“What the cynics fail to understand is that
the ground has shifted beneath them…”
— Barack Obama
Part Zero:
For a laugh, here’s my (Omamaphoria-induced) contribution to your expanding list of Obama-related neologisms:
anarcho-bamist: an anarchist who is impressed / inspired by Obama.
anarch-Obama (or anarchObama / anarcho-bama): an articulate, intelligent, earnest, elected democrat, concerned with their own legitimacy.
inaugulation: inaugural inoculation (against cynicism).
Part One:
Today i woke up from a dream and reality was more exciting. Guantanamo Bay, a place i’ve visited in nightmares, is going to close. Obama called the prison “a stain on America’s reputation” — it seems incredible, to me, that the new president of the United States might actually see with his own eyes what Sunera Thobani received death threats less than eight years ago for pointing out: that “American foreign policy is soaked in blood.” Guantanamo is only the first of innumerable stains Obama will have to wash out, but it is a beginning about which any conscious human being can breathe a sigh of relief.
Many people, including my dad, expressed worry — shortly after his coup in 2001 — that Bush would look for a way to hold on to power at the end of his term(s). But of course today such fears seem surreal: clearly Bush himself never wanted to be president, and barely ever was. (He wanted the perks, not the job.) He couldn’t get in that helicopter fast enough. Who on earth wasn’t relieved to see him leave? Part imperial autocrat, part obnoxious frat boy, part wanna-be hillbilly, Bush II was truly all bad. Scholars and scalpers alike will struggle to articulate the scale of his failures. We can expect to hear more phrases like: The most criminally incompetent statesman of the modern era. The worst orator in the public realm in a generation. Etc. A war criminal. An asshole. A clown.
His accomplishments are an astounding inversion of achievement. He embodies the words: just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse…
Almost any mammal who sought to proceed him would have looked promising. Almost. Sarah Palin seems to have been sprung from the same zoo, and — while i don’t condone the incarceration of animals for human entertainment — it’s good to know she’s back there. For now. I imagine her bizarreness will attract more tourists to Alaska than an entire chorus line of dancing bears. However, we are all indebted to her for catalyzing the long-overdue recognition of Tina Fey’s comedic genius.
Speaking of the power of laughter to make dark days more bearable: as i sat, paralyzed with horror during Israel’s mass-murdering kick-off for 2009, John Stewart summed the situation up with a bit of brilliant wit beyond even his usual high standards: demonstrating the “range” of perspectives presented in the US media by American politicians, Stewart concluded (on the January 5th show, if you want to look it up) that the Gaza strip is “the Möbius strip of issues: there’s only one side!” I hadn’t laughed that hard yet this year.
But seriously…
Part Two:
I maintain: the idea of legitimate government is something everyone, but anarchists in particular, should be very interested in (with ever-vigilant skepticism, but nevertheless). This is a propitious moment for people who share basic concerns for human rights and justice (in all domains: social, economic, ecological, etc.). All of us living in this context, anarchists, liberals, even the spectral conservatives, have a relationship with the idea of democracy, and as Edward Said says of Orientalism: it is certainly much “more than a mere collection of lies.” To me, as an anarchist, recognizing the power and complexity of ideas is a first step to harnessing their power to motivate change.
Here’s an excerpt from an essay i handed in on Monday, lamenting the way “lazy-minded fools” (to abuse my favorite Jimi Hendrix lyrics) drove Murray Bookchin to give up on anarchism:
Bookchin tried to warn us: Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism. I wish i could have told him, before he died, that i heard his warning: we are social beings! Life is of the social; “true individuality… depends on a social context.” (Beihl: 16) Perhaps he should have said “before” rather than “or”. Either way, i feel remorseful knowing in his last years he “felt alone and misunderstood, a man out of his time”. (17) It’s too late to hug Bookchin, but not too late to heed him. As Stephen Collis describes Phyllis Webb’s poetics as one of “response” (one of public engagement, despite being flooded with the tensions between public and private) and as Webb herself speaks of the “future” as “tact” (Collis: 15) — it is clear: we are concerned with each other. We share, create, withdraw, re-create, etc. We like spirals, which are both cyclical and linear, and it is their both-ness that makes them flexible. Makes them bouncy. Exciting. Useful. Fun.Anyway, i will be returning to the idea of [engagement with] democracy, and its purported thorniness for (some) anarchists, again. Hopefully i won’t share Bookchin’s fate of having my faith eroded by decades of cruel personal attacks.
Moving on…
Part Three:
Recently i’ve been reminded of one of my favorite lines from one of the great movies of my childhood: Winston Zeddemore (the first African-American Ghostbuster) in his job interview, saying “If it has a steady paycheque in it, I’ll believe anything you say.” Believing things is easy. Reconciling beliefs and reality, even to the extent that we can change reality, is not. And getting a job isn’t easy these days either. As indicated by the recent headline from The Onion —“Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job” — many people are ready to take whatever employment they can get.
So how about that inauguration? Quite a show. Of course the first thing that must be said is about the first things that were said, and who said them. The invitation of homophobic, anti-choice zealot / bestselling author Rick Warren to give the invocation has been rightly described as “an utter nightmare and a total insult to the LGBT community.” Some people, caught in the dazzling headlights of Obama’s inspiring oratory, might be tempted to rationalize the decision in terms of Obama’s aim to ameliorate the intense polarization of American political culture, but veteran gay Democrat Barney Frank (interviewed in last week’s New Yorker) would like to disabuse us of any such illusions. He explains that the invitation was a wrong turn attributable to the fact that “Obama tends to overestimate his ability to get people to change their opinions, and underestimates the importance of confronting ideological differences.”
In an editorial published after Warren’s invitation was announced, New York Times writer Frank Rich opines: “It’s bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow himself to be on the wrong side of this history.” He goes on to quote historian — and Obama campaigner — Timothy McCarthy who does us all the favour of putting things plainly, saying: after such a poor start, it is time for Obama “to start acting on the promises he made to the LGBT community during his campaign so that he doesn’t go down in history as another Bill Clinton, a sweet-talking swindler who would throw us under the bus for the sake of political expediency.”
So Rick Warren’s presence was, to recycle Obama’s reference to Guantanamo, a “stain” on the inauguration. Warren seemed to steer wide of language that would point back to the ideological sewer he calls home, and in doing so he reminded me of our famously evasive renegade Prime Minister — whose outrageous arrogance catalyzed December’s constitutional crisis (a tragicomic/farcical echo of the abovementioned fears that Bush would cling to power) and set an abysmal new precedent for unaccountable oligarchy in Canada. That whole melodrama certainly deserves a long post of its own, but it will have to wait for the time being…
Returning to our creepy crypto-fascist preacher, i do think one aspect of Warren’s invocation merits further attention. Warren spoke of hope for “civility even when we differ.” It has already been pointed out that Warren’s attacks on queer communities are a “strange model of civility” but the idea of civility is a difficult one, worth thinking about. Sure, sometimes it gets cynically used as a means of silencing justified outrage, but i think it has a lot of potential power. It is a key ingredient of pluralism — something i’ve become more and more interested in recently, especially since reading this fantastic piece from Claudia Ruitenberg (a brilliant UBC prof i was lucky enough to take a course with last semester). Of course the challenges of pluralism are very familiar to anarchists, for example in the recent debates about “diversity of tactics.” Civility and pluralism, along with democracy and engagement, are “unpopular” themes i intend to explore in the coming months.
One more thing about the power of the spectacle, i have to say: Aretha Franklin brought a tear to my eye with her rendition of My Country Tis of Thee — when she sang “Let freedom ring!” you know she really meant it. At such moments, i relish the freedom to let go for a moment and just give myself over emotionally to a musician and i luxuriate in the euphoric glimpse of a vague but shared idealism. It’s a life-sustaining feeling. I also couldn’t help but be reminded of that scene from School of Rock where Dewey Finn says “Everybody wants to party with Aretha!”
Part Four:
I wanted to say something about the Gaza rally i attended at the Vancouver Art Gallery recently. It was raining cruelly, yet there were certainly hundreds of umbrellas gathered together for the event. The part i saw however, didn’t go very well. There were many three-word-chants, of course, and shouts of “Shame!” at the usual intervals, right on cue. But things unraveled during a bumbling speech from Vancouver-Kingsway’s new NDP MP Don Davies (who by all accounts is a very nice, earnest, political activist). He implicitly invoked the most irritating of logical fallacies: the fallacy of the golden mean, which is a real pet peeve of mine, and the crowd reacted harshly. Davies’ mind-boggling blunder was to utter a condemnation of Hamas’ rocket-fire in the same breath as speaking of Israel’s completely incommensurable mass-slaughter of Palestinians. That’s the kind of “both sides” crap we expect to hear in the American media (it’s what makes John Stewart’s “Möbius strip” analysis so friggin’ hilarious), but it was beyond distasteful — just shockingly stupid really — to hear it from a Canadian MP at a rally against Israel’s war crimes.
Davies’ moment of ineptitude as a speaker, however, provoked a revelation of something that also disturbed me (in my perpetual naiveté): as he backtracked and stammered, suddenly we were hearing a different voice (i couldn’t see anything but umbrellas — i assume someone grabbed the microphone from him). This voice declared that “we” (ostensibly the damp, heterogeneous crowd) “do not support a two-state solution” to the conflict; according to the angry voice, “we” support a “one-state solution” (a “free Palestine” — well, who wouldn’t want that?).
I was actually surprised to hear this position expressed seriously. I had thought that there was a consensus that, in the foreseeable future, the only plausible means to end the violence is a two-state solution; but what i heard at that rally made me wonder if polarization has intensified too much for that idea to remain viable. A grim thought. I found this interesting article from the L.A. Times that suggests, if the two-state solution is dead, the only hope is for a one-state “solution” (if you’re thinking a “free Palestine” guess again): democratizing Israel.
Honestly, a two-state solution sounds a lot easier than that, but i could be wrong. In any case, i hope Mr. Davies is taking notes from Obama (who, so far, seems to have a real knack for evoking the complexities of a situation without reducing them to formulas that abandon all perspective), and i wish him better luck (and encourage him to prepare more carefully) in future public appearances, and in Ottawa.
Part Five:
I think that everyone who gives a shit about politics (human rights, social, economic & ecological justice, etc.) has some serious work to do. That much was also true during the Bush presidency of course, in a very different way. Today, in addition to forging new working relationships to overturn injustices and accelerate progress (our perennial concerns), we have to ask ourselves, with renewed willingness to confront inconsistencies between belief and reality: how — in what ways, to what extents, and by what means — shall we engage with the existing political structures?
Of course, we must continue to aggressively challenge the legitimacy of the power structures with/in/under/against/through which we struggle, but the second stage in this spiraling process of anarchistic critique is to vigorously champion their/our moments of success. Doing so will help us propel and steer them forward: towards the goals of justice (and ultimately, an anarchist hopes, their radical transformation / obsolescence — perhaps not too far over the utopian horizon).
On that note, let me state for the record that i’m decidedly not interested in pursuing serious conversations with people who object to incremental progress. You can go ahead and call me an “incrementalist” anarchist; i would rather be an anarchist “without adjectives” but i‘ll welcome adjectives that get hurled as insults if they in fact describe me fairly. Voltairine de Cleyre was right that “Little dreams are folly” but I don’t have much patience left for people who think change is only possible, or good, if it all happens at once.
Let’s say goodbye to Guantanamo Bay, and raise a glass to progress, then get back to arguing about what to do next. It is a very exciting time to be alive.
Happy new year.
PS: one of my resolutions is not to neglect this blog for months at a time, so i’ll be back soon; there are several things of a more personal nature i plan to write about so:
Hasta pronto companer@s...
