We Hate Ourselves More Than We Hate Rove

The strangest thing about this Karl Rove visit is how liberals at Oberlin clearly hated the protestors more than they hated Rove. It shouldn't be a contest: on the one hand, you had a professional (and knowing) slanderer and propagandist for the most reactionary American administration in at least 60 years; on the other, you had people whose worst crime would be to disrupt a mediocre speech by a man's who's mediocre in all respects except in his cruelty and lack of scruples. (He's not a "political genius," guys. The regurgitation of this piece of pure media hype proves that Oberlin has, if nothing else, successfully cultivated the next generation of Time magazine reporters.)

Yet the hate isn't directed at the bad guy; rather, it's directed at the people who want to fight him- even though we all may hate Rove, at least in theory. And any excuse, no matter how presumptuous, is good enough for the hate. The protests won't be effective, Rove won't care, we're just a bunch of whiny college students, we’re spoiled, a protest would be self-congratulatory, etc. All these excuses don't even come close to explaining the sheer amount of abuse the protestors received.

Which convince me that the real reason for the hate-fest can be best explained by an article about liberal hatred toward Michael Moore, written years ago by John Dolan at the brilliant The eXile:

"You hate Moore because he's likely to drag you into a streetfight. That's what happened at the Oscars: Moore took the podium and used it as a weapon. He bludgeoned Bush with that Oscar, right there in front of everyone, until the crowd booed him off. And they didn't boo him because they were "conservatives," either. I'd bet that the loudest booers were classic H-wood liberals. They booed because when Moore started fighting, they felt ashamed, then angry -- because in some vestigial corner of their minds, they knew they should have been standing with him.

"As a lifelong coward, I know the feeling, the shame of watching someone fight your fight for you--and I know that it's not your tormentors you hate most. No, it's your champion, your damned officious champion, whose courage only throws your cowardice into relief, that you hate most--after yourself."

But the excuses were interesting for being revealing. Take the “protests won’t be effective” argument. It was the argument the anti-protestors made the most; it also happened to be exactly false. About the only time colleges make the news at all these days is when there are student protests against prominent figures who are invited to speak at them.

Professor Steve Volk tacitly acknowledged the effectiveness of protest in a letter that encouraged student to observe decorum during the Rove speech. He listed Chris Hedges and Michael Oren as notable examples of people who were famously disrupted during their speeches. Other examples that ring out are the protests against Ehud Olmert at the University of Chicago and even a rather impressive protest against that indefatigable idiot Martin Peretz when he spoke at Harvard. This means Harvard activists upstaged us, and for a significantly less repulsive figure. Can we please stop promoting that obnoxiously self-aggrandizing “oh, we’re just so darn radical at Oberlin” cliché now?

And I’m willing to bet that some of the same people who directed spite at the Rove protestors watched or could watch some of the above examples on Youtube with glee. And we all enjoyed the video of the Iraqi journalist throwing his shoes at George Bush or of the student who pied Thomas Friedman. It’s only when such protests effect us that they suddenly become despicable.

Of course, the protestors share the blame in all this. Campus activism- real campus activism, the kind that has acted on the remarkable pretense that Oberlin is a community and could thus unite around certain causes- has emerged from hiding a few times since I’ve been a student here. The Coalition was an example; the Karl Rove Is Coming activists are another. And each treated politics as though it were a grim duty, our dubious birthright as privileged Oberlin students. The Coalition argued that we were spoiled and ignorant of racial issues, necessitating immediate reeducation. The Karl Rove is Coming protestors, on the other hand, argued that it was our responsibility to protest Rove so that we could vindicate our reputation as a liberal campus.

On this, the protestors and the anti-protestors were united: it was our duty to the school to either make a ruckus or to sit quietly to show that we were either liberal or tolerant enough to honor the school’s image. It was typical self-deprecating Oberlin politics on a slightly grander scale; eating out of dumpsters and not showering to conserve water expanded into political theatre.

What everyone seemed to miss is that protesting Karl Rove could be fun. Not fun in a cute, Harkness sort of way, but in a righteous and invigorating way. Imagine the spectacle of hundreds of students, unapologetic in their noble hatred for Karl Rove, directing a furious and joyous tide of boos at that repulsive pig- because we could, and because we wanted to. As everyone knew (deep down, at least), that kind of bold display would become Oberlin legend and would have an effect both in and outside of the campus- which is the real reason that people hated the protestors.

We’re too spoiled and lucky to be able to go to such a venerable institution to allow ourselves any joy or collective gratification. The reputation of the school was paramount, however false that reputation actually is. And the same crippling deference that defines this wretched campus scored another victory. On that note, I should add that I didn’t go to the speech/ protest. Maybe it was because I was too busy, or because I never got around to buying a ticket- or maybe because, “in some vestigial corner” of my mind, I was afraid.

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.

Precious Is Class Warfare

So I saw Precious, again, last night with a group of friends. We all just laughed at it. A friend and I spent the two hours reenacting the "Precious! Precious!" scene from Silence of the Lambs. The exception was one girl who watched the movie cuddled up to her boyfriend in terror, inexpressibly disgusted at the torrent of despair porn the film inflicted on her. It wasn't the reaction you'd expect from a film that, to take a random critical blurb, is "full of life and love, well-meaning and, judging by the reaction in the US, a genuine and important phenomenon that says act- don't dwell- on your dreams."

But it's not surprising that bougie middle-class critics liked it. Precious is class warfare, naked and in-your-face class warfare, albeit of the patronizing liberal variety. To put it as simply as possible: everyone in the movie who's working class (save for Precious) is an awful person, while everyone who's a middle class professional is an absolute saint.

The film doesn't exactly give the poor characters devil horns and draw halos around the wealthier ones, but it comes as close as possible to doing so with one of the crudest devices available to film: it makes the poor people physically ugly (and very black), and it casts pretty and light skinned actresses as the middle class professionals (Mariah Carey is one of them). And boy, does the movie rub that difference in your face. You're treated to extended sequences of Precious' obese mom eating a greasy piece of chicken or dancing in skin tight clothing before going out to a club. The intended reaction of such lingering and voyeuristic shots is nothing but sheer disgust. There's an Oberlin student out there somewhere with 1000 words on how this is "the exploitation and objectification of black bodies"; suffice it to say that this isn't observant sociology but zoology.

Above are the good guys in the movie. The first, Mariah Carey, is Precious' social worker: patient, helpful, and smiley, not the harried and overworked bureaucratic functionary that real poor people are accustomed to working with. She directs her to light-skinned woman number two, Precious' teacher, who's a lesbian- I think we're actually meant to rejoice at how progressive that is- that lives with her partner in a tastefully adorned house with plenty of books and, I think, a piano.

And for the working class people? There's Precious' stepfather, who is only shown raping and impregnating her in flashbacks; the previously mentioned obese mother who hates and abuses Precious for being raped by her husband; obnoxious classmates in her old school who tease her for being fat and won't let her "learn" (her white teacher, on the other hand, is portrayed as another well-meaning savior, although he's helpless against the tide of cruelty directed at him by the poor kids); and street kids who harass and hurt her on the street for being overweight. Her neighbors in her apartment are invisible, non-existent; they don't even call the cops when Precious' mom beats her or pop their heads out of their apartments even to investigate.

There are her fellow classmates who are all girls and thus are all naturally bitchy, catty, and superficial. They're all initially hostile to Precious but are magically civilized by the light-skinned teacher (as is the typical power fantasy in these movies), and they even accompany Precious to the hospital where she gives birth to her baby- although they spend most of the time there hitting on a light skinned doctor. There's literally not a single poor character in the movie who is kind, or intelligent, or at all mutifaceted. At best the poor characters are just window dressing, at worst they're repulsive caricatures. And all of them are there in their resplendent ugliness simply so the film can brag that it's "keeping it real." The film's "gritty realism," however, is deployed in only one direction on the socio-economic ladder.

Precious herself is neither good or bad; she purely neutral, having less agency and independence than any other film protagonist I've seen for some time. Most of the film she spends crying and moaning about how she "can't do it," which sets her up to be immediately reassured by her betters. She's merely the territory, the beautiful soul, fought over by the working class beasts and the middle class beauties. The film is tireless in patronizing her, but the two ladies pictured above do all the thinking and acting for her- which is the real reason the establishment critics like the movie. (Spoiler alert: the light skinned middle class people win her from the poor people in the end.) The name of the film even implies as much: she's "Precious," like a gem, a pretty object owned by somebody to be doted upon.

Anyway, if I was a poor, working class person, particularly a poor black person, I think I would be absolutely furious at this movie. The system that represses them is beautiful and heroic for trying to save the poor from their own awfulness; the problem with poverty is poor people themselves. Now one can see why Precious received the critical acclaim that it did (it got a 91% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes) in spite of its absolute lack of good qualities: it tells middle class critics that working class problems are all theirs to solve, that their failure in solving them isn't their fault, and that their ideology of patronizing liberalism is the savior of America's wretched. Like much propaganda, Precious is the voyeuristic exploitation of caricatured human ugliness for narrow political purposes.

The Southern and White Ethnic Strategies Live

"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger'—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger'."

- Republican Strategist Lee Atwater, 1981

"In the end, the Nixon adminstration recognized and legitimated the category of white ethnic but in rhetoric rather than policy. Instead, his policies and rhetoric directed ethnicity down the narrow channel of the politics of resentment. Rather than bringing ethnics into the civil rights coalition by including them in affirmative action programs, Nixon officials capitalized on white ethnics' animosity over the 'special treatment' of blacks."

- Thomas J. Sugrue, John D. Skrentny, "The White Ethnic Strategy." Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s

"The overwhelming majority of (tea party) supporters say Mr. Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and that he does not understand the problems of people like themselves. More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites (my italics) — compared with 11 percent of the general public ."

- "Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated" The New York Times, April 14, 2010