Boo The Pig

Hate him. Hate him. Hate him.

Karl Rove is coming to Oberlin, and I’m already hearing calls to be tolerant toward him. Oberlin students are embarrassed by a "self-image" that's at least four years out of date: We're a bunch of spoiled upper- middle-class radicals who are tolerant of all beliefs, except those that are conservative. Meanwhile, there were a handful of people in the Oberlin Socialists last year; as far as I know, the thing doesn't even exist this year.

I don't see this tolerant image we're supposed to have or why we as individuals would be obliged to defend it in the first place. (What's with this obsession about defending "the Oberlin image" anyway?) The average Oberlin student is about as angry and intolerant as any other overworked, stressed out person. Let's direct that anger against a deserving target, for once. The right thinks we're a bunch of radicals and perverts anyway; why not indulge them?

We should treat Rove like scum not because of his beliefs (which are indeed awful), but because of his behavior. He's a terrible person not on an ideological level, but simply as a human being. This goes beyond made-up "left vs. right" dichotomies; treating him like swine should be a matter of course, not an overt political act.

Matt Taibbi, back during the Valerie Plame affair, wrote the best description of the totality of Rove:

The result of all this was to obscure the basic fact about Rove, which is that he's not a genius at all. He is a pig, and the only thing that distinguishes him is the degree of his brazenness and cruelty. It doesn't take a genius to send out fliers calling your opponent the "fag candidate." It doesn't take a genius to insinuate that your opponent's wife is a drug addict. There's nothing cunning or clever about saying your opponent came home from a war too fucked in the head to govern (particularly when your own candidate was too much of a coward to fight in the same war), or about whispering that that same candidate may have an illegitimate black child. And there's nothing clever about calling the followers of the opposition party traitorous and un-American, and claiming that they all want to coddle and appease the murderers of our brothers, sisters, sons and daughters.

This is all Rove is; this is how he’s “earned” his power and prestige and is thus the only reason he’s being invited to speak. I don't know why anyone would be "interested in what he has to say," and anyway, booing wouldn't prevent him from speaking. Boo, heckle, harass him; I’m afraid to do all that by myself, but if enough people do so, I’ll join in (assuming I go). And please: Don’t dress up as a superhero or dance in protest or some other self-marginalizing Kalan shit. Hate him because you’re a regular person and he’s someone regular people should hate.

We're All Fictional People

Martin Peretz married into money and bought a magazine; he now thinks he is better than this man.

I'm bringing this up due to a recent piece by Martin Peretz in TNR in which he calls the Palestinians a "fictional people," about which I have nothing pertinent to say except that Peretz can have his married-his-way-into-wealth-and-status ass savaged by a pack of starving dogs. I doubt this is going to matter to anyone who takes the "Palestinians are a fiction" argument seriously, but there's a deep irony to the argument that seems nonetheless worth pointing out.

There's more than that. There's the extreme totalitarian mindset underlying the argument: because Palestinian people- human beings, remember, not just "Palestinians"- didn't exist in a modern nation state at the time of their ethnic cleansing, they are not entitled to make any claims to human rights and dignity. Thus, people only have value as human beings insofar as they exist in a state. Mussolini would love that one; TNR, ostensibly, is not supposed to.

And the argument could be used, without any changes at all, to justify colonial slaughter in Africa or North America: because the natives did not constitute a nation, you can drive them from their lands, kill them, etc. It's sort of a white man's burden argument by way of modern state realism: the savages haven't reached a high enough stage of societal development- the nation state in this case- therefore they must be swept away by the winds of progress. Same with MLK's black nationalism: African-Americans never existed as a nation, so they have no right to control their own communities. None of this makes even superficial sense; the fact that it has such monstrous precedent makes it all the worse, and I'm not sure why people make it in public, where other people can read it.

The irony part is this: the organizing of a disparate people into a nation-state to ensure the protection of their human rights was the principle motivation of Zionism. Norman Finkelstein has done sterling work on this in some of his earliest scholarship: basically, he argues, Zionism was a kind of romantic nationalism whose proponents argued that as long as Jews existed as minorities in other states, the states would never belong to them, and they would be accordingly persecuted. This Holocaust gave quite some weight to this argument, and immigration en masse to Israel began, and resulted in its founding in 1948.

Now, when the Palestinians wish to do the exact same thing that the Zionists did- set up a state to protect themselves from the abuses of a state that will never belong to them ("the state of the Jewish people," remember)- they are- what? Fantasists? Cynical political opportunists? Agents of the Jordanians and "the warrior Arab states," in Peretz's words?" One could argue that the Jews are a fictional people for not having a state prior to Israel; let's see Peretz and anyone else in mainstream journalism make that argument and watch what happens. (The closest anyone in the mainstream came to making a claim like this may have been Helen Thomas, as Think Progress points out; look what happened to her.) And, of course, we were all "fictional people" at one time, Americans included.

Anyway, you can drop this on a pro-Israel apologist if he makes the argument, especially since you're likely to see it being raised more and more as that particular camp runs out of arguments. Anyone still left in the hardcore of that camp, though, is likely to be without shame and/ or completely full of shit like Peretz, so I'm not sure you're gonna get anywhere.

Summer Reading

"Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well. A portion of him turns against him and acts like another person, defeating him from inside. A man inside a man. Which is no man at all."

"God's M.O., he reflected, is to transmute evil into good. If He is active here, He is doing that now, although our eyes can't perceive it; the process lies hidden beneath the surface of reality, and emerges only later. To, perhaps, our waiting heirs. Paltry people who will never know the dreadful war we've gone through, and the losses we took, unless in some footnote in a minor history book they catch a notion. Some brief mention. With no list of the fallen."

"'What is it?' one staff member said.

Donna said, 'A person.'

'Substance D?'

She nodded.

'It ate his head. Another loser.'

She said to the two of them, 'It's easy to win. Anybody can win.'"

You've Never Heard Of Alex Carey

"'Americans are the most propagandized people of any nation.'"

"The subject embraces a 75-year-long multi-billion dollar project in social engineering on a national scale."

"'The manufacture of consent... was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy' Walter Lippman wrote. 'But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique... Under the impact of propaganda, it is not longer possible... to believe in the original dogma of democracy.'"

And other fun facts you would learn if you lived in a democracy. It's worth pondering on why any half-way decent course on Russian or Chinese history in America thoroughly discusses their social engineering projects- the Five Year Plan, the Cultural Revolution, etc.- as a given, while our own social engineering projects- corporate propaganda, the National Highway Act- are never even mentioned in spite of being significantly larger in scale. We don't even know that there were social engineering projects in this country. Imagine being a Russian student and never learning about the Five Year Plan or a Chinese student never learning about The Great Leap Forward (and the parallels of the US to these massive state-controlled behemoths are frequent and often unflattering), and you're beginning to get a sense at how fucking stupid American education is. And to rub it in, you get smug libertarians like John Stossel (who is, ironically, a pure and perfect product of our education system) snarking on how American kids are ignorant because teachers get paid as if they somewhat resembled human beings. If you don't know the kind of things Carey talks about, you're ignorant about 20th century American history- just like I was before I read the book, and probably still am. It would be remarkable if it were otherwise.