Bush was bad enough, but Obama's not much better and in some ways worse. We seem to be living in a permanent security state that is gradually morphing into something disturbingly authoritarian. (...) We're losing the moral high ground to criticize places like Russia and China, as we allow our freedoms to continually erode.

The American surveillance state

Poignant question from Sandy Levinson:

Why has "surveillance state" apparently become so widely accepted as a "neutral" term describing the present United States (and, no doubt, other countries as well, and perhaps all that have the technological capacity), while "police state," even if modified by "soft" or "pink" or, to adopt an adjective from the 18th century referring to one type of despot, "benevolent," still presumably raises all sorts of hackles and undoubtedly would generate accusations of ideological shrillness (perhaps like using "constitutional dictatorship" to refer to at least aspects of the American system, even if most of it these days is dysfunctional and incapable of any cogent action regarding many of our most crucial challenges)?

What happened? Well, my guess that something died in America when the change we could believed in ended up being nothing more than remixed Bushism.

The United States of Kal Penn

Old, but great stuff fromm Amitava Kumar:

As an Indian, I’m raising my kids in the firm belief that sooner or later, everyone in this country [America] is going to look like Kal Penn.

That would make America the handsomest country in the world and an Abercrombie & Fitch's wet dream!

The American family

Ah!:

Can American Muslims really be an equal part of the American family when they’re viewed either as suspects or as informants?

A war on black people

Sntences of the week from Ta-nehisi Coates:

The years between 2000 and 2010 do not simply constitute a war on marijuana, but a war on black people who use marijuana.

A rising wave smashes Negroes first.

Boobs

Sugary excerpt of the week so far from Zoe Holman:

Discussing the traditional role of corporeality in protest, Judith Butler recently noted that: “if there is a body in the public sphere, it is masculine, free to create, but not itself created... When male citizens enter into the public square to debate questions of justice, revenge, war, and emancipation, they take the illuminated public square for granted as the architecturally bounded theatre of their speech.” By contrast, the female body has customarily been associated with the sexual, the childish, the labouring and the pre-political. This being the case, Butler argues for the need to interrogate and challenge the division of gendered bodies into “one that appears publicly to speak and act, and another, feminine, foreign and mute, that is generally relegated to the private and pre-political sphere.” (...)
Boobs can be fun. Boobs can be frivolous, primal or sexy. For this reason, they are compelling. In the right context, they might prove powerful. But they are also distracting. And for those women wishing to enter the theatre of political speech to debate questions of justice, emancipation, war, or indeed the sales tax on tampons, to achieve something more than lechery and to be taken seriously, they may prove a diversion.

Les sous-ensembles et les ensembles

I agree with Alex Massie on this:

All jihadists may be muslim; it is grotesque to suppose all muslims are potential jihadists. But treating them as though they may be is one way to increase sympathy for the real jihadists. Denigrating someone’s sense of identity is one sure way of ensuring they will have less time for your point of view.

Liberalism

Ah:

Liberalism has also been a brave and indispensable political tradition, one that is essential today to any left worth taking seriously; it is the repository of certain fundamental values to do with liberties, rights and the rule of law, and there are liberals for whom the protection of these values is central to why we need to fight murderous obscurantism rather than making excuses for it.

Well, words matter and don't lie but they are seldom enough to salvage ideological contradictions and well-meaning tribalism.

Old old and too cool school

From Christian Lorentzen:

There’s something confusing about the consensus around Alice Munro. It has to do with the way her critics begin by asserting her goodness, her greatness, her majorness or her bestness, and then quickly adopt a defensive tone, instructing us in ways of seeing as virtues the many things about her writing that might be considered shortcomings. So she writes only short stories, but the stories are richer than most novels. Over a career now in its sixth decade, she’s rehearsed the same themes again and again, but that’s because she’s a master of variation. She has preternatural powers of sympathy and empathy, but she’s never sentimental. She writes about and redeems ordinary life, ordinary people – ‘people people people’, as Jonathan Franzen puts it.

Ordinary people turn out to live in a rural corner of Ontario between Toronto and Lake Huron, and to be white, Christian, prudish and dangling on a class rung somewhere between genteel poverty and middle-class comfort. Occasionally they move to the vicinity of Vancouver, only to go back to Ontario again. If this patch of the North Country sounds like a provincial cage, just think of it as a Canadian Yoknapatawpha County, and ignore the ways the plainspoken Munro is otherwise anti-Faulknerian. (‘I didn’t really like Faulkner that much,’ she has said.) It might be too much to call her an anti-modernist, rather than someone on whom modernism didn’t leave much of an impression, but her conventionality – a writer ‘of the old school’ in Anne Tyler’s phrase – won’t quite do.

Maybe I have been trying too  hard to love Munro's prose. Probably not!

Terrorism as a Muslim problem

Just the facrs from Chris Dillow:

The fact that a terrorist is likely to be a Muslim does not mean a Muslim is likely to be a terrorist. Even if we assume that there are ten terrorists walking the streets for every one inside, then 99.988% of Muslims are not terrorists. To put this another way, there's only around a one in 8000 chance of a Muslim being a terrorist; it's 16 times more likely that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will name their child Wayne. Given all this, why does anyone think terrorism is a Muslim problem?

Forced american positivity

From Jane McManus:

With too many tragedies to report in such a short period of time — Newtown, the Boston bombings, Hurricane Sandy, the deadly explosion at a Texas fertilizer plant and others — there seems to be a desire to move straight from the tragic to the silver lining.

I have nothing against the woman who found her dog in the rubble, or the few horses that survived a direct hit of an F5 tornado at the Orr Family Farm.

But in an everything-happens-for-a-reason culture, where happy aphorisms greet you every time you log onto a social media site, the premature positivity feels forced. I know polls constantly tell station managers that the public wants good news, not so much bad news. But news itself doesn’t have a point of view, it just is — when reported objectively.

But once the cloud of national news outlets descend and the news cycle is all day long, you can see how the same threads get teased from the wreckage.

No wonder Camus thought that America lacked a sense of the tragic for in the US, whenever shit happens, the news story rarely focuses on the agony and the consequences to avoid being about fatality, tragedy and its meaninglessness instead of survival and triumph over adversity.

Conservatively

Quote of the day from Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the US House of Representatives:

The one thing I do conservatively is count.

Bread

Best thing I read last week from Muhammad Idrees Ahmad's bit in the London Review of Books on the recent presidential election in Pakistan:

Terrorism may be foremost in the minds of Western observers; Pakistanis are more worried about the economy, education and corruption. Opinion polls showed that people’s biggest concerns are inflation and unemployment, as well as power outages and high energy costs, which have stunted economic growth and caused much misery: 20-hour blackouts are not unknown. Not all Pakistanis are exposed to terrorist violence; everyone has to buy bread.

 

Encore cette stupide exception culturelle

I agree wholeheartedly with Art Goldhammer on this :

Anyone who watches French TV or goes to the movies is aware that whatever "cultural exception" has existed since World War II has not done much to ward off American influences on French popular culture. Whether one deplores or applauds those influences (and I personally think neither deprecation nor applause is warranted), a trade negotiation is not a good place to stop it. In such a venue, money is what counts, not culture.

Perhaps as a cultural mongrel myself, capable of appreciating both high and low, domestic and foreign, I simply don't evaluate the stakes as the self-appointed defenders of European culture do. I say, let people decide what they like. I may often not approve of other people's choices, but I don't think that taste can be improved by imposing quotas, any more that it can be legislated or enforced by curricular edict. I do know that part of my love of France came from watching some fairly low-brow French films. I would have lost something if my government had tried to "protect" me from them. But American governments have never been much interested in that kind of protection (as opposed to prophylactic censorship of supposed sexual immorality). The mask of antiphilistinism is more commonly worn in Europe, but those who wear it are less concerned with the culture of the masses than they are with the profits to be made from them.

 

The limits of political magic

Ah!:

In truth Mr Obama’s problems extend well beyond the confines of the capital’s Beltway. The president’s headache is that his winning majority resembles the hamlet in “Brigadoon”. It exists all right, twice sending him to the White House. But, like that Highland village, it is hard to see or touch most of the time. (...) The magic at the heart of Mr Obama’s two victories was his ability to expand the electorate itself, mobilising sporadic voters who shun politics most of the time, notably the young and minorities. Now that he is no longer on the ballot, his loose coalition risks being no match for the intense ideologues who fight and oversee Washington’s partisan battles.

 

Reasons to read

I agree with Claire Messud on this (hat tip: Corey Robin ) :

If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities

No revision necessary

I agree with Dan Drezner on this:

At best, George W. Bush was a well-meaning man who gave the occasional nice speech and was thoroughly overmatched by events. At worst, he was the most disastrous foreign policy president of the post-1945 era.

The American constitution as a toxin

The best sentence I read this week from Sandy Levinson over at Balkinization:

(...) the Constitution is evermore a clear and present danger to the health of the American Republic.