people seem to think i buried the lead, even though this is not what i think is most important. so here is bunch from late in the post below, also now expanded yet again.
you know, i sat in an american society for aesthetics session and literally listened to someone, jim carney, read back a paper i wrote and sent him a couple of months before. i just talked to him outside; he purported to have a neurological disorder. you know when something like that happens, it strikes you that if you just happened to hear that there might be others. never tried to check. here's what i told myself: i've got plenty to go around, and i am opposed to intellectual property (although definitely not opposed to crediting your sources, particularly if one of those sources is the author of your paper). i think i actually emailed semi-politely with carney after that. after a couple he asked me what i was working on, would i send it along? he promised, not this time! neurological disorder! ever since then, the asa has been consistently rejecting my papers or any panel i was associated with. odd, when at least in my opinion i have done as much and as good aesthetics as anyone.
alexander nehamas was also a friend of danto's. our books on beauty have the same epigraph, i'm assuming (well, sort of hoping) that he gave it to us both. nehamas writes to revive a more erotic, desire-based conception of beauty, just precisely what i had done for routledge 5 years before, without the elitist obfuscation and excruciating taste. also infinitely less pretentiously and more beautifully. i found this out the hard way when i ordered the thing sight unseen (i think on danto's recommendation) for my beauty course. oh yeah we both published books titled the art of living. let me see if i get this right? mine was 1993 from suny after going through several publishers. his was 2000 from harvard (oops i checked it: california, as low as alexander nehamas ever sank on the publishing pecking order), ecstatically received. let me see, what is his academic position? he does read greek, though. i had concluded long before his book appeared that 'the art of living' was a lame title, so go for it, man. go try to find a single review of mine, though. wrong publisher? definitely, but thank the good lord for suny press. in mine, i actually gave a new theory of art. now it needed some refinements, but it got the spirit of what art is.
another thing i'll add to the nehamas case: the position was definitely not danto's, had hardly been part of the literature since burke. suddenly there it was twice. i am an expert on that. now i'm thinking i should take each sentence of that stanford article and put it into jstor and see what comes back. but however, i don't really care that much! i think i actually literally threw the thing away, but i don't think i was in the index, which is just insane. i do wonder whether only a promise of happiness won any awards? you could xerox them and send them on. i will whiteout his name and put my own, and comfort myself with them.
oh yes, just for the hell of it, i invented the swamping problem - which, i'm told, is one of the major problems of contemporary epistemology and also a decisive refutation of reliabilism - in cargile's epistemology seminar in 1987. the first thing i did with it was refute reliabilism. i think that one's in a box under my house. B+ dude. are you beginning to get the picture? i couldn't get the book in which i did that, which would have been my first book, published, put it on amazon decades later. at publisher after publisher they sent it to the people who had already laughingly, with such bad arguments, slapped me down. right. william lycan. that's when i quit epistemology. i tried to catch up a bit. i think the swamping problem revolutionized epistemology when linda zagzebski invented it in the late nineties. i am in the footnotes. very same paper. but not in the swamping bit.
zagzebski's discussion is remarkably close recapitulation of mine, including the very same quotes trimmed the very same way. and she does footnote my paper, almost randomly: 'one person who denies this is.' but then it is completely palpable that her own presentation is a raw recapitulation of mine. and she has gotten credit for the swamping problem for all this time. looking at it squarely, it's pretty bold, obvious academic misconduct.
i will also say this: in some sense the swamping problem was my central contribution to epistemology, one of the best ideas i ever had. it turned out to be a major contribution to epistemology. but it has been credited entirely to zagzebski. the movement to the style of theory of beauty in 6 names of beauty is certainly, in my mind, my central contribution to aesthetics. nehamas has been extremely widely celebrated for it; myself far less so. that will tick a professor off! and then to se it happen with different figures, different disciplines: it really makes you wonder what else is out there. and it really drives you to despair, actually.
by that time, i guess, i was so dead in academic philosophy that people just felt free. well, nature needs carrion feeders, too. i comfort myself with the fact that i am a much better writer than nehamas or zagzebski, which admittedly is like saying you're taller than marco rubio. not carney, though. we are equals. what happens when in an exploratory way you email alexander nehamas or linda zagzebski, both saying and not saying you are biting me. we should connect! our work is so similar! we work on the same issues! well, i'm not sure exactly what happens; i only know you will never get a reply.
the purpose of this entry was not to level accusations. but now it is. so i will begin the documentation project. to begin with i am talking about these two papers:
here is one extremely telling moment. in quite the same discussion, at quite the same point, we quote bonjour. her:
The basic role of justification is that of a means to truth, a more directly attainable mediating link between our subjective starting point and our objective goal. . . .If epistemic justification were not conducive to truth in this way, if finding epistemically justified beliefs did not substantially increase the likelihood of finding true ones, then epistemic justification would be irrelevant to our main cognitive goal and of dubious worth. It is only if we have some reason for thinking that epistemic justification constitutes a path to truth that we as cognitive beings have any motive for preferring epistemically justified beliefs to epistemically unjustified ones. Epistemic justification is therefore in the final analysis only an instrumental value, not an intrinsic one. (BonJour 1985, 7–8)14
me:
If epistemic justification were not conducive to truth in this way, if finding epistemically justified beliefs did not substantially increase the likelihood of finding true ones, then epistemic justification would be irrelevant to our main cognitive goal and of dubious worth. It is only if we have some reason for thinking that epistemic justification constitutes a path to truth that we as cognitive beings have any motive for preferring epistemically justified beliefs to epistemically unjustified ones. Epistemic justification is therefore in the final analysis only an instrumental value, not an intrinsic one. (ibid. p. 8)
she's quoting bonjour, not me. but this just makes it obvious, alright? i quoted the same passage in my very first published presentation in american philosophical quarterly, april 1991, making the very same argument. any philosopher will see that part. i use it almost casually to attack reliabilsm on page 162. it is a decisive refutation of reliabilism; only i have ever recognized that until zabgzebski put her name on it. i had much more, even liable to be in the unpublished book. many other resemblances will appear if you look at the papers. keep in mind publications, dates, etc.
let me address to you a question: how does a profession publish an article in arguably its top journal, then a raw plagiarism of it in metaphilosophy and no one sees it? tip of an infinite iceberg? y'all don't seem particularly attentive. how can i be discovering this a quarter century later?
these same big names who regarded my work as ridiculous regarded hers as revolutionary. take a searching and fearless moral inventory is my advice to your. scholarly too. where was robert audi? where was paul moser? where the fuck was laurence bonjour, alvin goldman? i was sure under the impression they were reading everything in this area at the time. they were trying to project that about themselves when they all gathered in a single room at the apa and put me down forever, after which this idiotic knowledge is merely true belief thing was over. they didn't even notice that i won the argument. there should be reparations, like when you wrongly condemn a man to life imprisonment. over and over and over (see entry below).
i hate to say it, i think a lot of her work rests on this argument. it is absolutely my argument. perhaps i'll let other people evaluate later papers? or even this one, more thoroughly if they need to. in a way i can hardly bear to read it. this is enough, it seems to me.
i'm taking back what i said earlier about not a clear case of plagiarism.
i took these one by one at the time, just kind of decided not to let shit like this obsess me and turn me from the next project. but looking at it all together (there might be some more questionable cases in my mind), it is rather disturbing. obviously what i'm saying about nehamas and zagzebski is right there on the surface; it hardly needs any documentation. (well, i would have to show that my paper does indeed formulate the swamping problem. best procedure: read it.) the nehamas does not constitute straightforward plagiarism. it is possible (to my mind, barely possible) that it constitutes a striking set of coincidences. the carney would be a bit harder. maybe i have old discs with the emails, or maybe there's a recording of the session. i certainly talked a lot to people about that there. i think danto? one context or another for sure. no help. i think arnold berleant? (we both eventually got purged from the asa as insufficiently kantian.) plus jim carney was never worth a big hassle in any respect.
and look i never went and tried to find out what was out there, though some things hit you between the eyes. for one reason or another, such things might make you never go to a conference again, like you don't know who you might see and how it might go from there. sadly i am no necro. there definitely are plenty of other reasons not to go to conferences, though, like that all the people hate you and despise your work.
on the other hand, i should be proud to add my talent to the collective. i have been a resource for some of the most eminent philosophers in the world; seems like they might sort of be impossible without me. it's like being kant in the 19th century. footnotes would help, though.
note to the apa. the thing that actually got me to just decide to quit academia was the anti-bullying thing. and that was what made me decide to write the entry below, which began to expand into this. i think you may see what bullying really is pretty quick.
obviously, from the posts nearby, i am in a hyper-intense process of actually experiencing my whole life, which can seem way too dangerous while it's happening. you might not think so, but i am also doing this from a place of happiness and peace: first time in my life. it has been hard up here in my head, whatever it may have looked like on a given day. one thing i've realized. i actually do want out of academia, whether i get disciplined over that post etc or not. it has never given me damn thing except continuous restrictions, tests where i really had to bow and scrape and beg and falsify myself, myriad meaningless hoops that have distracted me from learning and writing, loving and living, a thousand times where i smiled and pretended to agree with things that i had already decisively refuted, that were entirely incompatible with my belief system. i could do the whole story, but just, you know, look me up on amazon or in the philosophers' index and then realize that my career has ended me as an associate professor at a small liberal arts college.
i don't need these fuckers to write. in fact, i need to get rid of these fuckers if i'm going to write at my best. there is no reason that a convenience-store clerk with my background shouldn't publish a new system of philosophy. that would certainly, certainly, obviously, be a more credible system than one produced by an associate professor. not that i'm quitting monday of course: still a chickenshit at heart! trying to see what other plans might be out there. to philosophy professors (i've got some nice exceptions, but i'm going to skip them): fuck all y'all, you fucking mediocrities.
no one ever took my political positions seriously, even if i literally proved them decisively over and over. all they knew: you disagree with us. you must be a republican=incomprehensible monster=fascist. you are a threat to our completely irrational consensus. we will have to confront that about ourselves unless we can open up your job to a national search, hire someone else, and put them in your office for the year we'll let you linger.
i tried to make it part of my little act: oh i just disagree with everyone because that's what i do. it's pathological! no, son, it's because i started trying to read everything and think this through seriously and responsibly when i was twelve. i knew what i thought about a lot of stuff, and i had my basic orientation, by the time i went to grad school. i fully expected many people to agree with me about many things, or to be able to persuade some, or to be persuaded. none of that ever happened whatsoever. the only question was: what is the most powerful group, so we can conform to its opinions? the most powerful group was definitely never me.
i'm serious about this: this is what the profession you have made is like: there can immense, career-defining social pressure on you to accept a particular theory of truth. never mind whether it's obviously wrong. or take this approach: i've got my own theory of truth! then you are incomprehensible and subject to universal ostracism. is that, on reflection, where you want this thing that plato started or whatever to fetch up? too late, it has. disband.
i swear to god i would just sit here and type in a list of names. but even now maybe i'm not really wanting to look at every detail. and reallly, only nixons or clintons make actual enemies' lists. sadly, my enemies coincide with my friends, mentors, and so on. that would not be your ideal professional context. i bet a good convenience store is pretty pleasant! the staff is struggling, but maybe the smiles, when they come, are honest smiles.
i resisted, but then i didn't really have a career. that's why. but i did also compromise every time in ways that felt, every time, like terrible self-betrayals. looking back on it, academia never gave me anything but torture, but of course i could have hopped off at any time; it was me groveling. i came to despise myself in the process, even as i desperately hung on. amazing how your kids' health insurance or tuition can compromise your whole life. not blaming them though; the choice to stick through the ridiculous pc abuse and so on was mine. so, now i am contemplating other possibilities. been a long time since i tried anything else. but this academic thing has been for me nothing but isolating, meaningless psychic destruction. they tried to destroy me intellectually too, hour by hour for decades since i arrived. i am really extremely proud that i held on to that part. those are pretty honest, voicey books. that's why you can't read them, little bitch.
i arrived at tenure in my mid-fifties, and despised myself for needing it even then. you would not believe how hard i want to not need anything from you. but actually, i didn't need that at all; i was under some delusion. i came right up on the edge of not having a job next year several times. it was like a miracle that something came through in june or whatever. hard to tell the miracles of god from the miracles of satan sometimes. those were moments when i had been completely abandoned; all i had to do was abandon you right back. it would have been easy. i do not know what i could possibly have been thinking.
i never lost a job, i believe, except because i wouldn't join a party, or i said something a feminist might construe as objectifying or something. they leave you speculating at the time, but sometimes you learn what happened. i believe i lost the job i really wanted at vanderbilt (true, true, i desperately loved nashville), because of my crazed, palpable anti-semitism. they did not give me a chance to say meet my great grandfather. on my mother's side. they missed my daughter's bat mitzvah. somewhere in the process i picked up the outlines. i hope i managed to convey that i was jewish. then it was sort of: we learn to hate ourselves in our oppression; sometimes jews are the biggest anti-semites! not talking about you, of course...but they did hear one of the counter-examples i used in my job talk, and were retraumatized from the holocaust. that's 1992, y'all. much worse now. the next month, the same paper appeared in the journal of philosophy. the first version was written for a graduate epistemology seminar. prof thought it was amusing, gave it a B+. the next semester i was in the chair's office begging for an extension of my assistanceship. i see what i'm doing wrong! i'll do better! then i just went on trying to work my voice or opinions into something that could possibly get me out of here. i borrowed 60k, to live with a young family. i have been paying monthly since 1990. i owe 27. then when i went to get a mortgage in 2012...
i wrote three completely separate book-length manuscripts under rorty. it took awhile, though i am the fastest, easiest writer you ever saw. [overall comment on my first draft (i've got em all with his comments of course): notably well written. that was definitely the high point, though he was generous and fast getting stuff back with elaborate comments, ( he did it on the plane as he went to debate his old buddy, jurgen haberas; right when i knew him he was at his most meteoric rise), and always like a deeply sweet man. he was a pretty damn good writer for a philosopher (egads i have spent my whole life reading literally some of the worst writing our species has every produced, both the classics and, most excruciatingly, the average release from oxford. then you get to the end and it does not amount to a hill of beans.) anyway, that was enough to keep me going through the next draft; i might have cared more about that than anything.]
let's say he brought more critical acuity to attacks on than to defenses of him. although most of the attacks were in fact silly, or just rage or 'you said the wrong thing'. swear to god he loved them; he was working on contingency, irony, solidarity when i was working with him. one day in the middle of lunch the phone rang and he said 'hold on a second', then he launched into an elaborate description of the project and a lovely assessment of where his work was at and how wildly it was changing, and how he was so far beyond mirror of nature, ready to kill the world. i did not know what he was actually working on at the time. it took me literally 15 minutes to spin out that it was richard bernstein. ok, not a lot of grad students get that experience! then he's off and i started arguing with him about this 'literary turn' nonsense. he did not respond to my attacks except to give me the in-process bibliography. i read it all. i can't find that one! i must have chucked it when i was done.
one thing he did: read aloud a couple of the most vicious criticisms of himself, which were on his desk, as he and bernstein cackled.
the first paper i really published, a couple of years before the degree, was an attack on arthur danto in the journal of asethetics and art criticism. he wrote me back an amazing hand-written letter, which i also don't have, patiently explaining how i had misinterpreted him, and also seriously working some of the points. then he asked if i ever came to new york. imagine this now! when i saw him, i pressed my case. i still think he was obviously wrong, or just straight wacky. that's how we connected. wait am i absolutely sure i don't have it? i had misinterpreted him in important ways, as it turned out over the years, and he withdrew a number of overbold or unsupportable formulations in the face of my years-long critique. both of us came out believing fundamentally what we believed going in. also, we came out friends. every time i asked him for a blurb or a letter i hesitated, sometimes i just left him out. i didn't want him to think i had been working him. i hadn't been.
when danto died, i had this unbecoming thought, which i shared with everyone but philosophy professors: well, now there is no doubt who is the best writer among philosophy professors. maybe i doubted that '95, but it was so danto; it took me awhile to read it all. honestly, he told me exactly that after i effusively praised his writings all the time, but i couldn't quite tell if he was serious. he was a generous man, had many friends, allies, proteges, etc at any given moment. damn that kept me for some years, though, either way. when randy auxier (right i will introduce a couple of allies) came to me for a piece in the library of living philosophers, he wanted a paper about sex. thought i'd be perfect. i just sent him an essay on danto the writer. i'd poured it out to danto years ago over dinner, but i'm better if you let me edit for a few minutes.
anyway, lord the rort had some critical acuity when he wasn't just shrugging at an auditorium full of people. he kicked my ass all day every day for what? like six years. in doing that, he showed me exactly what the highest level really was, what you had to know to toss off apparently casual provocations, how much machinery was underneath his performance art. i had been reading harder than anyone i ever knew since i started. i didn't hardly see how knowing what he knew was even possible. but i knew it would take me a long time. he actually hated academic philosophy. ('yo dick, i found something we agree on! carnap was totally wrong!' a: 'yup and he was kind of seeing that partly when i studied with him.' heavens!) i have never even told some of these stories, because at meetings people only wanted to confront me about rorty and how stupid he was. then they didn't hear it when i said: stupid? whatever, dude. definitely wrong though. ok you can be in our group! but you make no sense. yes i do, man, i am a disciple of richard rorty.
my best friend was a junior prof, and on my committee (well, i was 30). rorty: 'if we don't let this one go, he'll just write another.' that, i am told, was more or less the entirety of the meeting after my defense. and that assessment, i'm also told, was reflected in his letter for me, long since abandoned on the road by pointed advice, never seen. i never wanted to publish anything from my dissertation or see it again. i swore i would, if nothing else, write the way i wanted for the rest of my life. i have come pretty close. but i have paid a hideous price. i thought he'd kind of despise the followers who were trying to get him on their committee. but i thought i was emulating him: bold provocateur, bad boy of philosophy. i thought he'd see himself in me as soon as i started disagreeing with him; just the right person to carry on. but at least i did really disagree with him: each iteration was an attempt to subtilize, deepen, make irrefutable the critique. all indirectly, of course. i didn't mention him except in the effusive acknowledgements. i did try to destroy some of his heroes - gadamer, for instance - on aesthetic matters: the image, representation, realism in the visual arts. i was not ready to do that with any effectiveness.
while i am doing that, hans-georg gadamer puts in a surprise appearance in rorty's seminar. we watched as rorty and gadamer sparred with absolute pleasure over rorty's interpretation of gadamer. it started 'dick! sounds great! makes sense! you've got me completely wrong!' rorty laughed until i thought he'd cry, maybe a high point of his life, come to think of it.
now i am richard rorty. man you definitely don't know what that takes. and you definitely don't know what that takes when you're working at six different schools with no sabbaticals, not a single person who agrees with you about anything, and no support or social back-up at all. i hit it between 52 and 54, while in the middle of the most absurd meaningless academic nightmare of my career, during which i got tenure somehow. big new theories of all sorts of things were falling into my hands like plums from the tree i'd planted. it'll all be in entanglements, but i'm afraid i set this off just as the contract is set to be executed. it was an excruciating period, and an ecstatic one, the first attributable only to you, the second only to me. i don't care whether you read it. anyway, he's dead; it was oedipal; ok we heard a grad student say that! rorty punched me in the ribs. who cares? well i still do. i knew i could get where i am now as a philosopher if i never stopped writing, reading, working. (i am actually not a particularly fast reader.)
i thought he'd be delighted by my disagreement. he was, intermittently; we ended up having the best philosophical debates i ever had, through seminars, convention appearances, dozens of one-on-one hours. one thing he did clearly let me know: i was no robert brandom. my first vague hint was sitting at the big meeting with the pile of paper = second dissertation. he looked up at me with his oddly shy smile and said 'well, you're no robert brandom.' ok just going to admit it, i've been reading robert brandom enviously ever since. i think i've never footnoted him? vengeance is mine! i'll give him that. but who is an rb? and rorty one way or another taught me an incredible amount. you might not know this but he was incredibly learned. how many times are you going to make me say it? in so many things. i was not going to win the argument when i was 25! and boy he killed that continental-analytic thing completely. i thought he'd also admire my wide-openness. i was really seriously trying to read everything as i worked on drafts, so i could kick his ass next time. i found all sorts of stuff to love on both sides. i'll always be incredibly grateful to richard rorty for myriad dimensions of my development, in other words. i think he was wrong about everything.
if you read my books with that in mind, you'll see that i probably turned that corner in end of story. it was really quickly written and kind of disintegrated at the end. but i definitely wasn't worried about actually refuting the view after that. or macyntire's, or ricouer's. they were, i thought, baldly false views, not seriously entertainable ( i had been killing them in my head for years; i wasn't really going to try the full 400 pager. no one was listening anyway.)
oh heavens i remember a number of good-natured but devastating arguments with macintyre over the years. gonna say i found the whole thing repulsive, and the writing is wretched, alright? he might have been the only one i actually knew who knew more than rorty or danto. i ambushed him at an apa. i had been teaching confucius in asian phil for undergrads. i had never heard him write about anything in that vicinity, plus i thought multi-culturalism was an objection to his position. dude he started drawing ideograms on napkins, explaining why lau's translation was faulty. he read chinese fluently!?
since dick's death there has been a reassesment of the man who came to be called both the best-known philosopher of the late twentieth century, and the person i fucking never heard anything positive said about until the tribute at the apa. but man, i will not hear reverence either. that is a deep betrayal. i have never heard anyone say anything positive about rorty (or not till whenever that was); i have never known how to talk to people like you about him or my relation to him. i told my non-philosophical romantic partners or whatever. you didn't even want to know. there was no way i could talk about him honestly and make sense to you. but i have sat through three-hour banquets where people were ranting about how wrong he had dewey. the next morning, it's at the coffee table. how did i just not run or attack? after that gadamer thing, how do you take that? what if the senior person in what you take to be your field (mcdermott, to be precise) does that specifically in your face for years because...you were a student or rorty's? what is the response? all those years i tried a knowing smile. it was like i didn't even know rorty. and then i forgot some of these stories or repressed them because survival.
so say you were listening to people spit the worst sort of bile at your mentor/greatest enemy, and the most they got to was the first couple of things that had occurred to you that were too lame to even try on him? right on, brother? or do you expect me to sit here and engage in a defense? i have actually been caught in the vice at damn near every conference i have gone to since 1984 or whatever it was.
lord i'd love to sign off adios, see ya in the afterlife. dude there are five anarchist profs in the world or something. they kicked my out because i wasn't sufficiently bakuninist. well, even anarchist profs came through grad school; that's just what this thing is, soup to nuts. little cults, mindless social pressures brought to bear on your hyper-general theory of truth, are you continental or analytic: utterly meaningless claptrap that never helped anyone think about anything, but which many people have allowed to render them unfit to think at all. no one ever read my books because they were slightly unconventional, or because i was just obviously not the right sort of person. true. i am just obviously not the right sort of person. i see that clearly now.
i have been a professor of communications, political science, 'humanities,' 'art and art history.' not because i wanted to migrate disciplines, but because no philosophy department wanted me whatsoever. what in the world did i do it all for so desperately? good heavens, man!
i have loved and been close to many of my students. but undergraduates now are measurably, pollably, more totalitarian every week. if it doesn't happen next week it'll happen soon. boycotts of my classes, racial harassment charges, someone lobbing a bladder of pig's blood at my head (which, admittedly, i'd regard as an accomplishment). i'd like to stay and fight. but not against teenagers, you know? e.g. the editor of the school newspaper recently argued that 'make dickinson great again' on t-shirts (which she never even plainly asserted actually existed) was hate speech in virtue of its resemblance to a trump hat, and of course there is no place for hate speech on our ohsosafe campus. sorry, wrong planet!
there was never any place for me in academia; i knew that two weeks after i got to grad school. it's been ridiculous ever since. i kept thinking i had to find a niche, some support. every time i had a group, they extruded me because of what i regarded as a trivial or fun disagreement. every time i had a mentor, they straight ditched me because i disagreed with dewey's philosophy of history or something. you are not in any way truth-seekers, just peer pressurers and status seekers. you can dismiss me this way and that, but you have got to admit that i know your world as well as anyone. i certainly know what it is better than you do. anyway, that's how this got so entirely thoroughly false and boring.
you know, i sat in an american society for aesthetics session and literally listened to someone, jim carney, read back a paper i wrote and sent him a couple of months before. i just talked to him outside; he purported to have a neurological disorder. you know when something like that happens, it strikes you that if you just happened to hear that there might be others. never tried to check. here's what i told myself: i've got plenty to go around, and i am opposed to intellectual property (although definitely not opposed to crediting your sources, particularly if one of those sources is the author of your paper). i think i actually emailed semi-politely with carney after that. after a couple he asked me what i was working on, would i send it along? he promised, not this time! neurological disorder!
alexander nehamas was also a friend of danto's. our books on beauty have the same epigraph, i'm assuming he gave it to us both. nehamas writes to revive a more erotic, desire-based conception of beauty, just precisely what i had done for routledge 5 years before, without the elitist obfuscation and excruciating taste. also infinitely less pretentiously and more beautifully. i found this out the hard way when i ordered the thing sight unseen (i think on danto's recommendation) for my beauty course. oh yeah we both published books titled the art of living. let me see if i get this right? mine was 1993 from suny after going through several publishers. his was 2000 from harvard (oops i checked it: california, as low as alexander nehamas ever sank on the publishing pecking order), ecstatically received. let me see, what is his academic position? he does read greek, though. i had concluded long before his book appeared that 'the art of living' was a lame title, so go for it, man. go try to find a single review of mine, though. wrong publisher? definitely, but thank the good lord for suny press. in mine, i actually gave a new theory of art. now it needed some refinements, but it got the spirit of what art is.
oh yes, just for the hell of it, i invented the swamping problem - which, i'm told, is one of the major problems of contemporary epistemology and also a decisive refutation of reliabilism - in cargile's epistemology seminar in 1987. the first thing i did with it was refute reliabilism. i think that one's in a box under my house. B+ dude. are you beginning to get the picture? i couldn't get the book in which i did that, which would have been my first book, published, put it on amazon decades later. at publisher after publisher they sent it to the people who had already laughingly, with such bad arguments, slapped me down. right. william lycan. that's when i quit epistemology. i tried to catch up a bit. i think the swamping problem revolutionized epistemology when linda zagzebski invented it in the late nineties. i am in the footnotes. very same paper. but not in the swamping bit.
by that time, i guess, i was so dead in academic philosophy that people just felt free. well, nature needs carrion feeders, too. i comfort myself with the fact that i am a much better writer than nehamas or zagzebski, which admittedly is like saying you're taller than marco rubio. not carney, though. we are equals. what happens when in an exploratory way you email alexander nehamas or linda zagzebski, both saying and not saying you are biting me. we should connect! our work is so similar! we work on the same issues! well, i'm not sure exactly what happens; i only know you will never get a reply.
it's amazing to me how the discussion of race keeps (to my ear) presupposing my early work on whiteness. but i think we're still a couple of years from realistic plagiarism, the point where people will be able to get it. i have admired george yancy's work, quoted it many times, contributed to his anthologies. i thought 'dear white america' was important. before this blew i was trying to say just that in a tls review of the stone reader thing. they love the review! can you take out the jokes? i also don't think he gets there without me, though that is certainly racially presumptuous, and you'll have to ask him about that. and i would, sincerely, recommend that you believe what he says. anyway, here is the actual paragraph, still under consideration?
The Stone began in 2010, and already many excellent pieces have appeared in it that might have come too late to make the volume, for example George Yancy's long series of interviews with various thinkers on race, and his own "Dear White America." I hope that the thing persists long enough to produce a series of volumes, perhaps focusing on sub-disciplines or particular issues in philosophy. Such a thing might indeed by an extremely useful text for a course on ethics, or philosophy of religion, or critical race theory. Given the blog's relative popularity, that is likely.
i haven't seen a philosophy book come out of american academic philosophy in twenty years that i really just flatly thought was good. [update! i just thought of a close one. philip pettit's republicanism.] (i review philosophy books, or i used to, for times literary supplement). what counts as originality is slight adjustments or refinements of the most famous two theories or your prof's work or something. i will give you one just unbelievable example, parfit's earth-shaking, gigantical whatever it was called, the greatest advance in ethics since epictetus: he has sort of shown that teleological and deontological ethics are not quite as incompatible as you may, for all i know, have thought they were. yeah, epictetus was trying to figure out how to live. alright, we abandoned such questions in 1923. but whatever a thousand-page synthesis of sidgwick and kant might be, it is definitely not original. on the other hand, it is completely unreadable. i read it anyway, lord knows how. on the other hand, you were right. it is breathtakingly, earth-shatteringly original in the context of the academic philosophy books in english of this period. i can't actually believe anyone thought it was that great, much less original, important, etc. well, stick the right name on it and people establish their credentials by competing in their absurd hyperbolical praise. if i had written that book, it would never have been heard from at all. i would have run it through every academic press, then self-published it on amazon, and it'd be ranked 3 trillion.
goddammit, i'll throw a paragraph at mica, a place that was beloved to me before i ever got there, having lived around the corner and fantasized the whole time about teaching philosophy to art students. they don't have tenure. they brought me in with the understanding that i was permanent and there were no issues, they were lucky to get me. i gave up my tenure track job teaching journalism and media studies and advising the school paper at penn state harrisburg. this is what i'd always wanted. then i re-wrote the academic curriculum, working it through dozens of different constituency groups and finally marching it through the board of trustees. well, then you alienate everybody, including the guy who hired you, chris shipley, because you tried to pry one of his absurdly over-inflated english credits and move it to social science. ok he's literally arguing that life is a story and so literature is obviously the only humanity. it was the worst parody of rorty i ever heard.
i was on campus the day after 9:11, and i had already recorded a spot for all things considered. they were looking for someone who would express any sort of anger, could not find one among their staff or usual contributors, i gather. (maybe my timeline is too compressed here, it must have been a few days.) i had been talking to my (now-deceased) brother jim, who was an unbelievabale cynic, raconteur, and artist of the hyperbole. 'i want to fly over the middle east and see nothing but piles of smoking rubble.' i started there. you know, i too want vengeance. in fact this distinction between justice and vengeance is complete horseshit, just a way of pretending you don't want revenge, or collectivizing responsibility, effectively offloading it from everyone entirely. i had three minutes, years of argument behind it. then i said: but even if it is legitimate to take vengeance, you are morally obliged to take your vengeance only precisely on the perpetrators. no burning rubble, my brother, without osama & co inside it. only them.
next day, a senior colleague in the hall (i have repressed the name, will dig up on request). said "that was disgusting!" the next words out his mouth were 'osama is a freedom fighter!' i felt a marked cooling toward me and rallying around him after that. then for whatever evil political reason, they put my job to a national search. i did six names of beauty as the talk, just or soon-to-published. i was easily obviously exponentially the best scholar at the place. anyway, it defines beauty as 'the object of longing.' then i put up my childhood crush emma peel. then i went on to buntings and roses and the universe as a whole. a first year (lit) prof hopped up and started saying my whole thing was just (paraphrasing) coming from the dick. i seem to remember her saying isn't two millennia enough or some such undereducated nonsense.
ok then, they loved me, but they had an unprecedented opportunity to hire an unprecedented genius (in literature). she turned out to be literally insane, did not want to be in baltimore, was...sleeping in her office. and calling me (really, i am not making this up), for survival advice. maybe only lasted a year. you could have happily had me for life, y'all! this one's a little closer in time,; i don't even want to see names and pictures. i definitely thought that was the end of my career. but they gave me an extra year, moving her into my office, me to the adjuncts area. i mean, i just tried to keep a positive attitude. my last relapse coincides, but then again i was floating into the marital disaster of all times with a real drinker.
why was i ever here? how did i even survive? no idea, but just as you can enslave yourself voluntarily, maybe you can escape, gnaw off your leg and last another few minutes, but free. when i do get free, it will be my tribute to richard rorty.
i think that necro/vinnie/immortal tech song is the best hip hop song in awhile. it is a beautiful celebration of hip hop arts, some of the most vital arts of our culture and world cultures over the past - yo! - getting to be 40 years, the best art that is on offer these days, more or less. also it is important political discourse: tech's verse is unbelievable. but they are the last lingerers; there's going to be no taking hip hop back. to the american hiphopical association: hip hop is dead. stop your twitching.
i wonder whether suny would take this! it is my phenomenology of spirit. but better-written. taller than marco rubio!
February 26, 2016
February 25, 2016
as you plead ptsd over the entry above i would like to share with you some of my experiences. this is the tip of iceberg.
i was with my father when he died horribly. his last words to me, to anyone, were 'it's hard.'
i heard the shot and ran out onto the country road. my brother bob had been shot with a .357 magnum. i could tell he was dead. i lifted him up. his chest was caved in completely.
my brother adam committed suicide by heroin overdose at my grandmother's apartment in dc, where i had been going since i was a child. where my father grew up. she herself died there 4 days later.
i'm not asking for pity. i'm saying stuff like this freed me to do what i am doing here.
On Tom Petty's "Buried Treasure" XM Radio show, he told the story of standing with his tour manager outside a venue in Texas, where there was a creek behind the place, with shade trees and a den of beavers playing in the water. Seemed pretty arcadian, really, until one of the beavers saw the humans and charged up the hill at them. Petty asked the manager if he had his gun, the manager said yeah, (Petty's comment was something to the effect that "It was in Texas..." )and then Petty said, "Don't Beaver's have flat tails..." They were being blitzed by a big, angry rat...and Petty took the gun and shot the thing.
Well, I've tried to figure out what the hell Trump's evolving hair style really looks like, and it kind of makes him look like a blonde beaver with it's tail rolled up over his head. I realize that some of my jejune minded readers will immediately think about all the varieties of beaver, and I think that if you are a Republican, that's awful to think that way. Me, I'm a radical-liberal life-time Democrat except when Crispin actually convenes the Anarchist Party convention and we nominate Bill the Cat, so I'm at least open to consider alternatives.
So, I recommend that the Republican Party bow down and welcome it's new Beaverish Rodent-style Overlord, al la the great Kent Brockman...
As described by the Washington Post's Alexandra Petri: (Alexandra PetriFebruary 24 at 11:53 AM) with a neat graph!
"There are three GOP candidates left in the race who are not Trump — oh wait, no, apparently Ben Carson is still running? — and this chart pretends that there are only two non-Trumps remaining, but I think it’s still a handy illustration of the problem.
"If Candidate A and Candidate B are really in it to win it: congratulations, Nominee Donald!"
I will let Mr. Petty explain it for the some what slower amongst us...
cokie roberts on morning joe, saying what everyone is saying [play trump soundbite]: that is not funny! that is bullying! to think that bullying could be elected pres (i think that's exactly how she formulated it). there are many charges you could bring against human beings, 'bully' is one of the milder ones. and it is being generalized willy-nilly, so i can bully a whole nation by standing at a podium talking to a camera (while people cheer), blogging etc. we have come a long way from the bully pulpit.
for example, i am not at all signing off on the recent american philosophical association statement on bullying.. everything has been vague; i think it arises from george yancy's "dear white america" in the nyt and the brutality of the comments. let's say i have done a lot of this for a long time. my view is that i cannot be bullied in the comments section of anything anywhere (though i am a white guy, so..). i got email death threats after i said the beatles sucked, after an abortion column, and so on. after i wrote a column saying i let my 13-year-stepson play grand theft auto (and played it with him), people who said they were lawyers said they were instituting proceedings to remove my children from my custody, which was the worst kind of horseshit. true the abortion one made me a bit jittery; it was just a flat threat, then my address. but calling that bullying seems to underplay it. i did not contact the authorities. maybe i should have whined to the apa; protect me, fellow geeks! will you take a bullet for me?
here's why they're keeping it vague: if they told us what not to say, or even what they are in fact objecting to, they would have to violate their own ban, or object to themselves. in other words, the ban is literally logically impossible. you'd think this would occur to philosophers, but of course, notoriously, philosophy professors struggle on their best days with basic logical concepts. also they live in quaking fear of the supernatural power of phonemes. they are what they think the followers of donald trump are.
it's because american k-12 education has been on an unbelievably repetitive yet singularly well-funded anti-bullying campaign for a long time; you probably think schoolchildren should be standardized-tested on an antibullying curriculum. not gonna solve your little problem, sister. by these means the word 'bullying' has gained a preternatural power: it's a thin and forgotten line between bullying and assault and murder. i just actually hear the charge as trivial, although you could have a bad kindergarten situation, i acknowledge. but every single thing the academic left (=absolutely everyone, i mean to the tune of 98%) is doing to free anyone, they twist into speech prohibitions, which i believe flamboyantly displays their totalitarian hearts and total inability to reflect on the coherence of their own belief set, as well as a stunning lack of self-reflection and honesty in public space, as well as the iq that has so richly justified their categorization as 'special needs' or 'differently abled.' they are straight-up words-that-begin-with-p. they don't know who they are.
let me ask you this, philosophy professor: when i designated you as 'special needs', did you hear that as an insult? or was it ok? why? i thought you said that one was ok! whatever i may have been thinking at that moment, i did not call you a 'cretin,' an 'idiot,' or a 'retard,' or any of the other superseded euphemisms primitive people such as yourselves thought would cure us all. i really did not. i see you as part of the special needs population, however, and i think that is obviously the right track for you; but on your own account i cannot possibly have criticized or offended you by saying that. i propose to say it all day and see how you like it.
if you've got anything, which - reading your stuff - appears to me extremely unlikely, you could come back at me; that's sort of part of this philosophy thing, or it once was. hit me in the comments as hard as you please. please? this euphemism-as-homeopathic cure thing is not going to work out. carefully ponder the possible uses of the phrase 'the n-word' as an epithet in the sort of facebook bullying that might have you cowering under your bed or hanging yourself because of your self-esteem issues. indeed, on frege's account, 'the n-word' refers to the sense of the term 'nigger,' which is certainly offensive. they are connected in a meta-referential stack that preserves offense by stipulation. if one is offensive, so is the other. i'd suggest introducing a euphemism for 'the n-word,' such as 'the t-phrase.' that might buy you a couple of months, anyway.
and i don't think you've thoroughly considered the possibility of offensive numbers, you 771. that there is an amazing new indexical slur i've devised, to encompass your race, your gender, your family, and whatever else may be bundled into your inmost identity. definitely your super-gross yet pure-vanilla sexuality. i think it'll catch on, making mathematics impossible (for you, anyway. i know that stuff was hard for you, so no loss. people have different strengths!) in a secret ceremony, i have bequeathed on '771' an offensive power that rises from it as healing arises from the relics of the saints. you are helpless (well, you are helpless whether 771 is around or not). maybe therapy will bring some racial healing for all 771s?? right, '771' doesn't seem to have the right historical connection to systematic oppression. don't worry, it will. there have actually literally been offensive numbers. check your talmud on that, or we might find it near the heart of any belief system. or it's a little hard to tell whether there have been offensive numbers. i guess first we'd have to figure out what the hell a number is.
perhaps (sucks on pipe; make that vape) if we referred to autism as a super-power...see how the world is not made by the way we talk? i did this to richard rorty, year after year, in his office; "dick" (i said) "oh, dick. the world is made of language [or however he formulated it that year]. right, we both know that's false. you don't believe it yourself, of course. then i'd march him right down the history of euphemisms - i mean the oed etymologies etc - in various dimensions. that was one of 1700 decisive counter-examples. he was immune to rationality; all he did was shrug. but at least he shrugged intelligently. still i'm holding him posthumously responsible for this breathtaking blunder y'all take as a commonplace. let me refer you to my book...oh, never mind.
on the other hand, i highly approve of that other classic dick schtick: truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying, and suchlike. well you are letting me get away with saying everything i'm saying until you prove me wrong in my face. i don't seem to have that little tri-dot thing on my keyboard, but anyway, the only rational conclusion i can draw is that, therefore, what i'm saying is true. this will go for raw correspondence theories as well, though i admit that you could do better with coherence. except that is ridiculous.
as the membership of the apa yapyaps emptily, kind of mumbling the same euphemisms together, they pause for a parenthetical 'words are powerful.' not your flaccid quasi-words, b. also the 'i just got victimized in the comments section' approach just shows you as kind of pathetic. how did your daddy tell you to deal with a bully? alright many a fuckwad could intimidate me physically; but i feel i have the best insult-generator in the world, and if i decide to launch instead of just grinning and forgetting about it 3 seconds later (which is my usual approach), you will know what bullying is. or you won't even understand how badly i just ridiculed you, how bad i just made you look.
if it were logically possible for you to provide me with a list of banned racial slurs, i'd take a look at it, then propose to provide you with 37 new ones. you will know exactly what they mean. ban those, and i will increase geometrically from there. this language thing is copious. chomsky: infinite possibilities from a finite vocabulary + a syntax. you really need to take out language entirely. well, that thing is offensive, the source of all our real problems. very inappropriate. taboo. it will be a relief when you fall silent, i admit. you were not saying anything anyway. this is beginning to look bad for our colleagues in literature and mathematics, though. what do their associations say?
and i'm sorry, you're going to have to provide me with a specific, exhaustive list of all the terms i am not permitted to use, and all the juxtapositions of acceptable words i am not permitted to assay. obviously i have no basic intuition on that. that is some vague-ass shit you've got in that statement.
i don't think you want to do a damn thing about racism, sexism, homophobia or any of the other dozens of dimensions of oppression you've obsessively enumerated and taxonomized. i think you want to live in a world where we all play 'let's pretend.' that is how we got where we are now: no progress since king, at best. a society where hardly anyone sounds like a racist or believes themselves to be a racist, but which is structurally racist in every dimension. i blame people like you for that. please, you're not also pushing 'it's time for a frank national conversation?' you are not sincere or reflective persons, and your unanimity alldayeveryday on everything is slavish, a devastating indictment of your inmost selfhood. deep inside, you must feel your personal redundancy, yes? the fact that you yourself are making no contribution whatever, that if you did not exist, everything would just go on as before. you are as subject to peer pressure as nancy reagan thought elementary-age children were: a flock, a herd, a hive in which each individual is subsumed in a collective consciousness. unlike theirs, though, your collective consciousness is a delusion you seek to enforce on everybody with overwhelming peer pressure. that's what you mean when you condemn individualism and say 'but what about the collective?' i don't know, are you talking about that collective? i have withdrawn consciously, and i am perfectly satisfied with my decision. or, this is my contribution to the collective. swallow it.
i think you should think back and see whether you can remember the moment or process when you sold yourself, betrayed yourself; maybe it was everything from high school to tenure, a million tiny incremental compromises, a million acts of treason to yourself. then i want you to try to remember another moment: the moment you stopped noticing that you had no soul, when you stopped experiencing the hole where your soul used to be. there will be no going back. you know that more clearly than i do, for you know it deep inside. now that you know where you are, what did it all mean? what did you actually get in exchange? i'll tell you this, it compromised your work from the start to whatever you're working on now. it isn't your work.
this seems trivial after that: you have betrayed philosophy. a whole generation that means next to nothing, or every member of which sounds the same, but some of whom do have tenure. congratulations. there would be no place for the great figures of our own tradition in the american philosophical association. they held fiercely to their own vision. now you understand the price they paid, and the beauty of what they achieved. what you have done to yourselves and one another and to wisdom: that is cowardice, in its most thorough human form. maybe cowardice can be the theme of your next book, for that is what you really know best and closest up, something you can fully know by incorrigible introspection, something that is immediately present to consciousness, perfectly clear and distinct at last. a foundation.
on their own account, the statement is intended to create a safe atmosphere so that philosophers can feel free to write op-ed columns. i'll tell you what: if you are hesitating to write that column because of what the comments might look like, i do not want to read your pablum. i am going to straight-up claim credibility on this: of all the philosophy professors in america, i believe i have written exponentially the most op-ed columns. however, i haven't belonged to the apa in a very long time.
philosophy professors! hear my threat. if you publish op-ed columns, i am going troll from one to the next, effortlessly intimidating you one by one and leaving you quivering like yucky piles of semi-congealed knox-brand premium gelatin(tm). i'll time it for just when you have to go give that lecture in your ethics class. i'm going to do it while i sit right here in my living room, amusing myself immensely. oh dang i should have thought of that years ago. maybe eventually i could be the only voice left! i'll see you next month at the pacific apa in frisco. i'll have a name-tag on. i'ma straight-up take your lunch money and do your mom. (i did your dad [again] last night.)
this is where i hop off the midnight train to auschwitz. have a nice trip! headin to georgia.
shit! emory is down there. and that song was so perfect. siri! which direction is most clear of forced-labor camps? [a: "you are surrounded."]
the problem with my little next book project of trying to figure out how or why marxism keeps resurging in the high-end intellectual world, is that then you have to read the texts, and in general the last thing you want to do is read something written by a marxist. anyway, i'm still inching through horkheimer and adorno's dialectic of enlightenment. here's a nice bit from the 1944 preface:
The loyal son of modern civilization's fear of departing from the facts, which even in their perception are turned into cliches by the prevailing usages in science, business, and politics, is exactly the same as the fear of social deviation.
they are just flat telling you that they have overcome their fear of departing from the facts; a bold anti-bourgeois strike (by bourgeois people, mind). we are free of truth, which is an anachronistic bourgeois disaster. now we are free (from reality entirely)! they proceed to vividly demonstrate this freedom in the rest of the book.
of course every moment in adorno reeks of aesthetic snobbery; want 20 quick examples? let's skip it until pressed. like i really cannot actually understand how the structure is supposed to fit together or where the conclusions, or even the assumptions are coming from. the whole authorship is like some crazy self-devouring artifact.
i actually think the argument is this: capitalism has led to radio, jazz music, the hard-boiled detective story. if not for their false consciousness, the proletariat would be listening to schoenberg and shostakovich all day. i'll just say, when you come to free us, we'll be shooting back. i definitely like my chances against theodor & co. meanwhile, schoenberg and shostakovich are haut bourgeois darlings; the people at the concerts are the best-dressed people in paris; no proletarian ever went anywhere near that shit. i must be missing something? how did you get here?
can i tell you a story? it's late '83 or early '84. i am living in poverty in london with my gf (eventually wife) rachael in a bedsit in chiswick. she is cleaning nice british people's houses illegally, i am busking on the tube and writing for melody maker (i'm in there like every week, sometimes with multiple pieces. but they are paying...5 lbs a pop or something? more for a big score like when i interviewed cyndi lauper, or would have interviewed chrissie hynde=my crush except she slammed the dressing-room door on (not in) my face at the hammersmith odeon. that only made me love her more, but made it 5 again.) anyway, they give me a plum assignment: fly to paris for two days, interview inxs and see two shows (they had the #1 right then i think), and see how far you can get inside the scene. ok, they were supposed to be these insane australian guys, the hardest-partying pretty boys the world had ever known. plus i actually thought they were a good pop band.
i was not necessarily the person you'd choose for this. i did drink and do drugs, but there was nothing i hated like some big party scene; i prefer to drink alone, actually, etc. this is fine if you're a record reviewer. not if you are doing big tour features and the like. but they were not only flying me to paris, they were paying me like what i'd made for the last 40 pieces or whatever. not saying no.
somehow i hooked up with the dude from new music express on the plane over; we might have known each other from gigs. he had gotten the very same rap: here are the passes. we talked to their people. do not go to the show and then back to the hotel. get the real story. he was this geeky-tall dude fresh caught from oxford. we actually looked at each other with some fear.
so, we cabbed over to the gig at a theatre. i think it was one of those things where the stadium-type band plays like five straight nights at a middle-sized venue. good show, just what you were expecting, very pro. michael hutchence was a pretty paradigm lead singer/showman/sex symbol type, kind of the next iteration of jagger and tyler. i was going to write about that. so, we go backstage. not only are they glad to see us, they were drinking whatever was the best champagne available in france and doing coke from these little mounds (if i had ever done coke, and if i had done it then, i would describe it as not quite like any coke i had ever done before, like if i had ever lived in bethesda with a coke dealer, say). that was trivial, but also there were a bunch of the world's most beautiful women in there, like nothing i had ever seen in my fucking life, seriously. and no other guys but my boy and me.
plenty to go around! said hutchence in his aussie thing. oh har har! i am trying to enter into the spirit of the thing, but to begin to form the picture think about how me and my boy look in this context. i was wearing clothes from london thrift shops (wait rumble shops? they had a term). i cut my own hair without a mirror before i came because the old lady down the hall would use the bathroom for two hours. i am 5'7" and not the very worst in maybe a gradschool context, but i am standing next to hutchence and co. with women whose sudden appearance would flummox any heterosexual man. i'm 22 (oops let's make it 24; i felt 14). also, just for the hell of it, sex was already not going well with my darling.
we split up into two limos? one crit to each limo with some band guys and plenty of girls? we hit multiple stops; i have no idea; socialites' special parties where there's margaret trudeau or something? it got to where we were the most hilarious thing ever, like they said, we brought our writing staff! they say they want to do a biography of michael! he's a redneck american! he was at oxford last year! he's 5 feet tall; he's 7' tall! aren't they scruffy? let's see how far they'll go! we did our part, because we were easily the most verbal people in the region and we were competing madly with each other; the whole way over it was music history trivia and assessments of the gigging bands in london etc. he was so wrong about everything. anyway: my god don't they talk! it's hilarious! let's see if we can shut them up!
after that it is a complete blank. i have this vague notion that they literally rolled me out of the limo in front of the hotel. both me and nme guy missed the gig the next night. but the paris paper said they played great (my boy read french, the fucker). we had collapsed into one room somehow and we sat there groaning, thinking about how to approach our editors. we had this notion that we could help each other fabricate stories that would like be long enough and seem plausible and still have some hijinks etc. we offered to write them for each other; oddly enough we each had little bundles of our own clips along, and we decided that - though each of us regarded ourselves as unique geniuses and disagreed about every pop act who ever played - our prose styles might be indistinguishable for general reader or editor. we thought it would be fun to try; well we were trying to comfort ourselves, like curling up and rocking back and forth for awhile. like we thought we'd tell michael, and he'd still think we were hilarious, and he'd invite us to the next tour, and we'd remember this time and write genius articles.
i think he had a girl who was still at oxford, or maybe u london. both were worried about our drinking, as i recall; maybe we'd both promised to be temperate and chaste. we had to figure out some fabrications there too, and we were helping each other. we could confirm each others' stories and meet each other's lovelies! we never did get any of the pieces to fit, like how we missed the plane, and why the stories looked wrong when they came out and so on and we just sort of gave up eventually over lunch in london. we were each engaged in covert self-examination for clues as to what might have happened with whom. then we drank a little more and passed out and missed our plane back in the morning, as foreshadowed.
i made 5, but he sent me out again as soon as i returned because he did like the review of the show. he just sat there shaking his head as i kind of vaguely drew the picture. he'd seen it before.
hutchence died in 1997, by auto-erotic asphyxiation. it has rather a mythological quality. that is the origin of my personal life telos, the single principle to which my very soul has been dedicated ever since, as often stated on this blog: never die of auto-erotic asphyxiation. the obits are excruciating.
sometimes things are just so depressing, like the re-rise of hillary. in my opinion, hillary clinton cannot beat donald trump, but then again, i keep thinking she's got to collapse any second. here it is perhaps my lack of empathy and understanding: i'm having trouble reconstructing the process of reasoning or emoting that would guide anyone to vote for her. the section of her nevada victory speech i liked the best was her passionate plea to end unlimited contributions, 'secret money' and so on in campaigns: it's like she's saying, just very directly right in your face: only deeper and deeper into the problem can fix it. it is truly like she's attacking or discrediting herself, pointedly: running against herself. or it is: 'i am what is wrong; if elected, my first priority will be destroying myself.' people applauded. wha?
but i started out to try to say something positive. here is a lovely headline:
people didn't seem to notice it, probably because it is literally impossible to pay attention to jeb bush whether he's talking or not, but he cannot formulate an english sentence. he'd usually garble up even the sentences he'd rehearsed 1000 times in front of a mirror (can you imagine what he saw? it was the wall behind him. it's like a cloak of invisibility as well as stupidity). he left us with this gift: 'i look forward to working you.'
I was screwing around a few years ago looking at YouTube and stumbled on Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks at either a Crossroads or a New Orleans Jazz Festival. She was playing her blonde D'Angelico and with that sweet little girl speaking voice she has said, "This is an old Junior Wells Song" and then proceeded to build a roof over the grounds, set it on fire and send it up to the sky. She was playing with passion and riffing with Derek and just making you know that old Junior, if he is conscious in the universe, was smiling, riffing on the harp and turning to Muddy and saying, "See, that's what I'm talking about..." and then she stepped back and handed the lead duties off to the one basically amazing guitarist who as usual, on his Gibson SG Classic, proceeded to remodel the whole damned stadium, again making his kind of adopted Uncle Dwayne, sitting on the other side of Muddy and leaning forward, to take a swig of Jack Daniels, and scream" Cook it, Kid, Cook it!"
Supposedly the Derek Trucks band and the Susan Tedeschi band are still in existence, but since most of both bands plus some others are in the TTB, I suspect that occasionally everybody just needs to take some time off. In this recording of their complete performance at ACL this year, Susan alludes to the fact that when they started talking about having one band, they watched Mad Dogs and Englishmen and said, "Yeah, that looks like fun...the whole traveling circus." I suspect that they're a lot more disciplined than that was, but still..not a bad inspiration.
There are other great bands out there doing something like this, but they remind me of one of the early 70s Van Morrison tours, maybe The Band and Street Choir -- full horns, double drummers, chorus, and so on. This is a privilege to listen to and fun to watch. Enjoy...
i have often been amused by trump, often agreed with him even (say on the iraq war), and i'd like to express my gratitude to him for clearing out the pall of yipyap that has been american political discourse. alright. but all of that is overwhelmed, because he's quite capable of bringing the true nightmare. vote for him and you may in a couple of years be having to choose between the trump regime and the resistance. it will be a good moral test.
if hillary clinton had a relationship with god, she wouldn't be hillary clinton anymore. she's on a spiritual journey, alright, fleeing as quickly as possible, or maybe hidden in the bushes by the path somewhere, cowering.
if you're wondering why so much blogging: well, i decided to quit pitching to publications and just recommit to the blog. and then it just started flowing and i was writing again like i once did: a lot, with great pleasure. as zora put it: polishing my sentences with a soft cloth.
alright, even though i love lucinda inordinately, i hated the last album. let me give you my first impression of the ghosts of highway 20. it is incredibly beautiful and wonderful. right she is still sounding pretty depressed (well, the theme is death), but now that is deepening everything. i still want her joy very much, but maybe that's a quality of my fantasy marriage to lucinda williams (sorry, john rawls). (i was always going to heal her; let's say i tried that approach here and there and it wouldn't have worked out.)
on the other hand, speaking of zora neale hurston as well as people whose bodies have actually been in my proximity [let's make it five times altogether counting those two; those are my big loves] i have fallen in love with women because of their art, or partly, or inseparably. sometimes experiencing her music, or her prose style, or her painting, is looking deep into her eyes, but at the same time from her eyes into yourself, for a long time, seeing all the way in, and then you really might fall in love, you know, and it can change the way you hear or see or read things; that's when i've had the biggest changes of perception, as well as the most intense experiences of beauty. there has to be an opening in her art into her. she has to be there, be findable, all of her, in her art, and not even all good artists are, and then you have to be moved by what you find, what is emerging from her and into you, and then you have to somehow pour it back into the world too, toward her if she's really there and right around you both until you are embedded together in the same sweet and bittersweet life. that's when the loss begins.
good heavens lucinda, thank you so much for teaching me that. thank you for expressing it so completely.:
[among other things, that is a perfect country song, and the guitar just kills.]
you can't bring someone joy at a distance, or insist that she be joyful. but maybe being here will make joy possible again. oh my god this is so intensely lovely and sad. and i think she has made the decisive turn: she's pretty ok with the age she is now; she's inhabiting her body as it is now, and thinking about her life elegiacally. (i am a little worried though, because she keeps saying how ready she is to die. maybe those are personae, though. um, i want 16 more albums, so go right on.) man she is writing good poetry in her distinctive way too. i am so happy to be able to say this. maybe this is her best album, though that seems impossible considering what she has done before. she is making me cry again. harder.
i've had a lot of death. and now i can explore its implications for the mandolin. at the moment i first heard 'sweet old world,' my brother had just committed suicide. also i was really in love for the first time, and early in recovery. i was trying to change everything in my life so i wouldn't want to die. i listened to that song hundreds of times. i still love it so much and i can't stand it. i don't know whether to let it play. i might shatter. it is my favorite song. and it is my candidate for 'most beautiful thing in the world.' so when something like that happens it's hard not to start thinking about what the person who wrote that song knows that made it possible for her to write it, and the guts and self-knowledge it took to just write it and record it and let everyone hear it. she didn't make any big show about it, but in that song she just let people see who she was, kind of all the way down. i started thinking about her life, and how if she can say that she must have really been through the shit, something like the same shit, but she understood what it meant and i didn't. and it's not just a piece of writing; it is her actual voice embodying and conveying the life and my life. and it is a beautiful woman's voice, knowing you, healing you by tearing you to shreds. how do you not fall in love? when she is in despair on her next album, you just want to heal her back, with the very things she gave you. you want to teach her the melancholy but total affirmation of life she taught you, because now you can't live without it. plus the whole thing yielded the professional benefit of refuting kant's aesthetics once and for all forever; i got a theory of beauty from it. amazingly, there is a song about her little brother on that album that i swear could be a description of mine.
also, it says that love redeems. you could have said that to me all day every day at that point and i wouldn't have believed it. when she sang it, i started trying to believe it; i knew what i needed to believe if i was ever going to wend my way back to joy. and i did actually fall in love with the person who showed it to me. she could play it on the guitar and sing it ok, and i could do something with it on the harmonica. we played it in the subway one time. then it was really mine and ours. it's the acoustics in there; it's like you're vibrating the whole planet. people threw money, and she paid her rent. at the time, her father was dying. the presents she gave me were clothes she made with her own hands, some of the few things i could never throw away. i don't know where she is.
i can't seem to get exactly what i want on youtube right now, so go stream/download etc 'death came'. ok? 'if my love could kill.' "can't close the door on love.' then go watch the videos on that first post.
[don't worry, i'm clear on the difference between really digging someone's novels and, like, dating her etc. i've never needed to talk to luci, but also have never not been. i've gotten quite a bit of writing out our relationship, though. i remember when i really couldn't stop writing about zora neale hurston; i had to swear off. well, sadly, you do sometimes! one good thing about loving the dead or distant star is that if you fuck around on her, or get a sudden crush, she doesn't even notice. dead women, or distant women you've never met, are polyamorous, which is good because you can't actually cuddle up with them anyway, and you might want that. so, every few years luci might put out a bad album and i might get pretty pissed off and turn to edna st. vincent millay or chrissie hynde for solace, or just to feel like a man. taylor swift would be wrong for an old man like me. i had my mid-life crisis long ago with one of the 5 - but still. dude, have you ever had daughters? that's pretty romantic too, and then you watch them begin to fill the space, and read and sing and write and play and paint and you do those things with them, loving them so much and losing them too as you do, and loving even that you are losing them; that's the job. i'm afraid i'm not going to be able entirely to avoid the cliches on this; sometimes that is what is most particularly true. maybe you don't think so, but i've noticed that all of taylor is in fact in her art. it's a different kind of art, but it has to be.]
i don't know whether i would think lucinda williams was beautiful if i just happened to run into her perched on a barstool somewhere. i have forgotten to think about that at all for the last 20-some years. i know she is beautiful. that is a completely unaffected and unguarded performance. and it is also masterful.
i think that art is one of the best ways we show that the human self is not contained in the skin, that it is assembled bits of other people and broken pieces of the world. maybe as you gather it, you haphazarardly or systematically try to mend. that's what zora kept trying to show us. it's notorious that you can't know what someone is really thinking or feeling; i feel that is false. right, there is no such thing as telepathy; but you're picturing the human mind as this mysterious little box inside the body. when you love a real artist, you see how her mind extends and is available, because it is reshaping and inhabiting the environment you share. sometimes someone's selfhood is remaking your visual environment or filling your house and head with sound. sometimes her words are running through your head, merging with your internal monologue in a kind of counterpoint. also it isn't just mind, is it? it's the physical activity, skill, craft; it's her body too. lucinda's body is singing. i think that's why i've found artists especially compelling and transforming, sexually and lovily and aesthetically and stuff. it's better than telepathy.
yes i'm sorry it is important to me that it is a woman and i think there's something a little different about the way women typically do art; maybe something a little more generous or true or sincere, or a little less filled with preening and ego and armor: those things are isolating rather than enveloping. i want to be enveloped. with the right person, that doesn't make you disappear, it makes you more. or, well, i'm fascinated by women, ok, irritated with men. picasso might be trying to blow you away, control you, or bludgeon you or something. not georgia o'keeffe. richard wright, but not hurston. i believe i know who were the better artists. obviously these are waytoobig generalizations. but i don't actually think anyone's aesthetics are entirely separate from their sexuality, and i think that's good as long as it isn't too oppressive or something. i just don't think it is that surprising that someone like me keeps gravitating back to the art of women - certain women, and i'm definitely not trying to establish a norm or something. i'm just trying to say what this heterosexual love thing is like for me.
[i just watched that 17 times.]
i want to tell you why i am able to do this now. it's because i am loving and being loved by jane irish. she is a painter. we met here and there a couple of times; i liked her vaguely but didn't form that much of an impression. she's kind of a quiet person. then i went to her place. it was filled with art, a whole life, +minimalist sculpture by her lover, the late bill walton, and other stuff. a whole lifetime was in there, like i was surrounded by it, inside it, and it is so beautiful, but so pointed and smart too. then we made love. since then, my taste in visual arts - which i love - has broken wide open. she is taking me to museums and helping me see. for forty years my approach was "if it doesn't look like a vermeer, it sucks.' even i was getting tired of myself.
i'm writing this at a rest stop on pa turnpike, on my way to see her. i don't know what it will be like, because i have spent the last 48 hours crying, listening, yearning. like this is where i always thought i might get, but now that i'm here at the rest stop i don't know whether i'm having a breakdown or reaching the peace i never could have. i could feel this bit by bit. but i could not let myself feel all of it at once. then suddenly after 57 years i couldn't not feel it all: the adam part (fuck, two other brothers too). the judith part. the marion part. the jane and emma part, and the jane part. here it all is in the truest thing i ever wrote, ok? now what?
i really did just set out to write a record review, but every time i have had a new idea, and many times i have had a new feeling, i was actually at that moment typing. writing and thinking and feeling are sort of the same thing for me. the most genuine, most sustained, most various example i can think of like that - the person in all of history who i think thought and felt about writing the most like i do - is zora neale hurston.
they are playing 'passionate kisses' here at the rest stop. i am not kidding. oh dang now they're on steely dan. on the way here my random ipod was hitting everything i couldn't take in just the order i was imagining, like emmylou's version of 'sweet old world' or lucinda and emmylou on 'greenville.'
[update: the second i got down there i knew it was more of a breakthrough than a breakdown. i am in an excellent mood. love redeems, bro! ok i can listen to it now,]
[this entry, really quite the swoon, might be yinyanged with this one.]
i feel the link should be forwarded to all female artists and writers. love.
ok, if i were married to john rawls, this is what i'd do to him (besides making him very very happy). now if you are wondering why i am contemplating marriage to the late john rawls, it isn't because of his personal attractiveness. i guess you had to be there in the comments.
i think i felt i had kind of flubbed certain aspects of rawls. i did not precisely state the principles of justice. well, you go without notes and sometimes you choke. i did an 'errata' vid on this one. wouldn't effect the overall argument either way. yes since i refound the black nationalism vids i've been watching some of my own vids, even the card flourishes.
honestly, i feel, though i am certainly deluding myself, that the political stuff is easy, though i might lose an argument on almost anything else. easy from the highest theory and the cold white peaks of the canon to the argument at the barber shop. if you start with a whole bunch of unexamined ideological assumptions that you've adopted and assumed without argument to be the most rational position, if basically your position - and rawls is as much like this as anyone despite the huge machine - is a consensus among your social set and so held sacred but never justified, i am just going to be able to kill it real quick, even if you sort of don't think i just did. of course, you're saying, you must be just as much like that as anyone. don't you have figures you admire, traditions you respect, and so on? of course, but, um, i found them not they me. i assembled a canon, etc.
anyway i feel like you just meet very few people that can't just have their foundations undercut quite easily. you just go, wait a second...so, i can do that with reactionaries or progressives, communists and capitalists, individualists and collectivists (dems and reps aren't even worth it); i can do it with professors or counter girls or just that person at the party. i'm more often deciding that i need to hold it back, or start focusjng on the possible weaknesses in my own argument, which i might be taking seriously. hell i can do it with anarchists, and i do do it with myself, which is the key. i can do it with classical liberals, communitarians, narrative theorists, anyone you please! and yet people will just keep being marxists or something. just sort admit it's religious or some kind of club and leave it there? they think they have arguments! on the other hand, ted cruz, princeton champion debater, is going to have a difficult time explaining how he can hold all those positions simultaneously. etc. many people can do this to one side, few can want to do it to both, because it's solidarity, not rationality. maybe it helps that i'm not really talking to that many people except undergrads. but i am telling you, been a long time since i lost one. on the third hand, who's doing the judging?
or i guess i feel now like i've got all the equipment rawls had more or less, or rorty; i've done all the reading; it's all in this semi-available stock in my head. (he knew a lot more about kant. but i also am interested and semi-expert in many things he wasn't that could be relevant.) my theory is as well-developed, and so on, though it's still in publication, some of it. i was never intimidated by his obvious intelligence or his perch at harvard; that only made me want to really launch. i acknowledge that john rawls was/is smarter than i am. that doesn't really matter that much within limits, and he was definitely not as creative as i am, or as free. so i've got the weapons, but not the prepossessions. this is where i set off to get to when i was a baby, ok? (this is pretty ironic because the whole point of the original position is to remove all prepossessions. then by an amazing coincidence you end up with classical liberalism, the view to which rawls never ceased for a moment to be passionately committed, however it seemed or whatever he said. cf. descartes) my only assumption is an anti-authoritarian emotional impulse as big as all outdoors, which is precisely how i'm destroying your foundation, and why i want to. and that is where you might finish me off; you might just diagnose me. well, that's kind of irrelevant, but kind of not, of course.
i think that's an advantage too. i do know something about the psychological or biographical motive force of my positions. i have had a lot of therapy. i understand that i do not have a fully rational underpinning for all this, but that is part of what gives me leverage to show that you definitely do not either; here i will prove it to you. in my heart of hearts i think the impulse i got fighting against my parents or my school, the way i felt i had to defend myself against irrational authority, is a source of truth. i affirm it. but i realize i am not going to be able to prove the orientation. but i believe that at the very heart of most people's politics, why ultimately they believe what they believe, is that they need subordination. they need to subordinate others, and they need to be subordinated, though very often there is a particular side of the b&d transaction being emphasized. slightly toned down here or there, with various names and rigamaroles, these are arguments for human slavery, or they rest on a vision that legitimates slavery.
looking back on the arguments of john c. calhoun or whomever in favor of slavery, boy they just collapse; the real point was to find some argument to justify slavery. calhoun was a brilliant philosopher, actually, a systematic philosopher. but he himself didn't know that there was evil right at the heart of his heart, and that that was shaping his argument. every argument was an argument to the effect that he himself was not evil after all, so that he kind of lost his awareness of what was driving his own argument, not to speak of being massively uncritical of his own arguments, and unknown to himself. (and, again: calhoun was brilliant and learned; john c. calhoun was smarter than you, and smarter than i am). and plus every part of the political spectrum is like this more or less equally, especially now. it sort of detaches the political argument from the person and its own motivating force; the arguments start to seem like half-assed stuff that obviously have nothing to do with the belief: just a bunch of words trying to hide the monstrosity within.
if i'd have one hope, it would be that pretty quickly people will see the arguments that put you on the left or on the right are calhoun-style arguments for calhoun-style conclusions. it could happen! like we look back on the arguments for socialism or compulsory education and go: good heavens how did they think stuff like that? how could they make that argument? that argument was not honest.
or i could say: almost nobody ultimately has reasons for their politics, or really rests it on reasons. some people have rationalizations that consist of a shelf of volumes, though. they have social commitments. nothing wrong with that unless you claim that you're justified, or your position is rational and theirs isn't etc. like a little honesty about that would make everyone immune from the too-easy refutation. everything collapses like a house of cards if you touch it. i do try not to be cruel, though.
[i continue to revise/expand all the entries in the recent sequence on race. pulling out a bit i just added to monoculture 2, with a bit of expansion]: one problem is, when there's a progressive around, no one can speak freely, which makes it profoundly hard to connect. that no one should speak freely: that is the actual whole progressive program for truth and reconciliation. well, the whole thing depends on them not becoming conscious of themselves; they want a gassy cloud of hooey all around them; they demand to hear only euphemisms. they're scared - truly, literally scared - of words. a backwards, semi-linguistic, primitive group of people, yet to emerge from bizarre irrational supernatural beliefs, slaves to their superstition. i have been studying their belief system for many years, but there are limits to cross-cultural communication; i cannot know what it would be like to believe what they believe, any more than i know what it would be like to echo-locate like a bat; i don't know how i'd go about it. it's quite like dealing with silicon-based alien creatures.
i would suggest colonizing and converting them, for their own good. or the key is education: we've got to get these people starting in pre-k if we're going to address this; their english skills are lacking, just testing unwell. really, have you heard these people talk? it's stilted, inarticulate, mechanical, contentless. we need a new common core, but this time instead of turning it over to the richest white man in america, i'd suggest letting dead prez put the thing together. or really, their idea that they can be assaulted at a distance by an incantation makes them extremely vulnerable. i can slap them around by sitting here typing, and they will actually think they feel pain, to say nothing of what people are doing in a hip hop song. they must feel like they're constantly getting rodneykinged. admittedly, you can't actually harm someone like that, but we can make them experience their lives as though they're being constantly hurt. it's like they're covered with tattoos that say 'stab here' and are lying there prostrate trying to bleed. well no word can make anyone bleed, but it's still pretty funny. they can't face up to discourse or text, much less to realities, which they cannot encounter directly at all, but which are constantly present under erasure in their consciousness. they call that justice. i'm not tryina hear that, see?
February 17, 2016
i guess i never completed the series, or sometimes they take stuff down because you're using copyrighted music. intellectual property must die.
one theme i'd like to pull out of the comments: you know, they fully enclosed jesse jackson, john lewis, and so on. but after that, people who were supposed to be 'black leaders', like julian bond, jesse jr, let's say marc morial, kwesi mfume just went back and forth from democratic party politics to the leadership of black organizations. they are not people who actually have much of any constituency in the black community, but they have a big constituency among democratic party leaders and donors. morial is appearing as a hillary surrogate as he serves as president of the urban league. now, i always had on board that these organizations were actually too moderate and compromising throughout, that they never really accomplished that much until driven forward by much more radical people. they almost had to be dragged. but, in hindsight, those early organizers and presidents (oh, dubois) were so fiercely independent, so suspicious of white control of their own organizations, so independent and representing their race as they saw it (well, the middle-class, light-skinned people of their race, was the criticism). what would they say if they saw 'black' organizations and black 'leaders' who were wholly owned subsidiaries of the clinton campaign=the democratic party=goldman sachs? what if they saw little else anywhere?
and, those are the only black voices democratic politicians are listening to, the ones they're stuffing into suits and setting up as mouthpieces. they are selected specifically to mirror this half-assed, dishonest white liberalism, and the actual concrete results in their own communities have amounted to a permanent disaster. (how many decades of miserable failure is it going to take for us all to draw the conclusions malcolm drew in 1953? one way he saw what was real was that he saw the situation from prison; that's the angle from which the truth is available, not from the veuve clicqot dinner with the board of citibank.) that i have to sit here imagining what marcus or malcolm or whomever would say about this is the saddest thing of all. they used to be there right in our faces. y'all surrendered; your leaders are white people, and they are racist white people, and you vote the way they say at approximately 90%. never too late to go all nat turner on their ass, though.
(sharpton is an interesting case, inside/outside with some legitimacy as a leader. it has gotten to where al sharpton is the most radical black voice most white people might ever hear. no wonder we're complacent. think about where he would have been on the spectrum of black leadership in 1967. cornel west is out there, and at least he knows this history. but i think he would like to be absorbed into the democratic party; he's more pissed that they won't, though to his credit he'd try to push them into something that would at least look vaguely egalitarian and would be connected with some passion to the actual radical civil rights tradition. ok i should be able to name twenty names to the more radical side of that. i've got none except some underground hip hop artists.)
what i want to say about the 'unconscious racism' of people of my race: oh, you know, it is semi-conscious racism. it's true, caucasoids are less conscious of more stuff than negroids and mongoloids, etc. it is the white man's burden; it's like there's a screen of bullshit between us and reality, and we installed it ourselves. it's sort of our job to try to punch it out. there's really a lot that has to be ignored that is hard to ignore in order to be an unconscious racist. it's actually a pretty conscious strategy to be unconscious. like, any one of us could suddenly start to become aware of it in ourselves and one another at any moment by a hundred routes, or just by listening around a little. go get yourself some george yancy.
i think it's like black folks want to give us a little break. i'm not blaming you! it's systemic (ooph i heard that just last year). this is a strategic way to try to tell us there is a problem without arousing our well-known insane defensiveness and self-righteousness. well, but is it exactly true? even if they're sort of willing to give each of us a break, maybe we shouldn't be quite so quick to give ourselves a break, or so worried about whether we ourselves are good people. or i would think the point is not to appear to yourself to be a good person, or to tell yourself all day what a really good person you are, but actually to be a good person. that might take more work, though.
or what i want to pull out: i think unconscious racism is blameworthy on an individual basis. there are plenty of resources for coming to consciousness, plenty of people right in your proximity who are trying to make you more conscious. getting to know all of it is hard or in my actual experience it seems infinite, layer after layer; after i think i've got it down, that's when it's right there. but starting is unavoidable if you're not literally comatose. white person! repeat after me! i am a racist. i am a racist. i am a racist. i come from a racist people. i'm in the middle of a centuries-long, horrifying, genocidal moral failure, perpetrated by my own people. i am the people who are doing that. doing it right now. and now i am going to do whatever i can do about that. and the first thing that i can do is know that about myself.
we will never be free without knowledge of self. we will never be good.
i'm going to say that monoculture 2 is now about the boldest and most problematic thing i've ever done on race, and i've tried to be as bold as possible since 1993, when i started writing act like you know. i am resolved to just wade into this motherfucker. we've been too afraid. we need some damn courage. egads! i just realized i've been saying the same thing to women: c'mon now: right in our face with the real power. imagine the arrogance. i guess i think there are worse sins, and in many ways i don't really think very well of myself, if that's any comfort to you. what gives me some insulation is that my position is so bizarre (and of course, so blindingly true) that people can't even read what i'm saying even as their eyes traverse the words. you must be getting me wrong! i mean well!
if you're wondering how i came to this, i've told it many times as it's unfolded: it's been a long journey and i'm more extreme now than when i wrote that book. but it started in 7th grade in then-mostly-black alice deal junior high school in chocolate city, when willie singleton marched us with a powerful opinionated pro-malcolm streak through the autobiography of malcolm x. in my memory i was the only white student (though maybe that's wrong, actually; there might have been a couple of others) in his one-semester african-american history class. i was afraid of the whole situation - i remember how my body felt when i walked into that room, even though walking into any class even then i was one overly confident little asshole. well, i was afraid of black people. but after we read that book, suddenly my environment didn't seem incomprehensible to me anymore.
again, i was a scrawny little white revolutionary mouth who really, in his mind, all day, wanted to be malcolm x for about a million different reasons: because he was strong. because he obviously knew how to be a man and i really didn't. (it just struck me that my father had just dissolved in a pool of alcohol and disappeared. because he didn't drink [but because he had],) because he was standing up for his beliefs and his people. because he was fighting back, fighting back against four centuries of slavery and genocide and rank oppression. i wished i had something like that to fight; i finally settled on 'the political state': a pale imitation. because he had purged himself of his oppressor (even then i knew that would be construed as me: people looked right at me!) but honestly i didn't feel that really then. maybe bad white people. maybe just old white people. i had to grow up to be a white man, take that up or have it loaded on me bit by bit, right? i still needed training in that.
because of the beautiful way he used the language: with precision and poetry and an argument and a blackjack that left his opponents on the floor, bleeding from the mouth. he showed me the power of words. i took the bus down to the black power bookstore and i bought his speeches, even though they looked at me funny, like they were amused. but they highly recommended it, though i think they were rolling angela-davis marxism by then ('71); somewhere i still have a couple of booklets in that vein that i bought there. what i remember best, actually, was the dignified yet devastating yet argumentative young woman behind the counter in an afro and kente. when i call up a picture of angela davis to my mind, actually it's her. but that might have been a couple of years later. i didn't quite see that malcolm wasn't talking to me as his people or the lostfound tribe of israel: i was 12. because of his furious purity. because he was black. guess what? all the cool kids were. because of the little twinkle of fun in his eye (that's what denzel missed). because he was beautiful. because he had used his power to redeem himself, to save himself, to transform himself, and that was the same power he offered - well, believe it or not somehow i heard him offering it to me, to everyone with the courage to try to take it.
but to have that power, you had to bring it forth from your own life, from your own real experience; you had to be connected to it physically, autobiographically; it was so much more than just something you were advocating, more than a belief. if they killed you, you would die saying it. it mattered less what the content of the belief was than that you inhabited it fully; it had to be identical to your body and your sense of self - it had actually to come from you, and hence also from your culture. malcolm was a different way to be and to think: a real way. see i saw that effect not only on myself but on...us, the kids in that class. come to think of it, singleton had a goodly dose of all those qualities, and i admired him too, and i saw my black classmates like...waking the fuck up in a big way. [yes, it's true, i corresponded with willie singleton much later in life.]
[maybe if you write the same story over and over, trying to get it right or struggling to remember, or say it over and over to people in the audubon ballroom, you see the truth of it more. maybe if you try to see the truth about something, something about yourself and something about the world, and you just keep going and going and trying to learn and trying to change, maybe you end up being able to write it. revise and revise until you think it's true. because of the ways he changed. all this time, from undergrad papers to the last book to the last blog entry, i have been trying to figure out how to let the ideas emerge organically from my life, and say that right there on the page. i have struggled with that integration; there are not a lot of models for autobiographical philosophy that you also might hope could intervene in the academic debates, or that could help a white boy get tenure after all those compromises with the man. my dad was a fine writer. but i know - i've always been perfectly aware, actually - whose model i was really trying to follow. it just seemed wrong to say it, or maybe people wouldn't believe me. instead i just kept writing about malcolm.]
[[credit where due: i spent a decade living with the amazing memoirist/personal essayist marion winik. read her stuff and you'll know why i was better at writing about myself and moving from there to something bigger in 2008 than i was in 1998.]]
(white) people eagerly denatured malcolm after his death. they just sort of said he turned out to be an integrationist, sort of saw the light, fetched up as a slightly-unhinged king. then he just faded into a general list of civil rights heroes, though black people were always reviving the radical malcolm. i never made that move though. i thought i knew where malcolm was going, though of course none of us did, but wherever it was, it wasn't going to be passive integrationist or welfare statist. to speculate: he wasn't going to spend the rest of his life asking for help. i held the radical malcolm in my heart when he was a postage stamp. that stamp will lick you, asshole.
the next thing i would do - but not right now while i'm doing this - is start to peel back the racism that lies in my own heart still, the racism that lies at the heart of my white black nationalism and its complicated relation to all the various racisms of us white people. really, i can do that to some extent, and i have, and i want to. i don't now know what the next phase might hold, ok? because, as is typical of my race, my self-reflection is...stunted.
I heard the Burritos out in California could fly higher than the Byrds/ Roger McGuinn had a 12 string guitar, it was like nothing I ever heard... David Allan Coe, "Willie and Waylon and Me"
One of the joys of occasionally invading Crispin's space is to remind the world through my amateur efforts that we're dealing with a guy who should probably be music editor for Rolling Stone or at least their head critic. I always enjoy Crispy's criticism, and while I disagree with him on, well, most issues I do think he has great knowledge and insight on music, musicians, trends and so on. That obeisance paid, Guitar World published one of those lists of the greatest or most important or "Recorded in FSharpMinor" examples that are always fun to pick apart. In this case they are stalking the elusive 12 string guitar, and it's an interesting example of why most music magazines suck.
These things are always open to argument and while we recognize some 12 string work, a lot of it is just there. So some people appear to make the list because, well, they made the list. Either surprise that someone was playing a twelve and it sounded OK, or it's a great song and the band was famous for having a 12 String lead player. Go figure. Or a double-neck guitar -- critics love double neck guitars. So did I when I was fifteen. Unless the guy waving that ax around is Jimmy Page, I inevitably think of Cheap Trick or The Cyrkle when I see one.
every time trump says something apparently outrageous, or risks his candidacy again today, i've found that people will want to read it as a slick intentional strategy (or they want to read each one like that retrospectively, when it turns out to have helped trump). i just want to point this out: no political strategist in america would suggest attacking the second bush administration, saying george w didn't keep us safe at all because 9.11, saying the iraq war was an insane blunder driven by lies, and so on, in the week leading up to the republican primary in south carolina. nobody. nada. zippo. nary a one. not a soul. add to that that he's already leading in the polls; by acclamation it's a time to say as little as possible and not make a mistake. what he's realized is that people are really really sick of political strategists.
hillary clinton right now: 'i went to 112 countries as your secretary of state, including many places where dictators, or special interests, called the shots.' boy she was angry and passionate, arguing that obama should nominate a supreme right now, because this is a democracy, a beacon of hope in a benighted world. but some lessons you can learn without ever leaving home. and some people can mint brilliant ironies without even trying to, or while trying with all their vast ability not to. i'm voting for her because she's so much smarter than trump.
i utterly appreciate trump's attack on george w. if it's just the sort of thing you've always been saying - he lied us into a disastrous war and then the economy collapsed - you should too. the theory is that george w will play great in sc because it's so military. i don't know where military people might be now, but when i interacted during the war with high-ranking military people (colonel and above; because of dickinson's [spotty] interaction with the u.s. army war college), they'd just shake their head, roll their eyes, and often tell you straightforwardly that (though they viewed their jobs as carrying out the orders of the commander-in-chief) this was the worst idea anyone ever had, and just the sort of crappy shit the intelligence community does all the time, etc. i don't know how well george w is going to play as trump reminds everyone of the problems. a lot of military people came home maimed from that thing, and at the very best it accomplished absolutely nothing. you'd think that would alienate precisely military-type folks. don't let a flag confuse you; anyone can fly a flag.
oh just for the hell of it, while we're on the bush family: let's say i have some high-end sources who served in the reagan administration. two of them, in the late '80s, had a theory about the insane iran-contra debacle. the good thinking where they exchanged weapons for iranian hostages and then used the proceeds to illegally fund the contras (the other main source being a flood of cocaine that was waved through, helping drive the crack epidemic): it was a george h.w. bush operation (reminder: bush had run the cia). that had never occurred to me before. they just didn't think reagan could in any way generate a plan like that, even if he more or less waved it on or pointedly pretended not to see anything. they seemed pretty damn certain, like it just obviously had that distinctive bush touch, and they had channels...
just speculating now: the beloved justice scalia was poisoned, probably by a cabal of anti-originalist legal scholars centered at harvard law school. be this as it may, everyone is pointing out with their sudden generosity that scalia revived fundamental questions about constitutional interpretation. i think he had a pretty primitive theory. also i think most of his opponents have a pretty primitive theory, and a pretty primitive refutation of his theory. so, there are many cases where the original intent of the constitution is, for example, not singular. i will point out that it was a committee production involving an extremely wide range of political and legal positions, enshrining a number of compromises. there is not always or usually a clear or single intent, and what hamilton thought the thing meant and jefferson/madison were probably as different as what cruz thinks it means and sanders. also, even if we had a completely clear intent, the question would certainly remain of what we owe to that intent and why. also, it's not the case that the alternative to originalism is 'anything goes', as scalia himself liked to assert. there are many immediately obvious middle ways through.
however, i understand why scalia wanted to go fundamentalist, because specifically the left actually really doesn't care about the constitution at all, thinks we owe it nothing, and regards it only as an annoying barrier to the state annexing more and more aspects of everyone's lives: i.e. it is a barrier to progress. well, i am definitely enthusiastic about shoring up all barriers to progress thus construed. i think the constitution enshrines a vision of strictly limited governement that is what is distinctive about the american polity, and is also the sort of thing that in a pinch might save you from dying at the hands of your own genocidal megalomaniacal state. it's been an extremely useful hedge against toalitarianism, and if the left really could just ditch it out they'd start a cultural revolution.
also, the anti-originalists often say things like this: it is impossible to know the intent of the framers! what are you going to do, read the mind of people who have been dead for centuries? what a useless, fantastic notion, etc. please. are you telling me, for example, that it is impossible to know anything about the intentions of john milton as you read paradise lost, or david hume as he wrote the treatise of human nature? they both actually kind of told you what their intent was, and a lot of it is pretty darned legible right in the text. we interpret the intent of old-timey authors all the time. it's a difficult matter, and you have to get into the details, and maybe there will always be some lacunae. but really, interpreting the intent of dead people is a perfectly ordinary human activity, and for example literary scholars do it all the time. you could start with careful etymologies: how were the terms 'militia' or 'liberty' or 'speech' used in various sorts of texts of the day, and so forth. please don't tell me that you think such things are a priori impossible.
and then, plus, it's perfectly true, as scalia said, that plenty of people on the left really just want the thing to say whatever they want it to say, and have developed a theory of interpretation that would make that possible. of course, their theory makes all interpretation of any text impossible. i would say in both cases, cutting to the chase, or peeling back the layers of obfuscation, we really have very primitive and ridiculous competing theories of interpretation. i don't know: read gadamer's truth and method or something and get back to me. fuse the horizons, baby.
i would prefer not to focus on intent, which is not the same as meaning. intent could be relevant. but language is public, not in your head. i would prefer to think about the meaning of text in its original context, and it is in that context that whatever intentions were floating about were formed. again, you'd start with the ways particular words were used, not in madison's head, or not only in madison's head, but in the culture, conversation, and written texts of the era. seriously, i could say something i did not intend to say - i often have - but it wouldn't follow that my utterance was meaningless or that it might mean anything at all. we know, in our rough way, how to figure out what people mean from the words they use, and so on, and this is partly a matter of what those words mean in the public language. what they meant in madison's head was fixed by their public uses, though of course the public uses might be multivalent, ambiguous, or obscure, or madison might have had a self-serving or mistaken or pejorative use of some particular word or phrase. that madison was pretty darn clear and competent in the use of language, however.
anyway, yes, pragmatically, i want to be able to appeal to a strong constitution to defend against encroachments on my speech and so forth. i feel that it has kept me out of the re-education camps. overall, it's a pretty useful and good thing, and it has sort of helped fend off authoritarianism - and hence murder, pain, rape, and extreme inequality - though actually it has been chewed up to move in that direction in a pretty consistent arc. if it's got to be at this level, then i guess i'm going with originalism. but really, it can't be at this level; seems like law profs should be able to do better or could think more carefully or devote themselves to something other than mere partisanship.
just a bit more on racial monoculture [update: just a lot more], this time more policy-substantive. the democratic party (extremely more if sanders is elected) is the party of the welfare state, and as the dems annexed all black political activity, black 'leaders' turned the whole demographic, practically, into little but defenders of government benefits. the dems really tried to annex king, and they are doing it still. (joseph califano: selma was lbj's idea.) jesse jackson was part of the democratic establishment long before he ran for president, though it's not like he was going to get the nomination in any event. a great rhetorician at his best (unbelievably repetitive at his worst), but that was a pretty mild program he was pushing by the 80s, even if the huge dreams were still sort of half-inhabiting the words. i picture the response of some of the figures i mention below to the 10,000th repetition of "i AM somebody": well, i never doubted that for an instant. but you sound like you need reassurance on that all day. ok now that you're somebody, who are you and watcha gonnna do? wait, i'm not absolutely sure you are somebody; don't lose whatever somebody's left in there, man. me? i am going to go kick the white man's ass. they've still got you, i mean in 2016, and it looks from here like you don't even want any alternatives.
i hope to really unwind this argument one day, but i think an honest look at the history of the late-20th and early 21st centuries will show that the actual effect of the welfare state has been, first of all, to freeze racial and economic hierarchies into permanent immovable institutionalized structures intended to persist forever. also, it is actually the site of incredible "unconscious" racism: even just the pose of 'we must help y'all' is a marker of utter power inequality. but then, the whole thing is administered without consultation of the people it seeks to remake/save/re-enslave: it is our diagnosis of your pathologies, taken without consultation. well, why would we consult with you on this? you're so uneducated, so addicted, so criminal, and so on. you remember slavery, don't you? it was a generous program to bring civilization to savages, language to people who just chattered like birds, and protection to the vulnerable. booker washington: "We went into slavery pagans; we came out Christians. We went into slavery without a language; we came out speaking the proud Anglo-Saxon tongue."
some of these things i have said many times. look at what malcolm said about what welfare did to his family. or sister souljah. it's worse now, if that's possible. and dependence is powerlessness in the most concrete continual way. that was also one of the powers of slavery. i feed you, in my generosity. contradict me and you will starve.
the housing programs are maybe the very clearest place to see this, but it is everywhere. i swear, we will bulldoze your neighborhood, move you to a disgusting high-rise racial reservation without any connection to any viable economy, lock the door, and then come back ten years later and be surprised at how the thing looks. look at how these quasi-people live! we'll have to save them again, because we are so good and so generous and so not racists. . then we'lll implode it and build another one. you know that site down by the tracks that the chemical company abandoned? that would be a cost-effective spot. no one is going to buy it anyway. that was a liberal program for racial uplift, y'all, but the whole thing has this structure, and racism/classism underlies every move, specifically because the liberals, progressives etc doing it are doing it as they congratulate themselves for not being racists. really, astonishingly, they can introduce race-based policies that look for all the world as though they are trying to accomplish black isolation, impoverishment, and cultural destruction, and defend them on anti-racist grounds.
what is the answer to racial uplift? education! let's force their children under compulsion into some of the most useless, dysfunctional, and dangerous institutions the united states has ever seen (son, i spent years interned in the washington, dc, public school system. the way you're defending education as the answer strikes me as a little...abstract. why don't you try doing a couple of years in there and then get back to me?) there, we can jam white culture into their heads. they'll fill out the same little bubbles as our kids, and then we'll be equal. oops what has gone wrong? don't tell anyone, but i think there might be biological differences in iq (i actually do know some white people, so if you're wondering what a white person, almost any white person, might let slip to another white person or entertain in their secret white soul...). school choice? nonono we are liberals. you are not going anywhere. maybe compulsory pre-k! studies show, etc, until it's implemented. maybe if we caught them at birth and kept them institutionalized...indefinitely, we could fix them. on the contrary, progressives need to be fixed by them. but where are the black voices demanding that?
funny how much uplift/integration keeps looking like cultural destruction and direct subordination. some sort of coincidence, i guess. our best progressive thinking got you here. i guess we'll just keep on agoin? y'all seem to support it. let me ask you this. have we left a single child behind? we said we wouldn't and stuff. everybody said that every day for years, as though the phrase were a disease, until something else focus-grouped better, which was also when it started to sound sarcastic, no matter how apparently sincerely you said it. it's amazing how we yap. we really don't care about the truth whatsoever. i think y'all kind of know that; it's been hard to miss. keep it uppermost in your mind when the progressives come grinning at you again in the primaries.
you can comfort yourselves, as you vote over the next century for white and beautifully-integrated whiteish progressives: they are just about to get it right this time! they have a new approach. a new wave of educational reform is coming that will make it all work for you. and then another.
the racism of a trump and the racism of a hillary are different racisms, or different psychological syndromes, but neither one is going to be helping free anyone of anything; both assume effortlessly the normativity of bourgeois white culture. i have to say that the fact that the white left has annexed the entire black vote for that is a crying shame, and i'll say again that you should consult the malcolm in your head on this. or better: calling marcus garvey: you are needed again.
well, and why would we consult you if we've got 90% of your vote without consulting you?
one thing i'll point out: in the arts, african-american culture is far superior to white culture, and has remade the art of the world. the music and dance is obvious; you can't even have 20th century european classical music without jazz, not that that is any sort of flowering of anything. african music has been influenced for a century by african-american music. (true somehow i'm folding jamaica into this. there is a constant interaction politically and aesthetically between north american and caribbean diaspora cultures.) but i'm talking about all the way along. asking me straight for greatest novelist of the 20th century? i am returning zora neale hurston (by the way, i'll also pick her high in the draft as a political thinker, an essayist, a memoirist, and an anthropologist. #1 essayist? baldwin.) oh i guess i could go all graffiti, but when you start to peel back the layers of african-american traditions, you will find it everywhere: black power colors, images of malcolm. whose slang is the right slang? whose language are we actually speaking? look at the clothes people are wearing anywhere in the world, dude! this came from the most-oppressed 10% of a provincial nation. it's one of the most astonishing things that has ever happened. (the best analogy i can think of is when a band of middle-eastern peasants invented a mode of spirituality that people are still trying to practice millennia later.) we should acknowledge our superiors; i am utterly serious. they should be designing standardized tests for us.
bear in mind the words of eek-a-mouse: i walk, i talk, but i don't crawl on my belly like a reptile.
petitioning for benefits all day for decades is...servile. are you listening, ta-nehisi coates? provisionally, i'm going to include advocacy of affirmative action, at least in some configurations, under this category. its effects are...complex.
i know this whole thing is really bizarre, but it's reached the point where it seems like a white person has to remind you of some of this. i mean, you know, farrakhan's people might sort of still be out there or something. but remember when garvey was smacking dubois, malcolm martin on these sort of grounds? who is left to do that now? where is clarence 13x, fuck is bob marley? where is khallid muhammad? where is stokeley carmichael, eh? where is the noble drew ali, robert athlyi rogers, leonard howell, where is public enemy, where is amiri baraka? zulu nation, are you hovering around out there somewhere, waiting for the call? you think they were welfare-state liberals or something. for heaven's sake. don't make me unleash immortal technique on that ass. you're not ready.
[the white race is not monolithic. the stuff we've been listening to? a lot of it is made by multi-racial artists or in various multi-racial/ethnic/national configurations, like adrian sherwood at the mantrols for dub syndicate, dre for marshall. actually there are other ways of integrating stuff. we are actually naturally integrating wherever we are not hagridden by progressives. one problem is, when there's a progressive around, no one can speak freely, which makes it profoundly hard to connect. that no one should speak freely: that is the actual whole progressive program for truth and reconciliation. well, the whole thing depends on them not becoming conscious of themselves; they want a gassy cloud of hooey all around them; they demand to hear only euphemisms. they call that justice. the arts people usually stop much caring about race. they're more concerned with whether you've got flow. i am not talking about arts institutions, which are hyper yet counter-productively aware of race in that progressive way. i am talking about working artists.]
right they all had their drawbacks. well, there might have been some anti-semitism and sexism, for example. on the other hand, there is a lot of truth and power and bravery there. i understand; he's not talking to me, though he is roundly abusing people like me including me. i respect that. i started to think of some of these folks as role models somehow, ok? but however i thought about anyone, where are today's black nationalists, advocates of black power, black identity, black arts, black truth? where are the black leaders who don't care what i think about them? at least these people weren't capitulating. we are shooting your children in the streets.
i think 'black lives matter' sounds sort of pitiful. i hear a bit of a wheedle in it. it's pretty damn minimal. even if we don't know that, or act like we don't, surely you knew that? that wasn't a question for you before, was it? it isn't something you needed to tell yourself, is it? obviously, this is not my job, so i could just ask a question, what do you need to say to one another, now? it's not going to be khalid. but it had better not merely not be khalid. what i'm saying is that you had better not let it be our job to fix you. in the tradition from which you come, there are many models of self-reliance, real pride with something actually to be proud of besides better dependence; there is power and autonomy and intelligence, creativity and identity that isn't just a negative image of the thing we stamped you with. i can't tell you how to find that again, or what it needs to look like now. but lord, you can't just keep voting like this.
people are still hitting me with that new yorker thoreau pond scum thing by kathryn schulz. actually i wasn't going to say a damn thing. but here's what i do want to say: finally, someone noticed! no henry david thoreau was not a socialist. no he was not a collectivist. no he was not a 'liberal' or a 'progressive': those empty categories had not yet been invented. his politics were actually precisely the opposite of david remnick's; for hdt was not a raving statist nor a slightly-camouflaged authoritarian elitist mediocrity. also, unlike david remnick, he had his own politics and wasn't just chanting slogans in unison with his demographic. i want the new yorker, and everyone else, to realize that henry david thoreau would have utterly despised the politics, the prose, the culture, and probably the layout of the new yorker. oh yes, he was sort of a prickly eccentric asshole at times, though also quite beloved. anyway, i actually think kathryn schulz has a pretty accurate view of henry david thoreau. what really must gall in that context: what he said was true, and he wrote it beautifully. kathryn schulz has problems along both these lines overall, but does get hdt pretty right.
actually, i think even its advocates are in crazy conflict about this pc thing. there are many zones where it hardly seems to matter, and the same college kids who think 'all lives matter' is hate speech were listening, non-stop, as they argued for that, to lyrics like this : "i pray my dick gets big as the eiffel tower, so i can fuck the world for 72 hours." the thing i like most about the whole thing is that it begins 'martin had a dream!' the solemnity and repetition actually removed martin from the human race and made him a beautiful interracial cliche. anyway, just think what your speech codes would do to kendrick. you're never going to hear any good hip hop again. and, not to go all reverse racist, but i want the same rights to the use of the whole english language that we give black people. we actually, more or less all of us i hope, love our profanity and wild ability to violate taboos, and we make certain zones fairly exempt, while wanting to impose total censorship on others. i watched the movie 'tropic thunder' last night: robert downey in blackface; almost every single joke a direct pc violation. a lot of it was 'tard' jokes. delightful, of course, and it's not like it set off a huge storm of controversy. honestly, i want the same exemption that musicians and comedians get as i lecture, for example, but i realize it's kind of a forlorn hope.
today's cliche: the black community is not monolithic. and indeed, were i predicting, i'd predict that bernie could get a majority of the under-25 black vote in sc. but here is something that has really been a practical problem: in actual fact, the black community is the most monolithic voting bloc in the history of democracy: totally, 100% reliable for the democratic candidate anytime anywhere for decades on end. here is just one reason that's a practical problem. hillary has to talk race issues, mass incarceration and so on in the primaries. she doesn't have to mention it at all in the general, or do anything about it as pres, because no matter what she does (say, appearing with a klan hood or something) every black person in america will vote for her. she will swing white, because now she has to eat into trump's working-class white vote to win. that's exactly how warondrugs/race internment got started in the first place. martin etc fought for voting rights, but essentially the use of that power has become useless, precisely because it is far too unanimous.
on the other side, the unanimity of black folks makes it useless for republican candidates to even try, or to find a political connection, or do anything in office about racial issues. no matter what they do, no votes are forthcoming (they could be, i swear; rand would have been a start). so: the republicans have to fight in primaries for the white vote; they have to turn out the white vote in the general (more and more as we head toward majority-minority). they have absolutely no black constituency, don't have to listen to black voices at all, and neither do democrats. in fact, rand could not have been a start. it doesn't matter if he goes to ferguson and baltimore. it doesn't matter that he has an extremely coherent and consistent take on the war on drugs and mass incarceration and police violence. it doesn't even matter that he was centralizing race and racism among america's problems, moreso than the dems. even he finally just gave up; what he was saying polled him at 3% among republicans, and won him nobody's support at all. there was no way he could expand the republican base; it's impossible from both directions at once. there is just no chance that, for example, a single legit black leader or organization would endorse him under any circumstances. reflect on that a second, because it is making this voting thing useless.
this history is central to the persistence or even intensification of systemic racism: by their own decisions, black leaders and voters have given themselves no political leverage whatsoever. were i a black leader i'd be thinking about how badly we have misused the franchise we fought so hard for, and i'd be thinking about how that can be transformed.
the situation in south carolina, i think, should bother everybody. there are two primaries, the white primary and the black primary, reps and dems; it's very like an apartheid regime - you might as well put 'whites only' and 'blacks only' on the polling stations. except this time everybody seems to be enthusiastically participating in the partition. next comes the wall i guess. the divide between parties is ideological, ok, but in sc these are racial parties, tribal, like the national party and the inkatha freedom party in apartheid south africa. all of this would even be sort of okay if it led to black empowerment; then that could be turned around and change everything. but it leads very clearly for very definite reasons to black disempowerment.
sometimes it's said that demographics make democratic victories inevitable eventually. well, not if the whole country goes like south carolina, where almost 70% of the democratic electorate is black, and i'm assuming 90-some% of the republican electorate is white. not if the dems lose the white vote at the same rate they gain the latino vote. and they could lose the white vote, because the republicans are only too happy to use the racial dogwhistles etc, and they have no other practical way through: they have to corner and turn out the white vote in ever-increasing numbers. they are doing this! then you'll have the spectre of national race parties. martin had nightmares too.
the usual account of how this happened starts with nixon's 'southern strategy" or maybe the goldwater campaign (actually nixon lost most of the south to wallace that year). that is itself a far too partisan account. it is a dialectic: both sides are using racial politics for strategic purposes, it's as though both parties consisted merely of race hustlers. and both have a stake in increasing the salience of race as a demographic. watch the nytimes op-ed page obsessivle sort the electorate into races for decades. you could have other categories. but as long as black folks vote monolithically, and to the extent they do, race is indeed the best lever on both sides: you might fight for a 10 point gender gap, but you take for granted a 90% racial gap.
and i'm sorry, but i want to ask black folks: really. i mean really. i mean sincerely. how well have you been represented by white liberals?
that we find ourselves even more intensely in that exact same situation 50 years later is really a very sad thing. and the way things are going, i actually predict that racial inequality and systemic racism in all american institutions will grow in intensity for the foreseeable future. i don't think we're making progress!
i was physically coming up out of my chair trying to will bernie forward, to nail hillary on campaign finance squarely instead of keeping it general. to enumerate her contributors with amounts. when she went through that familiar-yet-grotesque rigamarole that she has nothing to do with her own super-pac and didn't even know that soros and whomever had given her tens of millions or whatever, and really it was barack's super-pac really, i just wanted to be in his ear: "hillary, that kind of stuff is just so disingenuous, so familiar, so...corrupt. there, i said it. you are actually going to rail about republicans doing what you yourself do better than republicans. you're not going to do campaign finance reform. you're already raising money for re-election. i am standing up here next to the very problem itself. could you pan the camera to my left? ladies, gentlemen, and others, take a good long look at the oligarchy." now, admittedly, that might just be a touch too sharp and chancey. but i say she was just standing there with her jaw hanging out, begging for the haymaker. we'd be counting right now. where is chris christie when you need him?
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