Why We Resist by Shmuel Pernicone (A Review)

In a recent movie featuring the uncanny, the pivotal young character eats spaghetti while Nichole Kidman watches entranced. The Killing a Sacred Deer is not as funny (intentionally so) as The Lobster nor (perhaps) as interesting as Dogtooth. Colin Farrell and Alicia Silverstein are also featured so who knows what beset its core concept in the process of enlisting such Hollywood star power. What’s most significant here is that this character is achingly young. So painfully young he can proclaim with wide-eyed earnestness that EVERYONE eats the stuff the very same way — as dripping red pasta dangles from his maw leaving striped traces on his chin and shirt. Like a vast swath of young humanity, he is awkward, lost, yearning, and obtuse in an imperviously innocent way. Innocent in that same impervious way so many adults, including those fast approaching their dotage, might be perceived or earnestly feel themselves to be. As impervious innocent as so many who voted for trimp, or as so many who voted against him while still perpetuating a ghastly dynamic that somehow feeds us and which threatens to continue to feed whoever come after us. The boy in this flick is as impervious innocent as the thousands of spinsters, shopkeepers, grandmamas, mechanics, accountants, postal clerks, students, secretaries, farmers, hausfraus, and pensioners who voted for Hitler‘s party before — and after — Kristallnacht. As impervious innocent as many of our most frivolous, stolid, dour, or wistful neighbors.

Tens of millions of American citizens voted for trimp who only lost the popular vote by nearly six million (always to be questioned) ballots. Over five million votes might seem a solid popular victory, immune to rational processes of recount and beyond any reasonable evidenced based claims of voter fraud. But anybody who claims THIS election wasn’t too close is only whistling in the graveyard. A graveyard where something uncanny is already happening because the uncanny has always been here lurking, and has always reared into history from time to time in different places such as the genocide in Rwanda or the witch trials in early modern Europe. Innocent people who whistle in graveyards don’t literally believe some putrid arm covered with moldy gore is ACTUALLY likely to lurch from the churning mud to drag them down to hell. It’s just that they can’t shake such images from their minds, and perhaps even enjoy the sensations such specters generate in their viscera — especially once they are safe and sound outside the iron gates under the comforting glow of civilized streetlights where they can see shadows dance behind the closed shades of familiar neighbors. 

 

Unless one investigates its title, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is likely to be written off as an autistic horror movie, a quirky take on an undead genre by a director known for his deliberately off-kilter stylistic moves. Long ago I saw a production of The Trojan Women done Kabuki style where the movements and utterances of the performers were as exaggerated as they were stilted. Once you accept its premise, nothing is exaggerated in this movie; everything is stilted. The effect is the same. Strange forms of destiny are inscrutable and irresistible. Whether imperceptibly or compulsively, it works through us despite our will, our wiles, our bargaining, or our most base or most elevated conceptions of justice. 

 

The movie’s title references the impetuous killing of a deer sacred to the goddess Artemis by Agamemnon who is prevented, so sayeth the seer, from launching his thousand ships of war unless he “atones” by sacrificing his own flesh and blood. So, pressured by teeming hordes of bloodthirsty troops, daughter Iphigenia is slaughtered. Ten years later so is Agamemnon, quickly followed by his avenging wife with all those murders (and war dead) leaving their offspring to be eternally pursued by vengeful Furies. (Or something.) 

 

I’m pretty sure the young man in the movie is not meant to represent evil. To be an oracle is to be condemned to struggle on under any one of a special variety of curses. (Ask Cassandra). In this particular movie the injured young man is a victim who is grotesquely re-victimized by becoming the unwitting portal of some ancient calculus meant to approximate a particularly savage form of justice. (For those of you over 18 living under amenable laws, it now occurs to me to suggest the movie which is probably a few nachos above your standard stoner flick might just be a tit more enjoyable when viewed under the effects of a moderate to tingling high of the sort cannabis can be cultivated to provide.)

 

This FINALLY brings us to Why We Resist by Schmuel Pernicone who is for now young (“just a kid” he reminds us and himself) but nothing like the unformed Sacred Deer protagonist EXCEPT that he might also be condemned to suffer under some version of something like the curse of prophecy. I believe “prophecy” to be a Greek term frequently used to refer to what went on amidst some dwellers in Canaan especially during the stretched decades before and after what they referred to as the “Exiles” when they permitted a particular form of this process to exert an enduring impact on the early process of becoming transformed from what might be called ‘Israelites” to what we might still called “Jews.” 

 

There are so many kinds of curses and so many types of prophet. Now and then, at least since the seventies, Bob Dylan likes to joke(?) about being one. The epithet has also been hurled at (or invited by) Noam Chomsky. The first mostly explores and draws power from the mythopoetic currents that roil whatever is “America” which like other legendary entities is always undergoing strange transformations. America is always (at the same dreamtime) much more, and always so much less, than the “United States” continuously crafted by laws and constitution. The other prophetic exemplar is exactly the same as the first. It’s just that he tries to channel it all with the focus sometimes provided by precisely tilted and carefully polished mirrors of reason. Of course, those reflecting, distorting, shiny surfaces are partially constructed on and in the shifting fields we call language. Language is something both struggle with according to their own genius. Language and reason form an uncomfortable double helix, but these are the two guiding angels of Why We Resist which in December of 2020 focuses on the challenge provided to America and the United States by its current *president.

 

One thing that Why We Resist tirelessly documents is that whatever else is represented by trimp and trimpism, they embody a potentially devastating attack on what might ever pass for reason, sanity, human decency, or hope. And it’s just as clear that its young author is determined to assert the value of reason and to defend it in every way possible that might not betray what he is so ardent to protect and, if possible, advance. He has the wit and the courage to early on in his book set forth his own guiding principles which he valiantly invites the “fellowship of the sane “to affirm, build upon, or even to question (if the probes are intended constructively so that they can provide a firmer foundation). A direct quote:

 

That objective reality exists.

 

That we all live at various overlapping points within it, and can map the whole more truthfully or less truthfully.

 

That we are all surely wrong about something.

 

That Life can be made better and it can be made worse.

 

That errors of belief blot our maps and hinder our hopes to navigate a better Life, and so we all ought to diligently discover and correct these errors, as best we can.

 

My only quibble here is that our maps are not simply blotted by distorted ideas and beliefs. Nor are they incomplete merely because of our failures to piece together various perspectives in ways that don’t leave holes. I think there are limits to our powers of perception and discovery and that the very fabric of our reasoning (based as it is on language, mathematics, logic, and intuition) has gaps that can only be depicted vaguely by our rude maps. But this is simply a quibble because I do believe that what we can map, we can represent more or less truthfully. 

 

Now, the subtitle of this book proclaims it to be a letter, and Shmuel Pernicone strives mightily to cleave to that form, often directly appealing to trimp supporters who might be willing to consider changing their minds, who might be willing to consider the truism that “thinking” is nothing BUT “changing one’s mind.” The preceding quotes are meant to mark the fact that I just mutilated one of a multitude of quotations and references included in this volume. The book is a letter, but Shmuel also calls it a “scrapbook”. If he’s entitled to reference it in that way, I’m entitled to try to characterize it less uncharitably. Yes, it is a repository of sorts: one filled with all manner of dark shards and glittering nuggets, booby traps and treasures, black holes and the beckoning twinkles of far-off mighty stars. In my first read-through I was momentarily dismayed by false indications it might be nothing more than a heavy compendium of the myriad assaults on reason and decency inflicted by trimp and his minions. But soon I paid more attention to the quotes, so many of them, and not just the ones that headline every chapter (the first of which feature Edmund Burke and Hunter S. Thompson). If the burden of reading this book is to bear witness to so many crimes, insults, and celebrations of viciousness, then Shmuel Pernicone recognizes his responsibility to guide us safely through such an ordeal while also providing interludes of respite and inspiration. 

 

This kind of mixtures provided by this book is necessary because young patriots coming of age in the age of trimp are indeed experiencing something of a miserable initiation. If anyone reading this is tempted to minimize this by pointing to the succession of conditions that initiated so many previous generations into an awareness of their adult responsibilities as citizens and members of the human family, perhaps they should consider how climate change may prove to be more inexorable than nuclear weapons as agents of our destruction if we don’t get our act together soon. But Why We Resist centers on trimp and trimpulism.

 

Let’s try to be clear. To face up to the “meaning” of trimp is to stare deep down into human viciousness where, as Adam Serwer put it “the cruelty is the point”. I said “let’s” try to be clear, so let me affirm this idea about viciousness is simply my bitter conviction. trimp supporters will have a variety of reactions to that. So would Shmuel Pernicone. But what about other young people, still early in the process of forming their understanding of politics, history, myth, and the prospects for humanity? How will they confront the meaning of this presidency which promises to haunt, perhaps possess, so much of America in how many presidential terms to come? trimpism might, as do some varieties of devilment, become even more potent in future incarnations. How will young people resist when their well-funded counterparts are so skilled in the deployment of intoxicating smoke and intentionally disorienting mirrors designed to subvert and distort? How will any of us cope with the unceasing shitstorm of proclamations destined to be continuously issued from the “Real White House” in Mara Lago for the next few years? How will we accommodate ourselves to the knowledge that some people are actually profiting handsomely from sowing chaos, undermining institutions, and inverting values?

 

Then, despite all the wooze (sometimes stupefying, sometimes infuriating) let’s continue trying to be clear. The bulk of those people who now idolize and uplift trimp are our neighbors. They’ll say things like, “Something has to be done.” Yes, they will. They’ll say that something has to be done about “those people burning down our cities” and those who are “allowing it.” They’ll say something has to be done to defend or restore “our Constitution” and even “the rule of law”. They’re primed to get way ahead of you to talk about “the rule of law” and those who are undermining it. They’ll talk about God’s law too, often knowledgeably about their Old Testament. And if the conversation hasn’t yet gone off the rails, they’d be the first to admit that “we are all wrong about something” and “life can be made better and it can be made worse”. If you bring up fascism or Nazism, they’ll agree that those are bad, but “communism” is worse” and maybe share their fear that Joe Biden is under communist influence. They’re bedeviled in their way. I am in mine. But they love their dogs and they love mine. They really care about unborn babies. They’ll help to make sure elders are shoveled out in winter and that everyone deserving gets what they really need. The overwhelming majority would never trudge out to a trimp rally, never mind dox someone, or (armed or not) stand vigil outside a public official’s home. “Don’t judge us by our bad apples,” they might say. There’s plenty of ways to commune with them, work with them, and admire them if you can mostly stay away from politics. But sometimes they’ll initiate. They like to be open minded, and they’d love to help me see the errors in my thinking.

 

The people who support trimp are driven to find facts from the best sources they can find and to develop more capacious understandings in the environments and circumstances most amenable to such processes. They’ve already invested a great deal of time and effort to such quests, and they’re determined to pursue it further. They are as afraid of human viciousness as I am. They have ideas about the “human heart” and those ideas are pretty bleak. Talking about “the human heart” will tend to devolve into incantations regarding myth and religion, and as much as I remain deluded to believe it might be better to try to talk about population dynamics and how such might be affected by education and institutions and the organs of culture, I should know by now that that’s where I’m most likely to blow it all up. (I’m always so fascinated by myth and religion — and cults.) They’re plenty experienced with education and institutions with all their annoying functionaries of corruption, incompetence, overreaching, and insulting condescension. They don’t need me to tell them about the distortions of the media or the malign influences emanating from Hollywood and Madison Avenue. And sometimes discussions don’t blow up. We can agree to disagree just like we might about the Red Sox v The Mudville 9 and each walk away puzzling whether the other’s obduracy is the result of too much over-tense complexity or the convoluted tragedy of simply being a simpleton. trimp’s believers know the difference between facts and stories and are perfectly equipped to stick to their facts with all the tools they have been provided.

 

“Come now, and let us reason together”

 

Nonetheless, Why We Resist is, from alpha to omega, an assertive apology for reason. The power and fragility of ALL this is never so evident than in the penultimate sections in a chapter entitled The Specter of Revolt. The juxtaposed “conflict” between reason and violence explored here is older than Camus and surely older than even Isaiah who, by the way, just a few lines after his invitation, also threatened those not amenable to be devoured by a (figurative?) “sword” and to then (figuratively?) “burn in an unquenchable fire.” If the Abrahamic Lord of Hosts could not avoid the linguistic snares of metaphoric(?) violence when he spaketh through Isaiah or all grown up Baby Jesus (“I did not come to bring peace but a sword.”) then how can we not applaud and admire Shmuel Pernicone’s valiant strivings here? This is where I invite and challenge all readers to peruse, analyze, criticize, and meditate — and then exert yourselves to try and do better. Come! Let us reason! 

 

Eschewing violence is a choice. Perhaps it is an extremely taxing and difficult one, but it is one that could be supported by practice, habit, and discipline. Sustained commitment to nonviolence must also be supported by an appropriate form of “community” which implies a degree of trust and or loyalty even though all communities known so far seem to involve at least some level of coercion (or at least the threat of it). Minimizing violence requires building trust and loyalty, and trust and loyalty are perhaps two keys for alleviating the effects of shame, one of which can be violence. There is evidence that nonviolent resistance is rational. There is evidence that nonviolent resistance (involving community) may also be joyful And, as always, there are cautions: one of which is that some forms of nonviolent resistance (including those advocated by another prophet, MLK) are vulnerable to the accusation that they are designed to provoke a violent response.

 

(Whatever you do, don’t be like me. The next time some trimper starts waxing conspiratorially at me, I’m gonna throw The Beatles at ‘em. As it is written, those four sinners had songs about octopi (I know) piggies, bulldogs, raccoons, ponies, and bluejays, but never anything about honey badgers. What’s THAT all about? What’s the glimmering significance of THAT lacuna? But still, even if they justify pandemic indifference or caging children by invoking a vaulting stock market, I wilst NOT lunge at them to open their throat so that I may chew on their larynx. I do forswear it — along with most of the rest of Satan’s snares.)

 

Part of the appeal of horror movies and other forms of the macabre is the justified sense that there is indeed a thin veil separating us from the irrational or what might be worse, from powers that may be malevolent, or from devastatingly sublime forces as blind and indifferent to our most elevated (or most base) schemes as they are overwhelming. I don’t always like the “veil” metaphor, but it’s better than any bridge of swords (a bridge over “what”?), and I can’t quite encapsulate the image of jumping from stone to stone across a raging river or leaping forward from meteor to meter as they hurl toward us, always threatening to bash us backward in what must be the wrong direction. I hate the word “evil” too, but which is more chilling: malevolence or indifference? The word “evil” is ever so likely to pop into our mind or cross between our lips and teeth. Maybe that word should forever be fiercely eschewed. Maybe not. One thing is clear, we cannot find evil in the followers of trimp without also delving deep into whatever it is as it writhes inside us. Come. Let us reason together or avoid such reasoning all together as long as we work or play together in peace. “Make America Great Again” cannot be evil in its heart. It might be an invocation of a certain timeless and placeless sense of “ordinary” that can never be fully absorbed or appreciated in our own little Grover's Corners whether that exists in New Hampshire near Massachusetts in the decades before the Great War and the Last Pandemic, or if it’s in an L.A. barrio today, or a Calcutta slum some thirty-five years from now. Poor Emily Webb died in childbirth too young to grasp how to hold, let go, or appreciate what one Dublin born contemporary callowly called the everyday little “epiphanies” or a long-ago dead Charleville born reprobate even more callowly called “Illuminations.” We can have good moments together. 

 

We CAN have good moments together, but history is also rushing at us at an accelerating rate. Even so, we can also count our blessings in THIS trimpy incarnation of King (fenzey zinger boy) David, or Nebuchadnezzar, or Cyrus, or Rufus T. Firefly (Hail Freedonia). After all, this moldy cantaloupe of a Cincinnatus, as devoid of honor as he might be, luckily lacked the wit to take advantage of the only major crisis of his administration that he did not instigate himself. Surely, any other megalomaniac with half a brain would have known what to do with Covid 19. If he really wanted to be president for life, he could have jumped all over the Defense Production Act in March and by April would have crates of personal protective equipment being paratroopered into Central Park. Then he’d have bullied Andrew Cuomo to have those crates opened and their contents distributed to hospitals and nursing homes by relatable lard bellies and gum chewers in MAGA hats. He’d have assiduously followed the scientific advice of Doctor Fauci et al while continuously trumpeting that he and only he really understood viruses and was the only one who cared enough about the average American to do what was right. Tell me that then he couldn’t have gotten the Constitution amended before the end of his second term to allow him a third, or failing that get Malania (I don’t care how to spell her name rite) elected in his place (with Ivanka or Rudi Giuliani as Veep). 

 

Before trimp was ever elected, I took it upon myself with the aid of a Classics professor fluent in the language to make up a very old Italian folk saying. It went “Gli stunadi voglion Cesare”, which roughly translated from the contemporary Anglo-Saxon means “The fuktards want Caesar.” Like many authentic traditional folk sayings, this one encapsulates a hard and uncomfortable truth fatalistically expressed in a sardonically grim manner. That means it was a particularly mean and petty thing I did when I fabricated it. Today it looks like trimp’s post-election “coup” is (for now) just a combination mail fraud scheme and connect-the-dots step-by-step masterplan for whatever more bold and competent Bonaparte lurks watching and waiting. 

 

I suspect we’ll never fully understand ourselves or our universe, but I’m sure we can always learn more. I think somewhere careful work has been done and continues to be developed about how cults are formed and how they persist. Maybe there is worthwhile investigation into how cults (like Nazism) can be sustained by an inversion of the most common values of humanity. It must have something to do with long lasting forms of oppression such as slavery, anti-Semitism, class, and the gender related types of violence that might be as old as human culture - or older. It probably also has something to do with the complexities of having to deal with too many rivalries, misunderstandings, insults, and threatening situations over long periods without any reassuring prospects for relief or relatively effective mechanisms to periodically release pressures. (A sadistic simplification of such predicaments is when they are lumped into the nonsensically genocidal concept of “overpopulation”.) Whenever there are sustained sensations of injustice, guilt and shame must also come into the mix. Shame, I think, might be what mostly drives those cults that thrive on negation. Guilt and fear also come into it when one is or has been a victimizer - even when one merely has learned as a self-protective measure to identify with the victimizers. Fear is always there for anyone who has seen scapegoating and the strange, sometimes almost random, ways human groups tend to select their “goats” whether those victims are individuals or any number of those who fit some particular set of criteria. But shame might be the most important factor because shame is when one has learned to blame oneself for one’s own victimization. And shame can possess the victimizer too, not only if he or she has participated in wonton cruelty, but if he or she has ever felt the slightest glimmer of identification with a victim — and thenkicks in more guilt or fear. Shame can easily turn to vengeful fury — especially when people feel themselves to have been serially violated, mocked, tricked, and brutalized, or even when they have reason to fear this might happen to them. Cult formation is certainly one of the engines of forming new nations out of the schisms of the old. Some cults have persisted for years, sustaining their members more than limiting them. Cult formation has also been the means of reinvigorating and transforming exhausted cultures and civilizations. Then, some types of cult formation have led only to destruction and holocaust. 

 

In the meantime, some people ARE profiting from our current circumstances of miasma and chaos. Many others are scrambling to fortify our culture and institutions against this and future infections. So many people, like Shmuel Pernicone, struggle responsibly to be responsible. We all have our bit to do if it’s only to cheer on those who are investing in competence, hard work, seriousness, and honor whether they strive to distribute vaccines or reset the incentives that drive the social media markets where our fevered attention is the product up for sale. Pro tips: laugh in the face of anybody who gushes or blusters about “free markets''. There never was, could, or will be any such thing. Markets are as defined by regulations as grassy lawns are by mowers. Study the successes and failures of The New Deal, the Great Society, and the system of regimented capitalism they were able to gingerly sustain. Imagine how we might all work together without the compulsions of need or violence. Investigate those who promote hope, joy, and faith. They may be imperfect, but they are not all mountebanks and necromancers. Contemplate the structures of reason. Consider what might fill in its gaps. If “belief'' seems too specific a word, then try maybe “hope”, “joy” or “faith”. Remember that we are not simply the stories we tell ourselves we are, though we may always need to be told and to tell ourselves stories. Seek out stories that open rather than enclose your understanding.

 

The beautifully written final chapter of Why We Resist ends with Lincoln’s conclusion to his first inaugural address; the one that reminds us we must not be enemies, that invokes mystic chords of memory, and them better angels of our nature. I suppose it’s much better to invoke the Emancipator’s first rather than choose his second; the one that muses darkly about the ominous and overwhelming (merely spiritual?) debt incurred by US for slavery and for every drop of blood drawn by the lash. In the first, Lincoln was essentially begging for a peaceful resolution to a sectional crisis, one that would almost certainly have preserved slavery for many more generations. In the second he was imploring for mercy on behalf of his fractured nation. In my warped worldview, the man who wrote and delivered those speeches was also a prophet whose words channel the ineffable as much as do the words of Isaiah or Jesus. And in my crabbed and blinkered understanding of why we resist, why we cooperate, why we work, why we knowingly breathe, why we strive to learn, why we read, why we write, why we sing, why we make songs, why we follow the law, why we try to change it, why we put up with each other, and why we sometimes hope, we can never be so awestruck by the powerful language of any prophecy that we don’t try to retranslate it so that it might ring again as new in our present circumstances. Because even by falling short we still might help each other find courage by going back to some particular source, some nearly wholesome one — even while our neighbors find other sources and some never give up questing for one they might credibly imagine as either primary, pure, or ultimate. If reading Why We Resist does not do some of that for you, the failure might well be yours. 

 

 

WHITE RAGE!

Attention must be PAID. (And “paid for!”) 

The time to invest in the US in an equitable way has come, if it’s not already too late. 

Far too many “whites” (especially without a strong education) lack effective concepts to deal with what’s “enraging” them. Their grievances hinge on the word “respect” which for “whites” is POISONED by what’s legitimate about the awkward cut of the phrase “white privilege”. 

”White Privilege” is a lie. It’s a FALSE sense of security and esteem instilled by systemic brutalizations and denigrations (enforced by terror and violence) of those considered non “white”. 

“Whites” with more resources linked to security and self-esteem MAY understand this bitter “privilege” as a historic dynamic. They may understand it as a devious force supporting invidious distinctions BETWEEN “whites” as well as the gore dripping chasm between “Black” and “White.” 

People with more resources do not experience the term as the same kind of unnerving threat (or lacerating mockery) it is for those with less. The ways “white privilege” actually WORKS in US society does make it a cruel, threatening taunt to FAR too many “whites ” regardless of wealth or income. 

Wealth and income represent only one crucial dimension of the resources supporting security and self-esteem while “white” Americans increasingly experience the insecurities and pathologies associated with having no wealth and uncertain incomes. (Pathologies we’ve been encultured to associate with “Blacks.”) This is NOT the kind of “equality” we need, but leveling based on “sharing the deprivation” is the boogeyman long used to keep us ignorant and divided.) 

Education in its broadest sense represents another set of dimensions related to security and esteem. It goes beyond formal schooling and skill credentials. Education’s links to human potential are similar to those of healthcare and community. And such opportunities are not simply economic. Nor are they always clearly linked to what can be easily measured or observed. 

To avoid (or reverse) a bloody cataclysm, we MUST invest heavily to reverse regional inequalities that go far beyond the neglect of inner cities. And FAR beyond education. Every part of the US outside of top tier cities and college towns suffers from a wealth drain engineered by international monopolies and oligarchy. 

Infrastructure investment MUST address the broadest possible range of resources involving security and self-esteem for everyone. SOON! (#JoeBiden) It must instill a quest for excellence less focused on comparisons to others than to a wide spectrum of stepped propensities associated with helping OTHERS achieve their potentials in their own ways in a material and social environment that can be sustained. 

 

A strong education is not based on any single narrow sense of skills. Neither is basic literacy. Nor is a strong education limited to the developmental ages of childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. Nothing is central to it. Not even schooling although the most basic forms of schooling, literacy, and numeracy will always need sustenance. 

The crisis of a pandemic and necessary physical distancing can open new opportunities to reimagine education in a broader context of social and material supports. These supports do involve technology as well as healthcare and nutrition while recognizing them all as only parts of a broader set of necessary infrastructures. We can find new ways to integrate each into community, family, and national life while we nurture it all with committed and essential resources. We can be human without being human “capital”. 

 A strong education is a process of building understandings of how one’s self, one’s relationships, one’s communities, and opportunities are shaped by human culture and how one can best use one’s capacities to improve that culture to be more responsive to everyone’s needs. A strong education is based on stories (all partly myths). That’s so because our propensity to tell and believe stories is one of the fundamentals of our humanity. But a strong education must include ways of consuming and telling BETTER stories however we are constrained to create and understand them using numbers, words, images, models, simulations, or performances. 

What happens to capacities that are neglected or squelched? 

What happens to a raisin in the sun? 

What is a conspiracy theory or a cult but a pathology of our storytelling capacity?

We (including you reading this now) can start by criticizing two stories set up to awkwardly conflict with each other. One is “White Supremacy” and the other is “White Privilege.” What we can’t honorably do is deny the Everests of data and experience showing how Blacks in the US have been terrorized, brutalized, and diminished by all our institutions. We can’t honestly entertain stories pretending this injustice is a relic of some imaginary past. Then we might see how this ongoing travesty has diminished us all, and how it still might destroy us. 

 If it’s not too late.

The Dark Side of Non Violent ACTION

Over the course of the Civil War, the Commanding General of the United States Army was, in order of service, Winfield Scott, George B. McClellan, Henry Halleck, and finally, Ulysses S. Grant who, unlike his predecessors, gave the traitorous enemy no quarter until, of course, he met Lee at Appomattox. And everything has been peppermints and roses ever since, EXCEPT . . .

 

"Demonstration, Legislation, Reconciliation"

That was the formula. That was the progression the Reverend Al Sharpton took to heart when he started preaching in New York at the age of fourteen. He learned it from Martin Luther King who was murdered.

Demonstration, Legislation, THEN reconciliation. This REMAINS the formula and the progression we MUST pass down to the next generation and which they must hand on further down the line into the unknown. We must pass it down, no matter what happens to us because we have not yet won.

The proof that one truly believes is in action. You have to join every other movement for the freedom of people. --Bayard Rustin

"County by county. City by city. You tell us what kind of police force you want." -- Andrew Cuomo

It is by no means clear that the ongoing protests in reaction to the murder of George Floyd will lead to any meaningful change. It is by no means clear that the bulk of the white protesters might not “outgrow” their current activism as they are trudged into the organizations and institutions of US capitalism. Anyone who dismisses these concerns is someone profoundly ignorant of US history, no matter how many books they have read or classes they have taught.

But some people still call out for “reconciliation”! Are they well meaning?

Some people say NOW is the time we should forget about racism and heed the ringing plea of poor Rodney King. Are they serious?

Just “move on!” they tell us. Are they for real?

“We don’t see it,” they say. They have interrogated themselves and subjected themselves to a sincere examination. And they find no fault with themselves or with “America!”

It is beyond ignorant to deny the existence of White Supremacy Racism. It is beyond vicious. Ignorance can no longer be the vile shield and ugly bludgeon of seething, self consuming hate. Denying the reality and potency of White Supremacy is like denying the existence of the Covid virus. It is stupid. It is disrespectful. It is dangerous to deny such powerful realities because they are “myths”.

People who stay home (and wear masks when they have to go out) are trying to save lives. Those who don't, don't care. That is the BEST that can be said of them. The first wave of the current deadly viral infection has not subsided except in one state: Andrew Cuomo's New York. Another surge is likely. And if it comes, no state will be immune. But who would SERIOUSLY propose we should not take measures against the virus? Who would seriously claim we should take no action? (That’s a trick question of course.) And the vicious myth of White Supremacy is much more deadly, much more insidious, and much more prevalent than any microbial virus. The myth of White Supremacy proves the power of grand and dominant myth which transcends and infuses so many institutions far removed from police precincts.

The dead bodies with their breath crushed out of them are only the tip of a momentous iceberg. The school children punched in the face or whose heads were stuffed into plastic bags are only the cutting edge.

New York’s governor has required every locality to have a community discussion about policing and then to turn that into a legislated ordinance. How many communities will be happy to leave their police departments just the way they are? How many protesters will be willing or able to participate in the grinding discussions face to face with business leaders and police chiefs?

Democracy is mostly a grind. It’s mythology of glory is too easily expropriated by self dealers, too easily monopolized by the powerful, and too easily perverted by it’s enemies. It’s a myth worth reclaiming, worth reinvigorating. Let’s hope it is not betrayed. No doubt, it is a myth that will survive even if not one additional police department is reformed inside or out of New York.

Demonstrate, Legislate, Reconcile

The protesters on the street are living in democracy. More than that, they are enlivening it, giving democracy a chance at new life, but they are only partly right when they chant “This is what democracy looks like!” They represent only the first stage of democracy. Legislation must follow. And THEN reconciliation.

Democracy, the idea that a people can collectively rule themselves, may itself be a myth. But it is a living myth. It was a laughable idea in Athens, until they made it work for a time. It was absurd when Diggers and Levelers fought for it — with and against Cromwell during the English Civil Wars. And then they were crushed. But their ideas survived among some of the fighters in the American Revolution, enough for a bit of its spirit to be cautiously enshrined in the Philadelphia Constitution ratified in 1789 by nine of the thirteen former colonies. A seed barely sprouted, democracy is a living myth insinuating itself delicately and tremulously into law and custom. Though it’s tendrils are often crushed or poisoned, democracy is living myth, blindly staggering into the future, creating itself from nothing but air and the soil of humanity. Democracy, like Albert Camus’ vision of man is “impossible”. That’s why it is a myth which *may* never die.

“The South Shall Rise Again!”

Other myths live too, fueled by hatred and resentment. What is White Supremacy Racism but a myth based on a racial hierarchy crafted to justify slavery and colonialism? Myths fueled by greed and fear and spite have long lives too.

That’s why we need to look at the mythology of hate and the symbols of White Supremacy. And that’s why we need to crush them without mercy. And THEN maybe we can find reconciliation.

The myth of Nonviolent Resistance is something fostered by our immaturity. That’s because most of us learn about Martin Luther King the way we learn about democracy. We only learn these things as school children who must be protected from the darker aspects of democracy (the darker aspects of us). We have an overly bright vision of nonviolent resistance too.

If we think about the dark side of nonviolent resistance as led by Dr. King, we might see Bull Connor’s fire hoses sending children sprawling. We might cringe to remember Bull Connor’s police dogs with gnashing teeth lunging into the terrorized faces of cowering innocents. But Bull Connor didn’t ask those children to be on the street. Dr. King and his advisors did. They knew Bull Connor was an idiot and what he would do. And they knew what the images of Bull Connor’s violence would do.

It takes a form of ruthlessness born of desperation. Are we that ruthless? Are we that desperate?

When protests started in reaction to George Floyd’s lynching, I was afraid that the demonstrators would be portrayed as rioters and that trimp would win. It didn’t happen. Not yet. But it still could. trimp might be a moron, but he has formidable backing in high and low places. Both mindlessly and calculating, they will seek to turn the tables. They will seek to turn the tide.

The LEAST sophisticated enemies of democracy are well practiced at turning our words and our values against us. They are not about to stop now. THEY are desperate. We must keep them on the defensive lest they gain an advantage from OUR excess of enthusiasm or from OUR prudence and circumspection. We must keep them off balance and force THEM to make mistakes.

We should attack the symbols of the Confederacy on all fronts. We should be relentless. We should be non violent. We should be uncompromising.

We should rip open the history of the symbols and the men. We should tear down the smugness of ignorance regarding HOW and WHY such monuments were erected and why they are still celebrated.

We should be relentless. We should be non violent.

Non violence is not about being nice. We should own our dark side and put it to decent use. We should be non violent, but we should know what we are doing. We should not fear provoking a backlash because that backlash is already brewing. There are cowards and hair on fire idiots out there seething now. These cowards and weaklings have guns have not balked at brandishing them in state capitals. The most dangerous person with a gun is a coward and weakling. We should know this and take it into consideration. We should be nonviolent. As gentle as lambs and as wise as serpents.

We should not believe ANY victory is guaranteed. The US has not used mass murder in the sense of outright bloody massacres in our streets since 1937 when the practice pretty much died out. But it was a practice carried out by public and private armies on a regular basis for half a century after the Civil War. We may have forgotten, but we have not healed. Even after the US stopped wholesale massacres against its own people, it continued to passively or actively support bloody attacks on democracy all over the world. It continues to do so right up until this day. It continues even now to slaughter, choke, strangle, beat down, and shoot at its citizens on a steady basis, killing on the level of retail.

Cowards and crazies have won before. It happened in Italy and Germany before the last world war. Is it somehow possible that maybe enough of us will believe in the impossible NOW and push on to rip out a source of deadly infection represented by confederate mythology? Maybe enough of us will believe we can lawfully attack the very heart of White Supremacist HATE and destroy its symbols. None of us should believe that new symbols of hate won’t be quickly invented even if we were somehow successful now. But that might be the next generation’s battle.

There is something ugly about forcing the hands of frightened angry cowards. Of course, that’s something that Black people, female and male, young and old, do every day just by walking down the street or driving down the road. Maybe we can afford to spare ourselves that ugliness for now?

Maybe not.

***********************

Joe Panzica is the creator of Democracy STRUGGLES! The Bloody Slideshow.  He is also the author of the unpublished Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass and is working on a second novel: I Want to be Evil.

ERASE the Confederacy!

Of course the US can never "erase" the Confederacy any more than Germany can ever expunge the memory of Hitler or the Holocaust.  

Those memories should be preserved but only to inspire horror and disgust which is all they deserve and all they ever deserved.

Why did it take us so long to realize this?

In Germany, they do not allow memorials to Hitler or any of his henchmen. Why should we allow statues of Confederate traitors and slavers to have places of honor anywhere in the US? What does it say about us that we honor them or that we suffer them to be honored?

Until very recently I thought Confederate monuments might be placed in museums where they could be preserved as history in an appropriate context.

Seemed like a decent liberal compromise . . .

Maybe . . .

But what if those corners of the museums turned into racist shrines for hate and fascism?

How do we “compromise” with hate?

How do we “compromise” with ignorance?

How do we do that when it is all around us and inside us?

White Supremacy racism is like a virus.

We can’t see it but it affects everything we see, everything we do, and everything we think or say.

White Supremacy racism even infects “Colored” people with the worst kind of hate and disgust, SELF hate and self disgust. And it is the worst kind of self hate and self disgust because it is constantly enforced from the OUTSIDE even as it simmers or erupts in the inside. It is enforced on the outside too many times in too many ways by media images, by brutal police, by ignorant sales people, by harried passers by, and even by very “nice” teachers.

And it keeps on happening, with no easy "cures" or solutions.  The pain will endure for generations to come even if we could KILL the infection. But is that a reason not to?

And we wonder why we are having a difficult time deciding what to do about a steady stream of vicious lynchings that happen so regularly and just won’t stop?

Would it help if we understood that people of "color" are not the only ones damaged on the outside and on the inside by White Supremacy?  (Some people might be too deeply dug into their hatred.)

How do we compromise?

The haters know how to turn our values regarding compromise, free speech, and justice against us. They know how to turn those values against themselves and twist them into ugly mockeries.

What traumas led them that way?

How do we compromise with a virus?  How do we compromise with hate?

Some people might say even if we got rid of every emblem of the Confederacy on every state flag, people would still nurture hate in their hearts. Those people know what they are talking about and are probably right.

Some people say that even if we smashed every Confederate monument, it would only inflame their hatred. Those people know what they are talking about. Those people are probably right.

We should do it anyway. Even if new symbols of hate and spite and ignorance are forged in their place. We should do it anyway.

Get rid of them!

And be vigilant for the next wave which will surly come, which is surly surging already now.

Get rid of them.

And brace yourself.

***********************

Joe Panzica is the creator of Democracy STRUGGLES! The Bloody Slideshow.  He is also the author of the unpublished Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass and is working on a second novel: I Want to be Evil.

“Very Interesting” (Tom Cotton’s Fascist Op-Ed)

I was outraged by Tom Cotton’s op-ed, but not by the Times’ decision to print it.

My reasoning: if a US Senator is advocating fascism, I want to know about it. And I want all other Americans to know about it too. I want THE WORLD to know about it.

But I don’t expect my opinion to be the final one any more than I would give the last say on this matter to anyone else. And that would be true even if people like Cotton were successful in overthrowing the Constitution and intimidating most people into an official silence for some dismal period into the miserable foreseeable future.

Anyone laughing at that prospect, this concern? Anyone think it’s “Funny, Snowflake?”

(Interesting...)

Still agreeing that Cotton’s op-ed should have been published doesn’t mean I disagree with every criticism of the Times. Yes, the op-ed was newsworthy. And yes, I’m glad that Cotton betrayed himself this way. But The New York Times exerts immeasurable influence. They must be held accountable. Is the primary question one of context?

The op-ed is still being published on the Times website, but now with a disclaimer indicating that it never should have been. (Interesting...) Then there’s the confession that it *could* have been published some note of “context”. I suppose one version of fairness would have every op-ed “contextualized” in some way.

But what way?

I’m thinking of the late Arte Johnson on the old show “Laugh-In”. Much opinionating (including the one you’re reading now) could justifiably be contextualized as “Interesting, but stupid.”

How should they have contextualized Cotton’s? “Interesting, but scary.” “Interesting but disgusting?” “Interesting but outrageous?” “Interesting but fascist?”

Interestingly, when Arte Johnson make his LAUGH-In comments, he was usually lurking behind a shrub dressed as a NAZI German soldier.

Very interesting . . .

But here I am, making light of (AT LEAST) two problems.

One, a US Senator is unafraid to outwardly call for a fascist clampdown, knowing he has the support of 40% of the US population when FORTY PERCENT was the final ceiling on electoral support for Hitler’s party (before it could outlaw legitimate elections).

The second is the thorny problem of WHAT TO DO about this clear and present danger of fascism keeping in mind that what public officials say in public is often tempered compared to what they say in private. (And then there’s the question of how what they say and think and hear influences what they DO...)

But, oops! There is a third problem too. Or is this really the first one? It’s the problem of what the Times did - or what it should have done. Just how should the press and “the media” (including the “social”) handle the attacks on fact, truth, and democracy from people in official positions of great power who are supported by others who control vast resources. How should they “mediate”?

Interesting, but not so funny.

But some of us can’t help but laugh at what we cannot understand, or encapsulate into a clear principle or ringing slogan. (That doesn’t mean we should hold those who don’t find laughter to be soothing as contemptible, as “snowflakes”.

Yes, the Times could have refused to publish the op-ed (as such) while reporting fully on the contents of its submission with ample quotes from Cotton’s essay as well as plenty of counterweights from people with more commitment to the Constitution and to the concepts of democracy which give any “the rule of law’ its legitimacy. A false controversy over “free speech” would ensue in the right-wing press. (Isn’t it now? Who can keep up?) But that only “solves” the problem in hind-site. Or, probably not.

Interesting...

Other dilemmas are bound to impact us soon, probably many of them all at once.

What else is new?

Democracy can only improve by criticizing itself. Democracy can only survive by relentlessly interrogating itself. The enemies of democracy see this correctly as a weakness. The supporters of democracy see it as a weakness too, but we also claim (without conclusive evidence?) that this particular weakness is also its prevailing strength. (Interesting, but . . . ?) We have NO CHOICE but to claim this contradiction as a mysterious and empowering paradox. (kinda like the “Trinity”?) We have no choice but to be (“strangely”?) inspired by it. It may stink of blind faith, but it is only the admission we can’t see EVERYTHING clearly.

We need to help each other. (Snowflakes and hard hats. Liberals and conservatives. Cool cats and hot heads. Woke or groggy.)

Let’s hope enough of us clearly see the threat posed by people like Cotton (and Barr, and trimp and so many others). And let’s hope we keep faith.

How we keep the faith, if we do, will be beyond “interesting”.

It’s going to be a “fascinating” ordeal. (No outcome is guaranteed.)

And keep in mind that “fascism “doesn’t really rhyme with “fascinating”, and that fascism also like the Spanish Inquisition in that “NOBODY” ever “really” expects it.

***********************

Joe Panzica is the creator of Democracy STRUGGLES! The Bloody Slideshow.  He is also the author of the unpublished Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass and is working on a second novel: I Want to be Evil.