On the anti-cancel culture culture

The bitching and moaning about cancel culture requires a genealogy. I’ve been thinking about where these tropes come from, the ones used by the gatekeepers to say, essentially, peons, don’t fuck with me, but in more elevated language. And I’ve been thinking about the sites that promote them. You have the Atlantic, you have Harpers, you have the NYT opinion page. In England, of course, The New Stateman. And … you used to have the New York Review of Books. You used to have The New Republic. Until some awful  change came, and many of the dinosaurs were not given infinite space to scribble in. Cathedrals fell, cities were sacked. Ian Baruma lost his editing position. TNR was sold by Marty Peretz. The

Ah, the New Republic. If you are going to do a real genealogical trace of the cancel culture is mean crowd, you will inevitably land on the old New Republic, which was owned by Marty Peretz mentioned above(the man who liked to write about how black culture was primitive and Palestinians were animals, and distributed these ideas in every raving column he crammed into the mag). Peretz had a magic touch with assembling just the right krewe that went on to write for all the solid D.C. and NY mags. You’ll find Andrew Sullivan, firm believer in black IQ inferiority, at New York magazine. You’ll find Jonathan Chait there too. Weekly Standard, before it folded, was a hive of New Republic alums. So was Slate.

One name, though, seems to have dropped out: Ruth Shalit. This is an instance of the ingratitude of history. Although she was given the heave at the New Republic for plagiarism and inaccuracy, these are, really, petty crimes in comparison to her genius as a charter member of the “cancel the pc police/cancel cancel culture” group.

Her opus was not the hit piece that supposedly helped since Clinton’s healthcare plan in 1994. That plan was a self-sinking rubic’s cube of evasions. No, her opus was ‘exposing” the horrid, horrid effects of “diversity” at the Washington Post. Or, hiring black people to important positions. It was written with that brilliant trolling style: we all admit bigotry is bad, and having so admitted, we don’t have to change a damn thing, and if you ask us to, its PC Police time!

Shalit’s piece on “Race in the Newsroom”, which dissected the diversity program at the Washington Post, could be published tomorrow in the Atlantic – save for a few lamentable errors of fact, six or seven or eight, that weigh on the piece. But the basic reasoning – that once upon a time in white America, meritocracy ruled, open and free like the Great Plains (without those horrid indigenes crudding it up), and now the “brittle sensibilities” of “minority groups” peddling their grievances are messing up the whole deal, and thus, Freedom like the Great Plains! (without those horrid indigenes crudding it up).

I have to confess, the sparklines of Shalit’s prose, for which so many praised her in DC, seems sort of paste jewels to me. But the general thrust seems so contrarian, so Harpers, so “lets write a letter with this in it and get Steven Pinker to sign it”, that I think Ruth is owed. Time for a comeback.

Here’s a few bits: Here’s the being “sensitive” [thinking that there might possibly be a legitimate P.O.C viewpoint] is a surrender of truthseeking bit: “But it's unclear how sensitivity training can be "woven" into a profession which has traditionally held that reporters should tell the truth as they see it, without fear or favor. Public reaction, hostile or not, is not supposed to be anticipated and muted in the editing process but embraced as a healthy consequence of the search for truth, since the charge of bias is best dealt with in the marketplace of ideas. [the boilerplate prose just drove DC thumbsuckers into paroxysms of praise. There’s nothing that helps you succeed as a contrarian more than tossing approved clichés at the wizened old thumbsuckers. They go for it like seals smelling smelt at feeding time.

 There a dozens of bits all about lazy stupid black peeps are hired instead of bright washed white ivy leaguers, so I’ll leave that out – although Atlantic would definitely go for that sort of thing. It is all told in a more sorrow than anger troll voice, too, which adds to the general tone of frolicking centerism.  Then there’s the appeal to the old order, the noble cause, even, being threatened by (at that time) PC!

“Indifference is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it denotes neutrality and a desire for objectivity. In recent years it has become fashionable to criticize objectivity, to attack it as a mask for interests. For journalists, however, such a view is dangerous. If objectivity is not possible, then journalism is not possible. And a newspaper's indifference to the subjects of its coverage is the sign of a newspaper's integrity. Or so it used to be.”

Talk about contrarianism - the proposal that keeping in place an almost all white newspaper in a 60 percent black city has finally found its legitimating joke.  Ruth Shalit, the distinguished signatories of a deeply brave Harper’s Magazine letter salute you! I’m thinking: isn’t it time to give Shalit the Orwell medal she so obviously deserves?

suggestions for making law law and order order: the police and us

1. Radically de-police traffic. Police now have the equipment to take pics of moving violations. Just as they have put up cameras to take pics of cars at stop lights. There should be a vast fall off in police stopping cars, when they can simply clock and photo, and send tickets via mail. These violations should, themselves, be in the nature of very low fines. The Sandra Blands of this world should never, ever be stopped.

2. “Just cause” has been used extensively to allow violent cops to get back on the force, via arbitration. This is an abuse of just cause, which should only be used if it can be proved that some kind of political corruption was behind the firing. Narrowing the just cause clause for police arbitrations would eliminate the abuse of the community having no say in the retention of violent cops.

3. Profiling the racial profilers. Every policeman has a record of what they do and who they do it to at the end of the day. If those records consistently show a racial bias, the cop should be pulled and questioned. And if this continues, the policeman should be dismissed.

4. Controlling the system of enabling. This is the trickier part. The oppression visited on Black America is not an accident of the system, but its logic. And it is the judiciary and the prosecutors who, in the end, are the drivers of the thing. We need a better system to, a, make sure that judges are neutral rather than cop friendly, and b, make sure that D.A.s are doing their job for the community, rather than a part of the community. The entire system of the judiciary in the U.S. needs to be re-constructed. Term limits are, of course, necessary. But there are a number of things that need change, from the way that the judiciary is used to predate on the low income population (a la Ferguson) to the use of threats to people who use their constitutional right to plead not guilty. That plea should never be the basis for a longer sentence. That should simply be outlawed. If the system is overwhelmed by the number of cases, then perhaps there is something wrong with the number of cases.

5. Drug reform of course. We need to look to places like Portugal and de-criminalize drug use.

6. Police should be licenced. Like doctors. A policeman fired for beating someone, or torturing or killing someone - vide Elijah McClain - should have his or her licence yanked, and thus be unemployable as a cop in any town. As with doctor licences, the decision can be periodically reviewed.

metempsychosis of statues

“A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders

braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw

and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry

on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,

propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.”

Thus, Robert Lowell in For the Union Dead, a poem which centers a monument. Among the army of statuary that occupies America’s cities and parks, this is one of the rare statues that is signed by an actual famous artist: Augustus Saint Gaudens. In the later nineteenth century, he was the most famous American sculptor. It was Gaudens as well who made the famous tomb to poor Clover Adams, Henry Adams’ wife, in the Rock Creek Cemetery in D.C.

In the most recent overthrow of a buncha statues of unworthies, one argument is oddly missing: that these things are valuable art pieces. Not a peep is uttered about their artistic worth – it is all a question of history. It is unlikely that anybody knows the names of the sculptors who created their equestrian visions of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson which gallop across Richmond Virginia or Stone Mountain, Georgia. These sculptures were by contract and design of an extreme banality. There was no Greek nonsense – nobody even thought about showing, say, Stonewall’s dick, a la Greek Olympic sculpture.

Evidently, these statues are ways of monumentalizing a race hierarchy – or racism. But I want to poke along in another, related direction and ask about their social existence as objects.

One thing is certain: when you have a mass social phenomenon, you have a system. The question is: what is this system about? If we have read our Barthes, the first thing we want to know is: how substitutable are they one with the other, this banal troop?

If I substituted, say, a statue of Ulysses Grant for Robert E. Lee in Richmond (under cover of night, and carefully keeping the sign that read Robert E. Lee) would anybody notice?

I would imagine the answer is yes. But the substitution would have respected the system’s rules, and helped us think through the limits of substitution – limits within the statuary universe. Here, I would tentatively claim, we get to the totemic limits defining these things in the urban space. For surely these sculptures are rooted in the white culture’s fetishes.

There is a school of cultural studies that has been here. Inspired by such figures as Louis Marin (notice how my reference here itself erects a statue, a fetish, how I am caught within the system I critique), historians have long been fascinated by public “objects”, from stamps and coins to statues. In Paris, which is a city of statuary, I am surrounded by a violent history sedimented in statues and bas-relief whereever I turn – and I love it. I love it as a walker. Statues are simply another set of blurs to the car driver, but to the walker they are presences. Unsurprisingly, historians have picked through the statuary history of Paris for clues to the meaning of these totems. Here’s a nice paragraph from Victoria Thompson’s essay, The Creation, Destruction and Recreation of Henri IV Seeing Popular Sovereignty in the Statue of a King

"At the moment of their creation, public monuments are typically designed to reflect and communicate a single meaning. In reality, they often reflect competing values. This is perhaps most evident in efforts to commemorate some of the major events of the late twentieth century—the Holocaust, the Vietnam War and the fall of the Soviet bloc. The intense conflict generated by these attempts has allowed scholars to better under-stand how difficult it is to establish a stable and unifying meaning of an event using a public monument.4 In societies where diverse constituen-cies have a voice, debates over public commemoration reveal how various groups imagine their community and its history.5 And even in societies where the state determines what to commemorate and assigns monuments an official meaning, that meaning is subject to contestation by populations who vandalize, make fun of, or otherwise subvert the official meaning of a structure constantly in public view.6 The destruction of a public monument can similarly elicit diverse reactions, and the traces of its memory can exert an influence over communities long after it has disappeared.”

Thompson’s essay is concerned, in part, with the politics of revolution and reaction – revolution knocked down the statues of kings and saints, and reaction re-erected them. I live within a couple of blocks from the statue of Henri IV (an assassinated King) and a couple of blocks, as well, from the Parc du Temple, which is a third Republic park, a park designed under Napoleon III but really instituted by the Republic that came after Napoleon III’s overthrow. As a sign of the Republican ideal, a statue of Pierre Jean Béranger was erected, by popular subscription, in the park. Béranger lounges, now, in the limbo of forgotten celebrities – in his life, he was famous as a people’s poet, a maker of extremely popular songs with a democratic bent. His statue had a political meaning that was strong enough to incite a symbolic gesture when Paris was occupied by the Nazis – the statue was taken down and melted (it was made of bronze). That bronze then was recast for a statue in honor of the Nazi victories by Arno Breker, Speer and Hitler’s favorite artist. That monument, in turn, was destroyed by the Red Army.

That the fetish is fated to destruction is one of the unconscious principles of modernism. The alternation between the invention of universals and the destruction of people is the fort/da of the bit of history I have experienced, that little chunk of time, 20th/21st century.

Incidentally – two years ago, when I was in Berlin, I went to Treptower Park. There is an astonishing collection of statues there, built by the Soviets, to commemorate World War II. It is as impressive as, say, the statue of Liberty. Those statues are bronze. I wonder if Beranger’s statue, which was melted down to become part of Breker’s statue, which was melted down by the Red Army, didn’t end up there. The metempsychosis of statues – a subject for some Kleistian tale.

GROPING THE TROPE

The poet sings – or so she used to

And there are those who’ve returned to guitar

Or drums to sing the things that are

While others never finished piano lessons.

Otherwise poets are silent as Quakers

And all that song stuff is for fakers

Unless, as I do, whispering and claw voiced

They sample the goods to have a taste

- roll their tongue over the cut and paste

My muse is mainly a tick in the mind

Which throws out of hem my rants and pleas

- fr’instance, this here poem is one of these.

- Karen Chamisso

Handwriting

I don’t remember my first writing lessons. The bubble and squeak of my first letters, those wobbly circles and jerkily disproportionate lines which flowed out of my pencil onto the cheap, thick, lined paper – I can only envision them through their descendants, the degenerate scribble of my declining years, where the bubbles are less bubblicious and have been through the rat race. But I can remember the devises that went into writing – that paper, the thick lines spaced just so and the dotted line between them, the thin, bright yellow pencils with the little intaglio number near the metal band the holds the erasor, and the sharpeners. The little oblong plastic box with the hole in one end for the pencils and the two evil little blades that would bite into the cedar-y matter of the blunt end and shave off perfect little fans of thin thin wood. As well as a dusting of pencil lead, which would somehow get on my fingers.

There was a subtle competition, I remember, between the brilliant hand pencil sharpener and the noiser larger unit you would usually find at the front of the classroom, bolted to a corner of the teacher’s closet. That was crank run, which meant using your whole arm to turn it. It had a thick plastic disc with different sized holes through which to stick different thicknesses of pencil. Somehow, I associated that pencil sharpener with industry – with steel mills and tanks and such. It would make much more racket, which would draw attention, especially if you were sharpening a pencil during a test.
This, then, was the entourage, the court around the monarchical activity of calligraphy. In my case, mere graphie – I have never been a beautiful writer. In the third grade, when we started having spelling tests, I did poorly – it was my poorest subject on the report card. For one thing, I had a sovereign contempt for the homework, which bored me. Lists of words to spell seemed infinitely less interesting than lists of words, such as you would find in the dictionary. I was always a dictionary stan. I don’t remember any real problem with my handwriting as far as teachers were concerned. But it didn’t satisfy me none, as I got older. I wanted to be able to write the address on an envelope with a real piss elegance. I wanted my various scribblings to look more intense in my notebooks. I wanted some famous dead writer’s handwriting, but I only ever have had my own.

In France, I am discovering, handwriting is not dead. One of the standard thumbsucker topics in the U.S. is: Is the computer killing handwriting? The wee-est toddler in Manhattan, we are assured, knows her way around the keyboard. There are keyboards in Paris, even portable phones, but the school system is curiously centered on handwriting. I’ve been assured that Adam must practice his handwriting if he is to get anywhere in the terribly hierarchic French school system. Parents even show each other specimens of their children’s handwriting, worriedly.

I worked, as a grad student in philosophy, on Derrida – but it has only been in the last few years, experiencing the French education system, that I quite understood the social context of Derrida’s emphasis on writing and the place of logocentrism. For the French, the dictée is at the heart of the curriculum. There really is no American equivalent. Teachers in my elementary school never gave us set speeches that we were supposed to listen to and write, that I can remember. Of course, I recognize in the dicteé a genealogical kinship with the classical educational system of the Greeks and the Romans, but the American school system broke away from that family tree when Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod – or something like that. Americans have always been, they like to think, practical.

This has lead to a curious neglect of the oral-to-hand culture in the States. I am rather pleased with the ingrained habit of the dictée and how it organizes, subtly, the whole French system. The hand, here, still leaves its mark on the text. But try as I may, I can’t get too anxious about Adam’s handwriting. I’m just too American.

Jesus’ politics.and mine

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As the few who have actually read the Gospels know, Jesus said relatively little about sex. For him, it was a thing that occurred in the structure of families. Jesus didn’t much like families. He was only half joking when he said that he had no patience for him who didn’t hate his mother. He thought if you entered into a marriage, that was the end of it – no divorce for you. Of course, marriage, back in Jesus' day, wasn't the love match it is today, but an exchange between parents and clans in which the individuals exchanged had little say. So this is a hard saying to understand -- was it a way of warning men not to desert their wives and children?

In any case, he looked upon the marriage and family racket as hopelessly perverting -- there'd be no giving and taking of wives and husbands in the Kingdom of Heaven.

There's an  odd strain in the Gospels that shows Jesus's affinity with outcast women. This has been massively understated, since of course churches are male-controlled, but once you think of the society in which Jesus existed, the uniqueness of the protagonist of the Gospels comes into focus. One must always remember not to substitute the bourgeois society of 2020 for the Eastern Mediterranean culture in which Jesus lived. The status of women in that culture was complex. An anthropological generalization about these societies is that  the mother, at a certain age, within a household that often contained grown up sons and their wives, had a large tacit power, even as their recognized political power was null. This power was often exercised massively against the  wives of their sons. Within this society, freefloating women were rare - the prostitute, the unmarried daughter, the woman who'd outlived her entire family, these were types for whom Jesus had an affinity.  It was the outcasts, those who had a position at the bottom of society - the quintessential last - to whom he was called. 

In the only gospel story of Jesus losing an argument, it is a Samaritan woman who rebukes him for making a typically ethno-racist comment to her when she needed healing: that wonderful phrase about how even the dogs under the table were allowed to eat the master's crumbs. That immediately went to the heart of the Jesus's hypocrisy in rejecting her, and he owned it. This is a remarkable instance in the vita, for it is unusual for the revered hero, the sage or savior, to feature in a story of loss of face. But the remarkable thing about this story is that it questions the worth of face.   I do not remember the name of the critic who remarked, about Henny Pollit in  Christina Stead's The Man who Loved Children, that this character understood the  essential "outlawery" of women - the kind of soul formed literally of being outside the law, which refused to recognize in her a sovereign person - but I like that phrase. From whatever source inside himself, Jesus recognized some essential virtue in that outlawery too. This sensitivity to the outlaw prefigures a radical doubt about the law. Paul wasn't making this up entirely.    

Donc, donc, there is that. On the other hand, Jesus had numerous opinions about wealth. He unequivocally thought that the wealthy would not be in the kingdom of heaven. He thought that they were scanty in their sacrifices, and pushy in their lives, and in general a diabolical nuisance. Just getting wealthy, Jesus thought, probably entailed doing things that would send you to Hell. He had no hesitation about saying so. When a rich man came to him who had sacrificed much of his wealth, Jesus famously said that it was harder for the rich to get to heaven than for the camel to get through the eye of a needle. This saying is one that the most literal American fundamentalist suddenly gets all liberal about interpreting - surely he was referring to a narrow street in Jerusalem! Cause otherwise what he said is too terrible! But the meaning is made clear by what Jesus did before he made that comment – he clearly thought that the rich man hadn’t given enough. He hadn’t really destroyed his wealth.

While there is, currently, a great deal of kowtowing to a bunch of pissants who call themselves Christian in contemporary American culture, one can be confident that, if Jesus is within the ballpark of being right, most of the Christian right, from George Bush to Franklin Graham, are going straight to hell. (Although to be clear, I do think the place of weeping and gnashing of teeth is a metaphysical place, within the individual and collective consciousness - just as  geographical coordinates of the Kingdom of Heaven are within you). It isn’t really even a close call. All are wealthy. All retain their wealth in the face of a world in which masses starve. All have let these people starve during the whole course of their lives. Some, such as Pat Robertson, have acquired their wealth through such bloody associations that they are obviously immoral. But Jesus really didn’t make a lot of distinctions here. Gays are never condemned by Jesus. The wealthy are, time and time again. As for the clergy that coddles the wealthy and themselves become rich, they are what Jesus called Whited Sepulchers, filthy on the inside with death. Among the certainly and for sure damned, one can spot some easy prey: the creators of the Left Behind series (sin against the holy ghost, wealth), Dr. James Dobson (wealth, refusal to visit those in prison, definitely on the left side of the Son when he judges the quick and the dead), Newt Gingrich (are you kidding me) and many others who are going to go the inferno route.  . It is, of course, my burden that, as a non-Christian I am probably ending up spending the afterlife with a bunch of yahoo evangelical leaders. Just my luck. Although God has infinite mercy, and I can't imagine him so cruel as to put me next to Billy Graham's deluded son. Many of these men are under the misapprehension that Jesus gives his unconditional approval to heterosexuality, confusing viagra with virtue. Jesus made know his contempt for the family whenever he got a chance; his contempt for the mere industriousness that leads to wealth (behold the lilies of the field), his contempt for profiteers on the poor (you have made my father’s house into a den of thieves), etc. As for the membership of the political class, they have as little chance of making it to heaven as a vampire bat has of winning best in show at your local kennel club. If there is one crowd that has beast written on their foreheads, it is this one. Hopeless, from the divine point of view.

However, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out long ago, hardly anybody believes Jesus anymore, especially Christians. Shaw said that Christians are, almost to a man, followers of Barabbas: worshippers of ostentatious power, self-pitying about their cruelties, absolutely unable to sympathize with those lower than them if they aren’t allowed, at the same time, to strip those lower than them of all dignity – in other words, cannibals and freaks and the usual good booboisie you see buying steaks in the grocery store. Shaw thought certain of Jesus’ communistic ideas might work in today’s society. We don’t. That is, as a majoritarian stance, what Jesus taught leads to chaos and cruelty. The Grand Inquisitor is right about that. But as a minority stance, here and there, it is an experiment well worth doing.

poem

Too late I saw I’d got the wrong end
thinking that the dough and good legs
would always be enough. I turned away from wisdom
and subscribed to 1000 cable channels.

“I will also laugh at your calamities
I will mock when your fear cometh she said,
tagging another city gate
before the heat closed in with the tasers.
No big deal, I thought, another extra gone.

Sometimes though at precisely 4 a.m.
I remember that I haven’t paid the ransom yet.
- Karen Chamisso