Policraticus or Why Courtiers are Still Frivolous: March 2011

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

In Defense of "Bullying"--Or--What can Rebecca Black teach us about the Military Intervention in Libya?

In October of last year, there was quick succession of suicides committed by young gay men, mostly American teenagers, that caught the public eye. Seth Walsh hung himself in his backyard. Tyler Clementi jumped to his death from George Washington bridge. Billy Lucas, 15, hung himself, and Asher Brown, only 13, shot himself. Instead of coming to the obvious conclusion that these deaths, while self-inflicted, were commensurate with a culture that still tolerates publicly sanctioned bigotry so long as it is directed against gays and lesbians, America in her infinite wisdom decided to have a conversation about something else. We decided to talk about bullying. It might not be as likely that a child being picked on for a bad haircut would tie a rope around their neck and jump from a high place, but this way we could all manage to have a conversation about our own insecurities and feelings of harassment rather than the obvious reality of well financed and strategically positioned hate groups that sanction explicitly or implicitly the harassment of gay youth yet are accepted as legitimate participants in our “democratic conversation.” Instead, we decided that we are all harassed. And who benefitted from this rhetorical strategy the most? Parents who raise their children on the basis of these homophobic doctrines, who were able to separate instilling hate into their children from the fact that they "didn't raise them to be bullies."

Like all serious moral and political issues, the semantics of "bullying" can only be drawn out properly with a long digression into pop culture...

If there's one thing belatedly discovering the Rebecca Black anti-song brought home for me, it the re-appearance of this single word, "bullying." America's least favorite eighth grader deployed the term masterfully in an interview with Katie Couric, hitting all the right notes. According to CNN's narration,

"Those hurtful comments really shocked me," Black, 13, tells the Daily Beast. "At times, it feels like I'm being cyberbullied."The worst words she's received? " 'I hope you cut yourself, and I hope you'll get an eating disorder so you'll look pretty,' " Black said on Friday's "Good Morning America." "When I first saw all the nasty comments, I did cry ... I don't think I'm the worst singer, but I don't think I'm the best."

The human desire to revel in the embarrassing follies of others is all the more mysterious for how well the sting of cruel laughter is known to us all. Yet while it might be satisfying to blame Ms. Black's (fortunate) bad fortune on a universal human failing it might also be nefarious. As with the "October Suicides" explanations that rely on infinite and tragic follies generally all suffer from the same symptom, that they obscure more obvious exposition. The true villains in Ms. Black's story are not the infinite, tragic, "all of us"--a literary concept finally personified in the pixilliated form of anonymous YOU TUBE comments. They are rather more finite. The villains here are Rebecca Black's parents.

Not only did the Blacks 'drop a few Gs' for their 13 year old daughter to film a music video with a strange organization offering make believe stardom to the super young, they allowed her to appear alongside other scantily clad children singing about "Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)

Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah) Fun, fun, fun, fun" in what looked like a mix between a more suggestive Disney channel movie and one of Humbert Humbert’s more benign dreams. Oh, and Rebecca Black (code, in the child star's world for Rebecca Black's parents) are currently raking in $27,000 a week from the fruits of "nasty comments." (see my linked article)

Yet the older Ms. Black had the gall to say this of her daughter's detractors to Katie Couric,

"In all honesty, I probably could have killed a few people....but that probably would get me nowhere!"

No! Especially when the same people are lining your pockets with thousands of dollars every week you venal fucking sap.

But of course our sympathy for the "bullied" blinds us to all of this. Malevolent, cruel, and preying on the weak, bullies make perfect villains for our time. If there is a single defining feature in the semantic apparatus of “bullying” in contemporary ideology it is that bullies are not political. Bullies lack ideological and financial interests; they are mean for the sake of meanness, cruel for the sake of cruelty. While the contemporary mythology of bullying suggests the bully as a proto-sociopath, in traditional Freudian terms the bully is a man without a subconscious. Unlike the rest of us, the bully’s personality is in this sense precisely not “split.” He is cruel because he really wants to be cruel. Bullies are the perfect enemy of a culture that (according to its autobiography of itself) has ceased to have an ideology, because they pose an enemy with no ideology as an opposite. “Hegel’s basic insight,” as always, is that we are our own opposite. As President Obama might put it, we are the bullies we have been looking for.

Here is where the Rebecca Black’s two thousand dollar Karaoke game becomes an important lacuna. We are all bullies now!

And indeed, is this not basically the problem with the current intervention in Libya? In our military’s desire to “impose the no fly zone” without “directly supporting rebel forces” we are setting up Colonel Gadaffi to portray the US as “a bully.” Just like the biggest kid on the playground, we still have no idea what we want from Libya, or, more troubling, from ourselves.

In Defense of "Bullying"--Or--What can Rebecca Black teach us about the Military Intervention in Libya?

In October of last year, there was quick succession of suicides committed by young gay men, mostly American teenagers, that caught the public eye. Seth Walsh hung himself in his backyard. Tyler Clementi jumped to his death from George Washington bridge. Billy Lucas, 15, hung himself, and Asher Brown, only 13, shot himself. Instead of coming to the obvious conclusion that these deaths, while self-inflicted, were commensurate with a culture that still tolerates publicly sanctioned bigotry so long as it is directed against gays and lesbians, America in her infinite wisdom decided to have a conversation about something else. We decided to talk about bullying. It might not be as likely that a child being picked on for a bad haircut would tie a rope around his neck and jump from a high place, but this way we could all manage to have a conversation about our own insecurities and feelings of harassment rather than the obvious reality of well financed and strategically positioned hate groups that sanction explicitly or implicitly the harassment of gay youth and yet are accepted as legitimate participants in our “democratic conversation.” Instead, we decided that we are all harassed. And who befitted from this rhetorical strategy the most? Parents who raise their children on the basis of these homophobic doctrines, who were able to separate instilling hate into their children from the fact that they "didn't raise them to be bullies."

Like all serious moral and political issues, the semantics of "bullying" can only be drawn out properly with a long digression into pop culture...

If there's one thing belatedly discovering the Rebecca Black anti-song brought home for me, it the re-appearance of this single meme, "bullying." America's least favorite eighth grader deployed the term masterfully in an interview with Katie Couric, hitting all the right notes. According to CNN's narration,

Yet the older Ms. Black had the gall to say this of her daughter's detractors to Katie Couric,

"In all honesty, I probably could have killed a few people....but that probably would get me nowhere!"

No! Especially when the same people are lining your pockets with thousands of dollars every week you venal fucking sap.

Here is where the Rebecca Black’s two thousand dollar karaoke video becomes an important lacuna. We are all bullies now!

And indeed, is this not basically the problem with the current intervention in Libya? In our military’s desire to “impose the no fly zone” without “directly supporting rebel forces” with further military action we not up Colonel Gadaffi to portray the US as “a bully.” Just like the biggest kid on the playground, we still have no idea what we want from Libya, or, more troubling still, from ourselves.

In Defense of "Bullying"--Or--What can Rebecca Black teach us about the Military Intervention in Lybia?

Monday, March 7, 2011

Wisconsin: A Solution Without a Market?

Americans love to witness history, and recently 'history' seems be conspicuous everywhere. With the events unfolding in the Arab world over the course of the past two months, history's relationship to its witness is perhaps more acute. To witness history is to witness a set of happenings that have yet to accrue a clear set of political and conceptual meanings. The question is never what history 'means', but rather what it will have meant. This "will" of history's future meaning, however, is not yet 'here.' This, if anything, is for me what defines that sloppy but somehow necessary platitude: "we are witnessing history."

Some pro-labor demonstrators in Madison have taken to making signs analogizing Gov. Scott Walker to one Hosni Mubarak. This could easily be read as the exact sort of hyperbolic analogizing that so singularly defines the "Tea Party," which wouldn't be entirely wrong. Yet, the signs could also be read in terms of their anxiety. The question in Madison, both like and unlike that of Cairo, is not what "this history" will "mean," but rather whether "this" will have been "history" at all.

The answer to this question still remains to be seen. But it will depend in large part on whether these events create an opening for something new in the American political imagination. As many have pointed out, defanging public sector unions has a clearly beneficial purpose if you’re a Republican. Forget ideology. Of anyone I’ve read on the subject Hendrik Hertzberg is the most lucid and edifying on this point:

Of the five biggest non-party organizational contributors to political campaigns in 2008, the top two were unions, both of them pro-Democratic and both composed partly or wholly of public-sector workers. The other three were pro-Republican business groups or PACs. In 2010, after the Supreme Court threw open the cash sluices in the Citizens United case, only one union made it into the top five, and it came in fifth. And from now on, thanks to five Justices, corporate campaign spending will be literally limitless.

So, the politics of self-interest couldn’t be clearer here. Gutting unions is the clearest path to gutting the cash flow to the Democratic Party, particularly its genuinely progressive (and genuinely shrinking) left flank. There’s more where this came from, if Governor Walker was so concerned with Wisconsin’s budgetary problems, he probably wouldn’t have afforded steep tax cuts to Wisconsin’s business elite, etc. This game is easy to play, and its not unimportant. The ‘facts’ (as we Americans also love to say) “are on our side.”

But is ‘History’ with us too? If you ask President Obama, who’s job it is to know that history has sides and to determine for the American public which side is the right side, the answer would be this:

“Some of what I've heard coming out of Wisconsin, where you're just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain generally seems like more of an assault on unions…And I think it's very important for us to understand that public employees, they're our neighbors, they're our friends.”

Interpreted as an impassioned plea, this comment is a wonderfully acute signal of the extent to which the right still defines the parameters of political rhetoric in this country. Union members are important, not because UNIONS are important, but because union members, however quaint or bizarre their organizational makeup, are “our neighbors and friends.” One must wonder, even if the protests in Madison succeed in defeating this pernicious legislation, whether we are moving toward something like a “union community.” Like “the black community” and “the gay community” the unions, however different they may seem, are in fact neighbors and friends, not so different from regular Apple-Pie baking, vanilla ice cream scooping, “American families.” The language of identity politics is not of zero historical import here, and I don’t mean to belabor the rhetoric. The point is that identity politics language, the language of difference tolerance and acceptance, has all but usurped the formerly central place of a struggle for basic economic justice on the American left.

The question facing the ‘will’ of these events is in this sense a question of political language. Will unions simply regain the right to “Be Different” in the manner of so many Apple computers, or will some notion of economic fairness re-enter the realm of the acceptable in American public debate?

There was a time when Apple Pie was union pie. Even if that ascendency is over, which it probably is, some sense that the ‘solution’ and ‘the market’ are not synonymous in the case of Wisconsin is brewing.

Forget Tea Parties for a moment, lets see if this coffee percolates.