Tag Archives: Culture Wars

What is an Insincere Question?

03 Saturday Jun 2023

Posted by in Politics, Uncategorized

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The film “What is a Woman” begins with Matt Walsh reflecting on gender within his own family. So, it’s appropriate that the film ends on a conversation with his wife. Okay, maybe it would have been more appropriate to go the other way around, but the point is that Walsh’s family bookends the whole performance. This is particularly fitting, because it facilitates one of the central features of the film, namely the consistently personal framing of the inquiry. Walsh isn’t just exploring the topic in general; he consistently frames his questions in terms of his own identity and that of his family.

Walsh wants an objective answer to his question, but he consistently frames his questions in personal terms. He is asking these questions in response to progressive ideas about gender fluidity and the social construction of gender identity. Anyone familiar with Walsh knows that he thinks this is all nonsense, but that doesn’t stop him from framing the issues as if he was personally implicated in the possibilities. It isn’t enough to know what being a woman might mean to someone else; as he frames the issues, Walsh wants to know what it would mean to him and his own family. So, he sets out to answer the question of what is a woman? He asks this question as though his own identity were at issue.

Walsh also seems to assume the answer will be universal, and that it will be normative. He wants to have his is and ought it too. Whatever the nature of women, there is little doubt that Walsh knows what this should mean for both men and women.

One has only to see the color-coded dress of his children to know just how rigid Walsh may be in response to this issue.

Walsh spends the first half of the film interrogating progressives, many of them professionals working in medical and mental health fields, asking them what a woman is. He is never happy with their answers. To be fair, the answers he gets here really are less than impressive, but also to be fair, the answers these people actually use in their daily work are simply non-starters for Walsh. When he asks what a woman is, Walsh is looking for a firm biological answer, but he is talking to people deeply entrenched in the world of social constructivism. He knows these people are not going to give him that kind of answer, and so he skates right past the answers they actually do give him.

It’s frustrating to watch this performance. Many of these people seem to have grown so accustomed to constructivist paradigms that they have no idea how to talk to the Matt Walshes the world. He isn’t helping them, of course. His goal is to make them look foolish. They are less interview subjects than marks who have been conned into a discussion with someone who isn’t really interested in what they have to say. And so we get a battle of the just-so narratives. For Walsh’s marks, gender is a social construction, because it just is; for Walsh it certainly isn’t, because it just ain’t.

One of the themes Walsh hits rather hard in this part of the movie is the problem of circular definitions. Using a word to define itself is a problem; it really is, but that problem keeps popping up here for a reason. The social constructivists Walsh is talking to do not wish to define a woman in biological terms, so they keep talking about socially constructed roles and self-perceptions. This leads to a common refrain; they tell him a woman is someone who “identifies as a woman.” There are variations, to be sure, but all these answers lead back to the same question, what is a woman in the first place? If someone identifies as a woman, then what do they think that identity means? Walsh doesn’t get a good answer from any of those he talks to in the first half of the film, and of course he never wanted good definitions from them in the first place.

By the middle of the film, Walsh has concluded that those he has been talking to have no idea what a woman, none at all.

Much of the second half of the film is spent talking to critics of trans-gendered identity (and in particular, the medical establishment supporting various treatments and legal accommodations for trans-gendered persons. Those talking to Walsh in this part of the film get to make their own points; they get to define their own concerns and elaborate on them in concrete ways. This part of the series is interesting, at least. How many of the claims made here would hold up to scrutiny is an interesting question, but the issues discussed here are a good deal more substantive. This half of the film would have benefited from a sincere exploration of the reasons for these practices in the first place, but it was of course never Walsh’s goal to help us understand the issues. Having made the progressives look like fools in the first half of his film, the second half is spent making them look positively evil.

Walsh begins to claim some of his victories in the second half of the film. He parrots progressive themes with glee in the face of people who will have none of it, effectively setting them for a slam dunk response. Walsh relishes the chance to affirm biological differences between men and women in this half of the film, and to tell horror stories about the consequences of failure to accept these differences. All of these horrors, stem from the failure of progressives to acknowledge the underlying reality of sex, which Walsh clearly expects to be defined in biological terms.

Nothing less will count as truth to Walsh.

Somewhere near the end, Walsh asks Jordan Peterson what a woman is. Peterson tells him to marry one and find out. So, Walsh goes back home and asks his own wife what a woman is.

She tells him a woman is “an adult human female…”

And I wonder how many who watch this realize that this too is a cicular definition?

As was that of Peterson?

These are the final answer to the question Walsh has been asking throughout his film, but it is no more substantive than those answers he was given in the beginning segments. They are just as circular as the answers he rejected throughout the first half of the film! Peterson’s answer ells him to marry one to find out, which begs the question of who would he need to marry to accomplish this. His wife’s answer assumes we are talking about a female, but that isn’t far off being a woman in the first place. Neither of these answers gets Walsh any closer to a substantive understanding of the issue.

The answers given by Peterson and Walsh’s wife are satisfactory to Walsh, and to his target market, but much of that is a function of context. If the answer given by Walsh’s wife isn’t all that theoretically robust, it is clothed in the confidence of a warm kitchen where two people seem to know exactly how to behave.

In fact, the answer Walsh’s wife gives him is rather constructivist in its own right. She actually tells him that a woman is; “an adult human female, who needs help opening (a jar)”

Walsh and his fans might see in this a story about a biological female who knows who she is and a biological male who knows what he is, but social constructivists would hardly find it surprising to see a middle class American woman cooking for her husband.

…and of course letting her man to do some of the muscle work.

Donald Trump Could Let a Man Die on His Watch…

11 Sunday Aug 2019

Posted by in Politics

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2019-08-11 (2)Yesterday, the Idiot-in-Chief retweeted this little bit of tripe from one of the lesser grifters riding his crappy coattails to fame. This retweet is an entire Gish Gallop in a single tweet. Seriously, you could write a book on the many ways in which this is simply stupid.

Idiots will idiate!

But the particular idiocy that I keep coming back to is this. This is the President of the United States, and Epstein was a high profile suspect in a Federal institution. Epstein’s welfare was the direct responsibility of federal officials, and those officials answer to Trump. If Jeffrey Epstein was killed by ANYONE, it is ultimately the responsibility of Donald Trump. More to the point, that Epstein died in this facility absolutely IS Donald Trump’s responsibility. No hypotheticals needed! Yet trump sits there, just like any other couch-potato, musing on the possibility that something awful might have happened as if he were not himself implicated in the very rumors he is spreading.

Donald Trump is arguably the most powerful man in the world. (Well, to be honest, that status would probably belong to Putin, but that aside,…) Trump is arguably the most powerful man in the United States, and yet he still reacts to major political events as though he is simply Archie Bunker sitting in the comfy chair with nothing better to go on than his first impression of a news item and no more responsibility for the events in question than any other guy who just walked into his living room tired from a long day of work and sat down in a chair to learn about events well beyond his scope of power and expertise. The problem here is that Donald Trump isn’t just another guy sitting in a chair learning about the news from the pundits of his personal choice. He is in charge of the institutions in question and this death happened on his watch. Ideally the President of the United States should do more and know more than this President appears to, and there is every indication that this appearance of a hapless hackwit with neither self-awareness nor public consciousness is absolutely the underlying reality of this living facade.

There is no underlying truth to anything Trump says or does, no deeper meaning or real intention underlying the many misleading slogans which constitute the entirely of his political engagement. Donald Trump is the surface impression he creates, nothing more and nothing less.

…all of which is why it is so disturbing to see the President talking as though he were not implicated in events unfolding under his own authority. Donald Trump is the proverbial man (as in ‘the man’) talking about the politics of his day as if he were just another underdog, just another guy trying to make sense of another scandal, a scandal in which he doesn’t seem to see himself, even though he is all over it.

It’s an iconic moment, this tweet. Trump at his Trumpiest. It is also the present GOP and its most GOPest, a party completely devoid of any sense of responsibility for anything it or its members do.

I suppose Republicans have played the underdog for as long as I can remember, but that particular theme wasn’t always quite so prominent as it is now. There was a time when it was substantially overshadowed by themes of respectability and adherence to time-honored traditions. When I was in college Republicans were more likely to hold themselves up as the standard of moral and intellectual propriety from which liberals sought to free themselves. Back then the proverbial Man was understood to be a conservative Republican, and Republicans typically assumed a level of authority across the board which is fundamentally inconsistent with the ethos of rebellious underdogs fighting the powers that be. They were the ones telling the rest of us how to live, and quite often they were happy to tell us why they had the authority to do that.

Something changed.

But what?

If you ask me, it was Rush Limbaugh. It was Limbaugh that taught conservatives the joys of playing the smartass in the back of the room instead of posing as the Professor and then having to answer somebody else’s smartass questions. Limbaugh never tried to assert the authority of tradition; he always preferred to mock the efforts to liberals in whatever they happened to be doing. He set aside the authority tat was once so central to ‘conservative’ politics and instead opted to play the underdog fighting against somebody else’s authority.

It was also Limbaugh that taught bigots and bullies all over the country to think of themselves as conservatives, and to filter their hatreds through a political lens. You don’t hate blacks or Mexicans or women or homosexuals, or any of these people, so went Limbaugh’s message. No, you hate liberals, and you can always identify a liberal by their willingness to advocate for any of these groups. What looks on the surface to be hatred of an oppressed minority is instead, according to Limbaugh, rebellion against the oppression of those who would tell you how to think and act. That was a powerful message, a bigotry-laundering, and a successful one at that. Today’s bigots don’t just come out and say that they hate this group or that group; they consistently tie their contempt to some narrative about liberalism. It’s liberalism that they really hate, so they want to believe, even if their anti-liberalism means consistent attacks on underprivileged minorities.

In point of fact, Limbaugh’s hyper-politicization of prejudice goes hand-in-hand with his assumption of under-dog status. In retrospect, this was the real-pay-off for decades of PC-bashing. It enabled ‘conservatives’ to disavow any sense of responsibility for the real world outcomes of anything people experienced as a result of the culture wars. In their rejection of political correctness, hateful words directed at the powerless became spirited rebellion aimed at the real powers that be, and those who sought to help the unfortunate became oppressors in the new plantation system. (Don’t laugh, the DNC as a plantation system is a prominent theme in republican circles. It’s shit, yes, but the deplorables are eating that shit right up!)

What Limbaugh did was to help the racism goes down by teaching conservatives to think of someone else as the real authority. That authority could be the liberals, the Democrats, the coastal elites, Hollyweird, or whatever else you care to imagine as the over-arching power behind any policy that might help the underprivileged. Either way, someone else always had the power, and the expression of prejudice became, under his influence, resistance to that authority. When you use the N-word, you’re not really attacking African-Americans. No, you are just offending liberals. If they weren’t so touchy, then you wouldn’t have done it, right? How many times has Limbaugh played this gambit and countless others like it? And how many of those now flashing the ‘OK’ sign in racist circles have done so just because it would offend liberals, not because they endorse white supremacy.

…supposedly at any rate.

Anyway, my point is that all this PC-bashing which has long since become central to ‘conservative’ Republican thinking effectively transformed the GOP’s relationship to power and authority. They are no longer the 80s-era Christians telling us who to marry or what books to read or how we should dress. No, now they are the ones defying authority. And thus punching down has come to look an awful lot like standing up to the Man in the rhetoric of cultural conservatives.

Donald Trump took over the market for this message in his Presidential campaign. PC-bashing was a big part of his act from the very beginning. Nobody has ever inhabited the role of the politically incorrect rebel with such abandon. Under Trump, defiance of political correctness became everything from the usual racial epithets and sexist slurs to outright violence against protesters or explicitly discriminatory policies. In being politically incorrect, Trump wasn’t just hurting people’s feelings; he was declaring his intent to hurt people in very real and very tangible ways. Lest we dwell on his victims too much, trump has always (true to form) called our attention to some external power, some liberal authority, that is always the real reason things had to get so ugly. Trump’s every exercise of power counts now as defiance of the ultimate power, the ‘deep state.’ With such a fictional power somewhere out there, how could any mere mortal be anything but an underdog?

…unless of course that person was an emissary of the deep state!

But that role, the role of a deep state emissary, is of course reserved for Trump’s enemies. By definition, they are the real powers that be. If someone gets in his way, they are the ones working to maintain the status quo. And Donald trump’s every abuse of authority takes on the significance of fighting the power of that deep state and its surrogates. The children who have suffered in his internment camps are really the victims of that deep state, so the deplorables tell us, just as those who died in those camps are really victims of the deep state. Everyone he hurts is really the victim of that other power, the shadowy deep state that made all of this necessary. That is reality as Trump and his ilk understand it. So when this faux-Underdog in orange is sitting on his ass learning that his own people have let an important prisoner die, then he too can imagine that it must really be the fault of someone else.

Someone with REAL power!

It stands to reason that Trump would blame the Clintons. Of course they too may have reasons for wanting Epstein to be silent, so he can make a case for it, but Trump has other reasons for pointing at the Clintons; those that have more to do with story-line. The notion that the Clintons did it fits the narrative he has been using since the 2016 campaign. Far from diminishing her authority, Trump inflated it. He made Hillary into a surrogate for anything the government had ever done that his fans might have found objectionable. Whatever powers she might have had as a Senator or a former First Lady, they were dwarfed in comparison to the power that trump attributed to her in his campaign rhetoric. I lost track of the number of times Trump blamed Hillary for anything that did or didn’t happen in Congress when she was there (and even when she wasn’t). Trump held Hillary personally responsible for things well beyond her control so many times in the actual debates it was laughable. As if she, simply by being a Senator, were directly responsible for everything Congress (or the President) did. I wondered then, as I do now, how anyone could be so gullible as to believe him? But I also knew it was a powerful story-line. It made Hillary a symbol of government, of the establishment, of anything that disaffected Americans could imagine themselves to be up against.Trump then had only to oppose her to become a hero to many.

…even to those who would be hurt by his policies.

In Trump’s rhetoric, Hillary (and the Clintons in general) came to represent the government as it is and he came to represent government as anyone might imagine they wanted it to be. (That Trump  never really provided policy details or even finished his own damned sentences certainly made it easier for others to imagine the details as they wished.) The logic of Trump’s rhetoric has consistently made Hillary (and the Democrats) responsible for actual policy and real-world consequences. He in turn occupies an ideal world of government that is divorced from anything, even his own policies. So, I suppose it really shouldn’t surprise us that the Democrats in Congress have been responsible for every failure of the Trump administration. Neither should it come as any surprise that we’ve been hearing “What about Hillary” for close to 3 years now. To the deplorables, she is still government as they imagine it to be, or at least everything that’s wrong with it, and Trump is still government as they might hope it will be. Anything bad that actually happens is still her fault. This symbolism just isn’t affected by facts. It never was. And that is why countless people look to her whenever something goes wrong, even if it is directly the result of something Trump himself has done.

It’s also why a President whose own Department of Justice somehow took one of the most important prisoners off suicide watch can sit there on his ass and wonder out loud if the Clintons didn’t really do it.

What Donald Trump Can Teach Us About Political Correctness

18 Thursday May 2017

Posted by in Politics

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I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard the phrase “political correctness” used approvingly and without irony. I’ve long since lost track of the number of times I’ve heard it used derisively. I regard it as one of the central ironies of modern politics that it hasn’t been politically correct to be politically correct since the notion first became a household term. This hasn’t stopped people from proudly proclaiming (often to great applause) the brave mantle of ‘Political Incorrectness’. Indeed, countless courageous souls have made sure we all know how little regard they have for political correctness. The near universal disregard for political correctness, as such doesn’t seem to faze its detractors. It pretty well goes without saying that if the subject is political correctness, the correct thing to say is that you’re against it. Do that, and you earn all kinds of points for being a independent minded maverick of sorts.

Just like all other independent mavericky people.

In fact, that story-line is so damned pat, you’d think even the dimmest among us would have second thoughts about it, but I guess not. The narrative is just too damned strong, and the benefits to plotting your politics inside it too great to resist. So, it pretty well goes without saying that anyone worth his salt would proclaim himself to be politically incorrect.

It’s the American thing to do!

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve heard the stories too, the PC-horror stories, I mean. Some of them piss me off too, and some of them are utter bullshit. It’s a big topic, and I could type out a lot of things about it, but for now I want to explore just one particular part of it.

That would be the part where a Presidential candidate and then a President (Donald Trump) would proudly proclaim his own political incorrectness. Among all the many absurdities that fly under the banner of the politically incorrect, there is at least one that is fairly unique to Donald Trump’s use of it. Because if there was anyone that we might expect to be politically correct, that we might actually want to be politically correct, you would think it would be the President of the United States.

Yes, I’m serious.

I realize that in most circles ‘Political correctness’ simply means whatever lefty political agenda people feel like dismissing at the moment, but if you stop and think about the phrase itself for just a minute, you might see some trace of a meaning that isn’t quite confined to that sort of canned polemic. Indeed, there is no particular reason respect for Christian values, honoring the troops, or celebrating a conventional American family would count as any less politically correct than support for gay marriage, celebration of black history month, or avoidance of any number of racial epithets. In principle, right wing causes could as easily count as political correctness as those of the left, and make no mistake about it; they are as likely to produce the sort of toxic pettiness that fill so many of those PC-horror stories people tell sometime between their second and third beers on a Friday night. We seem only use the word for left-wing causes, but there are numerous comparable cause in right wing circles. And if there is any trace of a positive meaning in that phrase, it’s this; that political correctness can mean thinking about the consequences of what you are about to say before you say it, taking into account the feelings of others and their likely reactions to your words before you decide what to say and do. That same notion may produce all sorts of stories about censorship, professional victimhood, and fake outrage. It also produces countless stories generally left untold, those in which someone finds just the right words, shows respect to people she might easily have slighted, or simply handles a tough topic with grace and dignity. We don’t seem to have a label for such stories. That label could as easily be ‘political correctness’ as any of those now provoking outrage in countless gossip circles all across the land.

To be sure, there are distinctions to be made between respect and dignity on the one hand and the pointless pettiness generally associated with stories of political correctness, but those distinctions don’t really fall along a left-right axis, and the phrase itself has never helped anyone to draw those distinctions with any care. Indeed sneering ‘political correctness’ at an issue is little other than an effort to avoid drawing those distinctions with anything approaching thoughtfulness and precision.

If there are those who have used the phrase with more care than i suggest, our current President is not among them. Think back to the infamous moment in which Megan Kelly (perhaps accidentally) separated herself from the right wing faithful, and you can see the character of Donald’s own use of ‘political correctness’. Asked about his frequent use of abusive words against any women who crossed him, Trump responded by saying that he didn’t have time to be politically correct. Of course that was after first trying to pass off the notion that he only denigrates Rosie O’Donnell, but when forced off that gambit, Trump settled on the notion that his lifetime of vicious personal attacks against myriad women was simply failure to obey the dictates of political correctness. Trump wasn’t asking us to reject some far left political agenda; he was asking the American public to accept his own personal vice on grounds that failure to do so would be an instance of political correctness. He was asking us to accept that the most flagrant contempt for common decency was somehow little other than a rejection of left-wing excess.

Here I must say, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of sorrow, sorrow for the death of conservatism as I once knew it. Oh, I don’t count myself as a conservative, not since I was about 18 years old, but I’ve known many conservatives I have admired and respected over the years. They generally vote Republican and I rarely agree with them on much of anything, but if there is one thing that separates the old school conservatives I recall from my youth from the right wing politics of today, it is precisely the effectiveness of Trump’s ploy. There is simply nothing in cultural conservatism that is amenable to the kind of crass treatment Trump has dished out to women over the years. Not his personal attacks on female adversaries, and not asinine talk of sexual conquest. Time was, when conservatives would have been the first to object to such things, and perhaps some still do, but the bulk of the voting base for the Republican party seems to have shifted. Thus conventional respect for human beings in general, and conventional respect for women in particular became a sort of lefty, feminist, oppression, one gloriously vanquished with the promise of a President who couldn’t be pressured to treat a woman with dignity, at least not one marked for conquest, or one who had the audacity to get in his way.

I look back at Trump’s response to Kelly and marvel that anyone could find their way to a rationalization sufficient to support that guy. I also think about the time he stalked Hillary around the debate stage after threatening to lock her up and think the same thing. How did this kind of abuse become acceptable? In particular, how did it become acceptable to cultural conservatives? Near as I can tell, the answer lies in the narrative about political correctness. It recasts common crudeness, even cruelty, as a rejection of a obscure and nefarious political agenda, one no decent American would accept. That narrative alone was sufficient to lure millions of seemingly decent Americans to overlook some of the most brazenly abusive behavior to be displayed in public by a national politician.

It was a defining moment, and one that certainly doesn’t speak well of Trump’s character, or that of anyone who could defend it. It is objectionable in more ways that I could count, even with my shoes off, but the one objection that keeps haunting me is this simple thought; shouldn’t the President of the United States have time for political correctness? Isn’t that part of his job? When he enters into diplomatic negotiations, do we not want the President to be capable of choosing his words carefully? If you set aside the obvious angle of outright lefty-bashing, this is a job which requires all manner of careful judgements about what to say and what not to say, about who will be angry and what will they will do about it.

Only the stakes are much higher!

This is the thing that bothers me most about conventional PC-bashing. It makes a very convenient posture for many who, like Trump, seem think with their tongues. All too often, the notion that one is politically incorrect provides a ready-made excuse for all manner of perfectly conventional indiscretions. Sure, It’s the left wing that asks us to reconsider every day vocabulary for things like race, gender, and sexual orientation (among other things), but it’s not as though we are the only ones with any social sensitivities, and somehow the PC-bashing has became a sort of all-purpose excuse for the generally crass among us, the ones who just can’t be bothered to think before they talk.

People who cannot be bothered to consider how others will feel about their words seldom put much more thought into questions about the truth of those words. It’s one of the reasons why such people can be so damned sensitive themselves to any critical feedback they get. These folks can’t answer the criticisms and they know it, so they’d rather tell a story about the over-sensitivity of others, one which makes their first reflex into an unquestioned truth and the careful consideration of other just so much hogwash. PC-bashing ties this conventionally idiotic behavior to a broad range of set issues and it provides a blank check of sorts to anyone willing to play the role of the tough talking straight shooter.

It may seem that I am stretching the bounds of the concept. Political correctness doesn’t really cover that much of the issue, does it? Yet, I think it’s Trump who stretched the boundaries of the concept so broadly in this election, and not just in characterizing his contempt for women to political incorrectness. He also likened the expectation that people shouldn’t beat up protesters to political correctness. Trump himself has likened countless policy considerations regarding immigration, foreign diplomacy, and criminal law as instances of mere political correctness. And of course, it was Trump’s many sweeping attacks on Mexicans and Muslims that earned him the reputation as a ‘straight shooter’ back in the early days of his campaign. I never understood that. There was nothing straight or honest about Trump’s rhetoric, but so many seemed happy to equate rudeness with honesty that it became the standard media spin for awhile at least. Even Megan Kelly granted him that as she asked her infamous question. She too was willing to grant that Trump’s foolishness and cruelty should count as a kind of honesty. It’s the kind of equation best suited to the narratives of the politically incorrect.

…and it is doublespeak at its most deplorable!

It’s not just that Donald Trump expressed prejudice in his campaign rhetoric. He led with it. Prejudice was literally his first sales pitch. No, he didn’t say that all Mexicans were rapists, as his defenders often remind us, but he did say that Mexico was ‘sending’ its rapists. That wild accusation was not a call for immigration reform then, and it isn’t now. It was a clear and unmistakable signal to the racists in America that he would go after those they hated. How and when, and even why? All that would be made up later, …and so now we now get to see the GOP fiddle with token gestures at wall building. The physical wall that still haunts our policy discussions is merely the obligatory excretion of a rhetorical wall Trump built in that very first moment of his campaign. Through talk of a wall, Trump separated his supporters from the rest of us and polarized the nation as no American politician has done in my own life-time.

Why do we think of Trump’s various immigration restrictions as a ban on Muslims? Because he led with a call to ban entry of Muslims. It was only afterwards that Trump began walking the notion back to the various token policies now trotted before the courts. Ironically, folks now defend these policies by telling us Obama did the same thing (which is a stretch). This after Trump spent his entire campaign telling us how Obama wasn’t doing anything to protect us from terrorists. In any event, the point isn’t that Trump expressed a prejudice or three in the course of a campaign, or even in his Presidency. That would make him a run of the mill politician, perhaps even merely human. Prejudice was the centerpiece of his appeal from the beginning. It still is.

The result has been a non-stop clown show, a constant reminder that Trump doesn’t think before he speaks, writes, or even executive orders. We’ve all watched as his staff struggle to form policies around thoughtless statements and his surrogates have fought to rationalize the completely irrational utterances of the Ego-in-Chief. And this week we learn both that Trump sought to jail his critics in the press and that he shared intelligence secrets with Russian figures all in the space of a couple days. Whatever else this is, it is also the behavior of a man who doesn’t think before he does anything.

…and I can’t help but think all of this brings us right back to Trump’s response to Megan Kelly. He said he didn’t have time to be completely politically correct? In that very statement, Trump effectively told the entire nation that wasn’t then prepared to perform the duties of the President.

He isn’t now either.

Triggers

27 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by in Justice, Politics

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The first time I recall reading a trigger warning it was in the off-topic sub-forum on a gaming discussion board. If I remember correctly, it was in the title for a thread about sexual abuse. That usage struck me then, as it does now, as a perfectly appropriate warning to some that the ensuing discussion was going to cover issues which some might find intensely stressful. I also understood the likely reason for this to be that some people might have had direct personal experience with the realities of such abuse. It has ever since struck me as a reasonable and positive thing to provide that warning in advance. It also serves as a good reminder to the rest of us that something we may regard as grist for the mill could have serious personal significance for others. I know that reminder has helped me to appreciate the weight of some issues. I can’t say that I’m always happy with my performance in dealing with these things, but I do think I handle these issues with more care now than I did in earlier days, and I credit that first encounter with a trigger warning with producing the difference.

Within a couple years on that same discussion the trigger warnings in the off-topic forum had multiplied beyond my wildest imagination. Countless variations of trigger warnings could be found in the title of one thread after another. I found it increasingly difficult to take them seriously, not because I couldn’t imagine someone getting upset at this or that topic, but because there comes a point where the likelihood that someone will become upset ceases to be a function of the topic and becomes an abstract possibility that is simply always there. People get upset, but it isn’t always because the discussion at hand is intrinsically dangerous subject matter. As I read the increasingly common little warning symbols, placed conveniently in square brackets, I couldn’t help but think the point was far more likely to be a statement about the values of the person employing the hashtag. Right wingers like to call this ‘virtue signaling’, and I don’t necessarily dispute the appropriateness of the label, though I do suspect the convenience of that buzz-term is a vice of its own. Whatever the purpose of the growing trigger-warning craze, I couldn’t help thinking then, as I do now, that the concept is subject to inflationary pressures.

As in, increased usage leads to decreased significance.

Where do you draw the line? I don’t know, but somewhere between a trigger warning fr sexual abuse and the many seemingly trivial uses I have seen over the years, the significance of these warnings does seem to change. Moreover, the expectation that someone ought to use trigger warnings, or that they must use them introduces a level of coercive authority into the equation. It wasn’t that long ago that a Dean at the University of Chicago denounced trigger warnings. In so doing, he clearly took them to be a mechanism for silencing those with whom one disagrees. But what about those who choose to use such warnings, some argued. Is that not permitted? And thus the renunciation of authority came  itself to be viewed as an assertion of authority, one itself worthy of denial. Who is oppressing whom and how is, it turns out, a bit more complicated than some would have it.

I guess I’m enough of an old fashioned liberal to want to have my free speech and use it too. I don’t like seeing efforts to silence speakers at public universities in the name of safe spaces, and that isn’t because I’m a fan of people like Milo Yiannopoulos. What I really don’t like is watching the careers people like that flourish as a direct result of the explosive outrage they specialize in …triggering. People like that have nothing to say, and they need the spectacle of outrage to provide the illusion of substance. I’d rather answer them. I would rather make the case against them, at least when that case can be made without fear and intimidation coming from the other side. I have seen right wingers drown out their critics, and I wouldn’t tolerate it. Lately though, a number of right wing sources have come to relish moments in which the left appears to be doing the same thing.

…is doing the same thing.

That too should not be tolerated, not the least of reasons being that it’s exactly what some of these hacks want from us.

This brings me back to the whole inflationary pressures thing. If the left wing over-uses trigger warnings, I think the same can be said of the right.

…well the ‘trigger’ part anyway, not so much the ‘warning’ part.

Time and again, I see folks respond to an argument for social justice by claiming its proponent has been triggered. Hell, I’ve gotten the response myself a time or ten, sometimes when I am more amused than agry. It’s fascinating to me, to see this cry of victory. As often as not, the signs of stress just aren’t there, or if they are, they are present to exactly the degree that one might expect from anyone else upon expressing disagreement. Yet, those proclaiming their opponents have been ‘triggered’ seem to hope those opponents are wallowing in distress, or at least they seem to enjoy pretending that is the case.

This is of course the hope of a troll, and it isn’t much worthy of anyone who claims to be advancing a serious point of view on any subject. But I suppose it does help to confound the issues, to ensure that no-one ever does take a trigger warning seriously. Still, I can’t help thinking for some it appears to be an end in itself, the prospect of making someone else feel bad.

If the notion of a trigger has lost some of its value in overuse by those on the left, it’s losing even more value as playground conservatives transform the term into a trophy of sorts. If they have their way, the public will be incapable of distinguishing between the psychological traumas experienced by some when dealing with sensitive issues and the irritation others feel upon realizing someone is wrong on the internet. This isn’t really conservatism, of course. There is nothing conservative about mocking women over their looks, disabled persons, victims of crime, or even minorities for pleading their own case in the public eye. Conservative politics may be resistant to a number of efforts at correcting social harms, but the growing orgy of right wing schadenfreude is an altogether different animal. Some people really do hope to inflict suffering on others.

To them a trigger warning is a symbol of hope.

It’s a hope I would see them denied.

Love as a Decoy and Ducks as a Many-Layered Narrative

26 Thursday Dec 2013

Posted by in Politics, Religion

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phil-robertson-getty-gospel-according-to-phil-gq-magazineIf I does it, I get a whippin’.

I does it!

At least I should get a whippin’ for posting about this already tired story, but what the duck! I have a few words to tap out over Phil Robertson’s interview with GQ Magazine.

For me, the most striking thing about the recent dust-up over the Duck Dynasty star is a recurrent theme of decoys and deceptions, perhaps even self-deception. In the GQ article, the author’s (Drew Magary) focuses on one prominent theme about the show itself, the role of Duck Dynasty in a message of redemption. That message begins (at least chronologically) with Phil Robertson’s own transformation from an drunken, abusive, and neglectful husband and father to an upstanding head of a household filled righteous dignity. The message will end, so we are told when Duck Dynasty has run its course and Phil is free to make his ministry into a full-time occupation – barring breaks for duck-hunting of course. For Magary, the real story of Duck Dynasty is one of personal redemption. The beards, the ducks, and all the rest are but flavor for that story.

And suddenly it seems ever-so fitting that a man who has made his living off a device intended to lure ducks in for hunters might have used a show to lure in the audience for a sermon on how to live one’s life. The intent itself seems a little bit more benign, at least at this level, but it is still very much a false-front operation. And fair enough, as far as it goes. The Robertson family certainly doesn’t hide their beliefs in the show, and yet they have surrounded themselves with artifice. A family of well-costumed men, playing out a series of scripted scenarios; this is the same sort of pap television has been selling as ‘reality’ for some time now. Even the apparently rustic backwater home is carefully engineered to maintain just the sort of rustic lifestyle this opponent of modern technology wants to live and to show us on television.  Phil’s faith may be one of the most sincere features of the show, wrapped as it is in a facade of down-home-ish nonsense. So, I suppose it is fitting, almost noble, that Phil would hope the success of Duck Dynasty might in the end furnish him with a means to do something more substantive.

***

There isn’t much reason to doubt that Phil is serious about his core message, about the role of Christ in redemption as he sees it. After all, Christianity was central to his own transformation, a transformation that does indeed seem to have been quite dramatic. In assuming that the road to redemption is the same path the rest of us must ultimately take, he is hardly out of step with the mainstream Christian practice. For Robertson, his troubled pas is what comes of sin, and Jesus is the only answer to those problems, just as he would be for the rest of us. This is where his message begins to chafe. The major controversies in this story begin when Phil explains what it will take to go down the path towards Jesus. The tricky parts of the trail would seem to include the following:

It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.

.

Phil On Growing Up in Pre-Civil-Rights-Era Louisiana
‘I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.’

I should say at this point that I am at least a little concerned about the context behind Magary’s presentation of the racial politics. I am currently taking the block above at face value, though the quote itself does not contain a direct reference to segregation era politics. Magary fills that in himself with a heading for the block quote on the subject. If Robertson didn’t mean to address that particular topic with these comments, then I shall have to revise my thinking on that particular point.

[Robertson]Everything is blurred on what’s right and what’s wrong,” he says. “Sin becomes fine.”

[Magary]What, in your mind, is sinful?

[Robertson]’Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,’ he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: ‘Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers–they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.’

For conservative Christians, this is pretty standard fare. Phil is preaching a gospel of self-reliance and upstanding moral conduct. The power of this message can be seen in the narrative of Phil’s own life, and many conservative Christians will no doubt claim it can be seen in their own lives as well. Ultimately, they might suggest, what Phil is offering is salvation, not condemnation, and that is surely a message of love.

Who could deny that message? Who could reject that love?

It should be added that much of the conservative Christian defense of Phil Robertson (including the family’s own public statement on the matter) has centered on the notion that his views are essentially Biblical in nature. To reject his views one is, so the implication would seem, to reject the Bible. And who could deny that?

Well, I’ll be your huckleberry.

***

duck-dynasty-gq-magazine-january-2014-01More to the point, there is a great deal more than scripture in Phil’s views, and his chosen horribles (welfare dependence and homosexual behavior) are not dictated by scripture. They are dictated by the politics of modern conservatism.

That Phil denies the horrors of Jim Crow is particularly telling, and particularly disturbing. Perhaps he didn’t see anyone mistreat a black man (though I suspect it more likely that he didn’t recognize it when he did, or that he simply won’t admit it); but Phil goes beyond his personal experience to suggest that blacks were better off in the days of segregation. The notion that Jim Crow was not-so-bad and that welfare is an absolute evil are both hallmarks of modern conservatism. One can no doubt cobble-together a scriptural argument or three on this topic, but that is the way the genre works. It’s a big book, and one can find a broad range of ideas in there, especially is he is fast and loose with the particulars. In point of fact, Robertson’s views on this point are those of the Republican party.

Regarding homosexuality, we may begin by noting that Robertson does not merely say that it is sinful; he uses it as the paradigm case of sinfulness, even going so far as to suggest that other forms of sin can be understood as transformations of homosexuality. This too is a modern pre-occupation, and it is a telling one. I still remember my days on christianforums.com, back when it was the largest Christian forum on the net. The biggest divisions on that forum were not those between Catholic and Protestant or even between Christian and non-Christian. No, the defining battles of that forum were fought over homosexuality and its significance for membership, moderation, and its user-iconography. For all the richness of Christian traditions, and all the varieties of life commitments Christians can make, in the public sphere the dividing line between Christian and non-Christian is today first and foremost a question of how one views homosexuality. This foregrounding of the issue does not come from scripture, much less from Jesus; it is a function of modern politics.

Conservative Christians have employed a great variety of means to argue the point about homosexuality, some plausible, many outright ignorant or deceitful. But what do we get from Phil? In this interview, we get a sermon on the aesthetic benefits of a vagina. The Bible is a big book, but I somehow doubt that is in there. More to the point, I doubt that is where Phil got his thoughts on that particular matter.

There is something particularly disturbing, almost pornographic, about the way some homophobes talk about mechanics of anal sex. The notion that anal sex is somehow-the go-to moment for questions about the meaning of homosexuality is hardly obvious. It misses questions about oral and digital sex, anal sex occurring in straight couples, and (I believe) the vast majority of acts occurring between lesbian couples. It is by no means obvious that this is the sex act of choice for gay men either. And all of this ignores the larger questions of love and the formation of relationships, be they fleeting or long-lasting. Still, one finds folks like Phil meditating on the act of anal sex as if it is the key to the whole issue. That’s just a little creepy.

Did I say that the interest was almost pornographic? Let’s just delete the ‘almost’!

The bottom line is that there is a great deal worth objecting to in Phil’s comments, and much of it simply does not come from the Bible so much as the Republican play book. Small wonder that Phil tells us he voted for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama. Fair enough, he may vote for whomever he wishes, but his stated reason is pathetic (I’ll leave it to y’all to look it up in the article). But I’ve already spent too long on the details, which have been hashed over dozens of times in other posts.

Coming to the point of the matter, what I hear from conservative Christians on this subject is that this is not a message of hatred; it is a message of love and redemption. I can even see a certain case for this, or at least the outlines of a consistent narrative. Phil isn’t saying these things to be hurtful, so the argument goes; he is saying them because he believes that people need Christ in order to overcome the terrible consequences of a life of sin. What looks like condemnation is in fact, so the argument goes, righteous criticism, all part of an effort to help people find the right path. That right path is of course the one Phil has followed, and the one we must all follow. To describe all of this as hatred or cruelty would seem to be a deliberate misreading of the man’s intent.

This is all well enough, providing that one accepts Phil’s narrative at face value, providing one accepts at face value that the horrors Phil is calling out really are horrors. If they are not, then it is a perverse comfort to hear that he is offering hope of salvation. It is hardly a token of love and affection to follow baseless attacks with assertions of hope for change. And herein lies the heartbreaking feature about all this rhetoric; it asks us to simply accept the premise that homosexuality is evil without any evidence (or with the scant evidence of scriptures, many of which are poorly understood by those citing them). Failing that it asks us to accept at face value that Christians believe this premise at least, and to measure their own actions in the light of this belief. Thus, does a premise wholly without foundation become a given for purposes of the conversation about homosexuality, and the intent of people spreading genuinely harmful messages rises to a height beyond reproach. The love in this sort of sermon thus becomes the perfect cover for a harmful message, and its human source is hidden behind a Godly facade.

It does not add to the case for Phil’s love and compassion that his thoughts on the subject would stretch to a defense of segregation or pornographic meditations on other people’s sex lives. This is not merely a reflection of Godly thought; it is perfectly human, and to many of us perfectly contemptible.

This kind of love feels an awful lot like hatred. It looks like hatred, it sounds like hatred, and it smells like hatred. All the talk of love and redemption does little to change this impression, nor does do much to change the impact of such messages on the actual world. Countless African-Americans suffered through life under the system that Phil appears to be defending, and high suicide rate among those of homosexual persuasion alone is enough to give the lie to the distinction between sin and sinner. You simply cannot condemn the most basic elements of a person’s sex drive and then say; “no harm done, I love you.”

It just doesn’t work.

***

The aftermath of the interview is interesting enough. We all know that A&E suspended Phil. Well, maybe not all of us. The folks at Fox seem to think A&E declared war on Christianity, but of course they also think there is a war on Christmas. Note to Fox: if you want an example of an actual war incited by media, y’all can look at Iraq and the propaganda that you used to sell that disaster. Sarah Palin and hoards of similarly illiterate people (et tu Joe Perry)  have hyped this as a free speech issue, thus throwing yet another decoy out into the pond. It has since come to light that Palin did not actually read the interview in question, but I suppose it should come as no surprise to anyone that she didn’t read something or that this fact did not prevent her from commenting on the matter.

4272972928376089539More to the point, this simply isn’t a free speech issue, nor is it an issue of A&E silencing Christians, as many have pretended. It looks to me like A&E has been giving this particular Christian a forum for 5 years. Phil Robertson is certainly free to preach his message, just as he has done before (and it should be noted his actually a very skilled public speaker). Just like the rest of us, he must bear the consequences of his own speech, and if that includes trouble with his employers, then this is part of the price of freedom.

For those of us not privy to the negotiations going on behind the scenes, it is unclear as to whether or not A&E ever intended to keep Phil off the show permanently, but for the moment is appears that Phil’s supporters have enough weight to put Phil back on the show and the Robertson family back in the Cracker Barrel. Whether it because of greater numbers of greater passion, they appear to be winning the battle over Phil’s presence on the show. But this battle too is not what meets the eye. It simply is not a battle over free speech; it is a battle over the thoughts and ideas Phil actually communicated in that speech. Simply put, the vast majority of Phil’s supporters are not merely defending his right to say what he wants; they are endorsing his message itself

Is that a message of love?

Sure it is.

It is about as authentic as a duck call made from a blind.

Against Tolerance

17 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by in Politics

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“Tolerance?” Yep, I’m agin’ it!

…or at least certain rhetorical uses of the term.

Let’s start with the most obvious, and perhaps the most important example in contemporary American politics, tolerance of homosexuality. People often invoke the value of tolerance as a means of advancing acceptance of homosexuality. There is definitely some positive value to this approach, but the stratagem has at least two major flaws.

Problem 1: Apparent contradiction. The typical response here is to say that those pushing tolerance of homosexuality often show themselves to be intolerant of those who are intolerant of homosexuality. (Yes, that’s a serious double-negative maze in there, but you can manage it, I know you can.) Simply put, some people advocating tolerance really are too quick to attack cultural conservatives (particularly evangelical Christians) in personal and inappropriate ways. And if there are reasonable ways  to advocate tolerance for homosexuals while remaining critical of its critics, well, let us just say that an awful lot of people are too tone deaf to notice the necessary distinctions.

Problem 2: The Open Door Defense. I first noticed this problem when I heard someone claim to be tolerant of blacks. I just could not get my mind past the notion that there was anything about African Americans that needed tolerating. And therein lies the problem; at least one way of construing the term in question suggests that the person to be tolerated has actually done something wrong, something that will require a gesture of goodwill, even mercy, if they are not to be condemned in some manner. I think most people see this implication quite clearly in most uses of the term, and I think that is precisely why we do not normally ask for tolerance of blacks? Jews? Mexicans? …or people from New Jersey. We don’t normally ask people to tolerate different ethnic groups, precisely because that’s a rather damning defense of them.

If you are serious about defending the rights of minorities, then an appeal to tolerance is not how you would go about it. So, why is this continually the go-to principal for defense of homosexuality?

Tolerance is what one grants to kids that are acting up, to drunks that are getting loud, or to obnoxious customers when one is unfortunate enough to work in customer service. Tolerance is what one extends to people, not because they deserve it, but because you are feeling especially generous today (or when the boss is paying you to accept fecal input without complaint).

And therein lies the liver of this problem. Lots of people ‘tolerate’ homosexuality. …which is to say that they don’t scream and point, or get out a baseball bat when they see folks of homosexual orientation. They might not even fire a gay or bisexual worker at the first sign of good fashion sense, and that is the extent of their tolerance. And some folks congratulate themselves on their lack of violent and overt hostility. They think they are doing very well because they don’t attack or openly condemn homosexuals, at least not literally. But of course the very logic of tolerance suggests that they reserve the option to do so. …to express their disapproval if and when the mood strikes them.

Tolerance is what one extends to others out of personal largess. It’s a kindness one does for others when one isn’t feeling a little left of their own mind on any given day. This kind gesture goes to the glory of the one doing the tolerating, not the person tolerated. The object of toleration is, in a sense, demeaned by the implication that he requires this treatment for one reason or another.

Tolerance is a gift, and the problem is the gift is given or not given at the whim of the giver.

Advocating tolerance is like asking people to be nice. Folks may or they may not go along with it, but the request does little to foster the notion that there is anything obligatory about the matter. Granted, a willingness to accept people as they really are might be implied somewhere in notion, and that’s a damned fine value if someone truly embraces it. But for every individual that truly takes that message to heart there are many more who learn by the virtue of ‘tolerance’ to set their jaws and be quiet, sit an extra chair over from the offending party and go about their business, or just generally let it slide …for now.

As a substantive agenda, this is begging for scraps. And it’s settling for a truce while the enemy keeps his guns pointed. (…yes, we can produce additional metaphors, but you get the idea.)

I’d rather enter the debate with a little more muscle. To the degree that this is a public issue at all, it is an issue that involves rights. And rights are not asked for. They are not requested, and they are not presented as optional. One does not prove oneself to be an exceptionally good person by recognizing the rights of another. It is expected.

Rights are demanded. One should not be asking folks, for example, to tolerate a homosexual in the work place; one should be making it clear that mistreatment is not an option. It is not that someone would be nicer if they didn’t condemn the gay friend at a social outing; they should be informed clearly that doing so will not be …tolerated.

Told you I was against tolerance.