Tag Archives: politics

In the Wake of Systemic Failure, Stop Demanding Perfect Civility

Leave a reply

George Floyd died with a white cop’s knee on his neck, just as Eric Garner died with a white cop’s arm around his throat, just as lives of color have been snuffed out since long before America was even America. For over four hundred years on this continent alone, people of color have been enslaved, dehumanized, exploited, marginalized, tortured, lampooned, and dismissed, yet White America still expects people of color to react with civility—this despite the recent, overwhelmingly white protests in favor of “re-opening the country.” Look at those pictures of heavily armed white men screaming in the face of police and medical personnel, all because they can’t go to their favorite bar or get a pedicure, and an honest mind would have to wonder what America would look like if these apoplectic citizens had come from a four-centuries-long history in which their ancestors, friends, and relatives were murdered, raped, and denied human rights.

“Two wrongs do not make a right,” some have said in the wake of the violence in Minneapolis, as they also said after Ferguson, and Los Angeles, and Detroit, and Watts, and on and on, proving that small minds default to clichés when real arguments fail. No, I suppose two wrongs don’t make anything right, but neither does faux outrage. Plus, if you suggest that there is anything systemically cancerous in America, this “outrage” turns to defensiveness. If you are willing to concede the immorality of Derek Chauvin’s actions without a concurrent inclination to change the system that produced him, you are still part of the problem, for it is the American system that cries out for change.

Perhaps start with yourself. If you constantly feel the need to defend the white supremacist capitalist heteronormative patriarchy, ask yourself why that is. Then ask how your indignance over others’ protests fit, or fail to, with the values you claim to embrace.

“What good does it do to burn down businesses and police stations, especially in your own neighborhoods?” some people ask. First of all, that “your own neighborhoods” is usually code for “the places in which we allow you to exist, separate and unequal.” How many of us would feel lasting affection for our prison?

Second, when the system constantly fails and those who benefit from the system offer, at best, hollow words of solidarity without concurrent action, it is not the fault of the system’s victims.

Third, such a question assumes that humans always respond to horror, pain, and frustration with pure logic. Think again about those pictures you’ve seen of heavily armed white people screaming in the face of the authorities and medical responders. Remember that those pictures were taken only a couple of months after a blanket stay-at-home order whose purpose is to stop a pandemic, that most of the people in those pictures have only been inconvenienced, not oppressed. Try to empathize with those who come from a long history of real oppression—slavery, the destruction of families, armed and organized denial of constitutional rights, and on and on. How can we expect civil and logical responses to incivility and illogic, especially when it all happens over and over again?

America always demands that oppressed peoples react humbly and peacefully, no matter how repugnant the offense. And yet no civil protest is good enough, either. Ask Colin Kaepernick what happened to his NFL career after a peaceful protest. Ask Black Lives Matter participants who were demonized as racist for their temerity in peacefully protesting systemic racism. Think of assassinated black leaders, raped black women, murdered black children. At what point would you dismiss logic as a productive response? When would you abandon hope in “working within the law”? What would you do to change the world for your children in ways it wasn’t changed for you? What, in your mind, is the proper response to four hundred years of having a knee on your neck and your so-called allies’ “outrage,” in the wake of which nothing substantive changes?

Americans like to tell ourselves that we are the greatest nation on earth, in human history, but we are seldom honest with ourselves about the rot creeping through the heart of our mythos. We cannot be the land of equal opportunity for all people and also maintain our ambivalence over institutional inequality, which installs a hard ceiling on how so many of us can live our lives and all too often kills us. We are hundreds of years overdue for an accounting. And if that accounting is not civil, if it becomes violent, we shouldn’t wonder why. We’ve had plenty of chances to do things differently.

John F. Kennedy once warned, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” What have we actually done to encourage peaceful revolution—or, better yet, to eliminate the need for revolution at all? Americans should ponder that question before villainizing those who have already suffered so much.

Whining Liberals and Clueless Conservatives: A Personal Glimpse into the American Divide

Leave a reply

Note: This essay was written two years ago. I never published it traditionally. I share it now so we can ask if things have gotten better or worse.

On December 22nd, 2016, Predator-Elect Donald Trump tweeted, “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” Apparently, our existing ability to destroy the world many times over wasn’t enough. We’ve seen this movie before—Cold War ethos, Mutually Assured Destruction, cloak-and-dagger-black-ops-wetworks as diplomacy. It wasn’t fun the first time. If Trump wasn’t paying attention to politics and the global community, he could have watched Dr. Strangelove, War Games, The Terminator. A wild-west arms race protects no one. It only pushes us closer to the Last Detonation.

On Christmas Eve that year, a Facebook friend posted an article about the dangerous implications of Trump’s tweet and called for American unification in protesting and resisting yet another regressive stance. In response, someone from Europe ignored the spirit of the post and aggressively lambasted the American Left. Our problem, he said, is that the Left needs to examine its own ideas, which are, according to him, as much based on “abuse and fear” as the Right’s. He offered no examples, proof, or context—only certainty.

Where, when, and how, I wondered, have Leftists used abuse and fear as discourse, other than instances in which they are defending themselves from trolls’ direct personal attacks? Certainly, some Leftists embraced Hillary Clinton’s “deplorable” concept quickly and applied it too broadly, but this one instance of belittling the opposition hardly seems like enough evidence to condemn the entire Left and its methodologies.

In response to Mr. Certainty, my friend was gracious and patient. I don’t always embody those qualities.

Case in point: later that day, on my own wall, I shared someone’s tweet about Trump’s attempt to close his charitable foundation while it was still under investigation. One of my own acquaintances, whom I’ll call Frank, responded. I have not seen Frank since high school. If he ever really knew me, he no longer does. He has no idea how I spend my time. Of course, that didn’t stop him from generalizing about me or Leftists as a whole.

“I would bet you whining liberals probably don’t give much [to charity],” he said.  “You all come across as takers.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

What were we supposedly whining about? Perhaps the already-brewing CIA and FBI reports of pro-Trump Russian interference in our election. Does lamenting the undermining of democracy equate to whining?

Perhaps Frank meant the Left’s resistance to plans for building a wall along the Mexican border. Mexicans have metamorphosed into a collective El Cucuy in the Predator-in-Chief’s sick, racist imagination. Does rejection of racist generalizations count as whining?

Maybe Frank was thinking of our protests against Trump’s Muslim registry. Or the administration’s attack on the rights of women and LGBTQ people. Or their continuing fetishization with gutting Medicare. Or how millions are suffering a healthcare crisis because of Republicans are obsessed with gutting Obamacare.

Every one of these conservative positions, beliefs, and plans is a matter of public record. Add them to Trump’s mocking of the disabled, the inherent racism in GOP social contract policies, and constant saber-rattling in the Middle East and the Korean peninsula, and we are faced with a major American political party without a soul. These so-called leaders have supported and extended a white supremacist, capitalist, heteronormative, ableist, allegedly Christian, nativist patriarchy. They are threatening our inalienable rights. This is what Leftists are resisting—not the loss of one election but the selling of the Right’s soul, their embracing a bigoted tyrant for political expediency. Leftists are speaking out because Trump and his administration have tried to ruin millions of lives, over and over and over again.

If that is whining, then the Founding Fathers were whiners. So were slaves and abolitionists. So were suffragists. So were Stonewall activists. So were Freedom Riders, and Martin Luther King’s followers. And on and on.

If you want to hear whining, listen no further than the most vociferous Trump supporters, like Frank, who complain about increased premiums under the Affordable Care Act but ignore insurance companies’ roles in raising those rates and the GOP senators who fight to let them. They whine about the government’s nefarious plan to eliminate guns, even in the absence of substantive gun control measures and absolutely no governmental effort to confiscate firearms from law-abiding citizens. They support slashing aid to millions of people because they once saw that one guy in Wal-Mart use food stamps to buy crab legs. They whine about Benghazi and Clinton’s emails, and they support spending millions of dollars on failed investigation after failed investigation, yet they dismiss hard evidence of Trump’s constant malfeasance. They whine based on anecdotal or no evidence, and they whine about overblown or nonexistent threats, and they whine about ways that helping others might lead to minor inconveniences, and yet they are willing to overlook bigotry and hatred and the threat of nuclear war. In their minds, efforts to resist such actual, real-world, public-record threats are sour grapes, fake news, treason.

As for the rest of Frank’s claim, I spend a lot of time with Leftists—at work, in my social life, in my readings and research, on social media, through activism—and a more giving bunch you will not find. Leftists spend a lot of time, money, and effort working hard for other people through online and in-person activism, donations, volunteer work, written and oral arguments, and more. Look around and ask yourself who is fighting for all peoples’ equality, and I would posit that you will find more Leftists than far-right conservatives. This is true even, perhaps especially, when the individual Leftist does not benefit. How many economically privileged “liberals” can you name who fight for income equality and tax reform? How many economically privileged conservatives?

These are things we should think about.

Later in our conversation, Frank claimed that Trump would be replacing “a useless idiot.” First, Barack Obama is no idiot. In addition to his Bachelor’s degree, Obama holds a Doctor of Jurisprudence from Harvard. He is a published author, an eloquent speaker, a constitutional scholar, a strong critical thinker, and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Second, anyone who believes that Obama is “useless” either hasn’t been paying attention or doesn’t care about facts. While I do not agree with everything he has done or said, Obama ended two costly, unwinnable wars, at least one of which was immoral under any sane definition of the term. Over GOP obstruction, he oversaw healthcare reform that brought first-time or renewed coverage to millions and eliminated some of the most execrable practices of the insurance industry. He helped advance women’s and LGBTQ rights. And on and on.

I wonder if Obama is a “useless idiot” to Frank because he is a black Democrat with a funny name.

The last thing Frank said before I ended the conversation was, “You [Leftists] are getting dangerous . . . I am realizing more and more that when y’all don’t get your way, you all get physical and sometimes deadly.”

This would be laughable if it weren’t so sad.

Remember all those Clinton/Sanders supporters who brought weapons to rallies and assaulted protesters? Remember all the left-wing militia groups standing outside of conservative Christian churches, ready to police and violently stop any action, word, or gesture they deemed suspicious? Remember all the liberals calling for a registration of white people or a wall to keep out white male immigrants? Remember the acts of terrorism on American soil against white Christians? Remember the liberal attempts to control men’s healthcare and reproductive rights, including threats of violence outside health clinics? Remember all the hardcore Leftists policing polling stations and harassing white straight Republicans? Remember the left-wing embrace of Nazi gestures, symbols, and ethos?

If you claim to remember any of that, you’re probably Frank—or Trump.   

As usual, Frank had it exactly backward. The kind of mind it takes to see the world through such a distorted lens would beggar the imagination if it weren’t so obviously intentional—a willful ignorance, a strategic dismissal of recorded fact, a determination to cling to what he already believes because to do otherwise would mean that he is wrong, has always been wrong, has both directly and indirectly hurt millions of people.

Conservatives like Frank make it impossible to “reach across the aisle” because they will never reach back. They demand that everyone toe their line, one hundred percent of the time, and when not everyone does, it is always the Other’s fault. They are unwilling to examine their own ideas critically and change their minds, even a little, with new evidence. They are unwilling to hear and value other people’s ideas and experiences. They are blinded by their own bright, shining selves and their image of what being American means. They never acknowledge that America has always been not just a place but also a constantly evolving idea. Conservatives like Frank—who seem, more accurately, reactionary—have elected and are defending a bigot, an admitted perpetrator of sexual assault, a man who needed the help of a Russian strongman to win. In the name of their own individual “freedom,” they are falling into lockstep with an authoritarian, ignoring both that authoritarianism contradicts American democracy and that such authority can be turned upon them at any moment, on a whim.

And no one acts on his whims more than Donald Trump.

I unfriended Frank. I will only beat my head against any one wall for so long. What I will do is continue to resist his vision of America, and Trump’s. I do not reject conservatives; I will listen to and support good ideas, no matter where they originate or with whom. I understand many conservatives are good people who want what is best for everyone. However, it is not my job or my desire to placate those who consciously mischaracterize me and mine, or those who blindly follow the Predator-in-Chief. I have tried reaching them for most of my adult life. It’s their turn. And if they think of Leftists’ outspoken resistance to sociopolitical bigotry as mere whining, perhaps they need to examine their own privilege and rediscover their empathy. I would like to believe it still exists.

Follow me on Twitter and Instagram: @brettwrites

Email me at officialbrettriley@scorpion8903gmail.com

Like my Facebook author page

Kingdoms and Bridges: Online Communication, Activism, and the Price of Conscience

Leave a reply

NOTE: I wrote this two or three years ago, sent it off to a handful of places with no success, and then forgot about it. I post it here as a freebie to revisit a time not so long ago when I still felt hopeful we could talk to each other.

When I was in fourth grade, my family moved from small-town Arkansas to an even tinier Mississippi hamlet with limited educational opportunities: an all-white, K-12 private “academy” and a public school with a mostly African-American student body. In Arkansas, itself no bastion of racial equality, I attended integrated public schools. In Mississippi, my parents, not wishing me to be both the new kid and the different one, enrolled me in the private academy. When my peers referred to the “the nigger school,” even during class, it shocked me. Introverted and confused, I had no idea how to navigate a school full of strangers except to do what they did and talk like they talked. So, even though I had begun to question the logic and morality of racism, I, too, used racist language, to my everlasting shame.

My best friend’s name was not Joe, but that’s what I’ll call him. On my first day in that academy, I stood alone. Since most of the kids came from lower-middle-class or impoverished backgrounds and everyone was white, there were few cliques, but these kids knew each other and had formed patterns of behavior of which I was not a part. As they scampered off for their usual recess activities, they did not think to ask me along, and as an introvert, I did not assert myself. Instead, I just walked around, daydreaming and kicking rocks in the gravel driveway. Spotting me, Joe approached and introduced himself. We talked. He suggested that we hang out after school. In short, he performed an act of kindness and empathy: he noticed me and reached out. Soon, he became my best friend. Though we lost touch after I moved away, we found each other through social media in the mid-2000s. We still loved each other like brothers. We could talk about anything.

Politically, I’m a leftist. Joe leans to the right. He provided a dissenting but reasonable voice to some of my farther-left positions, and I suggested new ways for him to interpret situations. Sometimes, we even changed each other’s minds.

In my remembrance, our relationship’s degeneration began with debates over guns. Given the incredible statistics about gun violence, weapons’ ubiquity, and many other factors, I have long believed that this country needs to revise its stance on firearms and its unsophisticated readings of the Second Amendment. I have never claimed that new gun laws alone would solve gun violence. In fact, I have always argued for a multifaceted solution that includes regulation, new law-enforcement methods, destigmatization of and accessible treatments for mental illness, a reassessment of violence as a solution to our problems, and more. In short, I have rejected the idea that we can do nothing about our gun problem, but I have also rejected overly simplistic solutions.

On social media, though, far too many people insist we do nothing. “We cannot limit our access to weapons because of the Second Amendment,” they say, ignoring how we have already limited our access in common-sense ways. You can’t just run down to Wal-Mart and buy weapons-grade plutonium or a surface-to-air missile or a LAW rocket. “Laws won’t completely stop gun violence, so we shouldn’t have any laws,” people say, ignoring logic. As others have pointed out, why have any laws if that’s true? Why have traffic laws when people run red lights and speed and pass against the yellow line anyway? It only stops good guys with cars from getting to work on time. Why outlaw heroin and cocaine when people get high anyway? It only stops good guys from getting high responsibly. Why make murder illegal? It just keeps the good guys from killing bad guys. And so on. Of course, no one wants a meth lab next door or a lunatic driving one hundred miles an hour through their residential neighborhood, but some people believe that guns exist in a sociopolitical and moral vacuum in which normal logic does not apply.

I had these conversations a thousand times on social media—the same people making the same points and counterpoints over and over and over, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. If I suggested that maybe, just maybe, in the wake of Mass Shooting #3,824, we should finally try something, the exact same conversations ensued, often with the exact same people. I would also have to hear the same evidence, often quoted out of context. Chicago is still violent! (As if its violence or lack thereof is directly attributable only to its gun laws.) “Good guys with guns can prevent violence. I know because I heard about somebody who managed to do it.” (No one has yet explained how anecdotal evidence is applicable to the entire nation and all the possible conditions under which violence might occur, to say nothing of the questions raised by the whole “good guys with guns” concept. Who decides what constitutes a good guy or a bad guy? Is it always obvious? If two good guys with guns arrive to stop a mass shooter, how do they recognize each other—a secret password? A handshake? If a good guy with a gun shoots at a bad guy and hits a bystander or another good guy, does that now make the good guy a bad guy? And on and on.) Once you’ve covered all this dozens of times with people who never listen, trying to respect their positions and their rights when they don’t respect yours, you become weary. And so I instituted a new rule for my own social media feeds: I would no longer have these conversations. I would no longer debate whether we have a gun violence problem or talk about these same points. I would only discuss and debate methods to fix the problem. People could still have those same conversations on their own Facebook walls or Twitter accounts if they wished, but I would not participate, and I would delete the posts of anyone who tried to hijack our discussion of solutions.

At first, Joe resisted this idea. He once told me that if I only wanted to talk with progressives who agreed with me, I should not make my posts public, as if making them public meant that I owed the whole world those same useless conversations. I don’t. I was not and am not interested in living in an echo chamber, but I can no longer waste time with repetition while people are dying. Eventually, Joe respected my decision, but that conflict cracked the foundation of our lifelong friendship, even though I never advocated a solution that would affect him or his gun ownership in any substantive way.

As the years passed and Joe drifted further to the political right, we disagreed on more topics, but again, our conversations were mostly productive. Joe refused to acknowledge his privilege as a straight white Christian able-bodied male who lived above the poverty line, but overall, he listened to me, and I listened to him.

With time, though, nearly every interaction turned into a political argument. In the wake of the Orlando nightclub shootings, I shared a Facebook meme in which the writer argued that politicians, especially conservatives, should stop sending us their thoughts and prayers and actually do something. This meme pointed out that LGBTQ people suffer harassment, abuse, marginalization, torture, and worse every day. And it’s true. Anti-LGBTQ legislation contributes to an atmosphere in which treating non-hetero, gender-nonconforming people as subhuman becomes acceptable. So-called Christian politicians attack LGBTQ people as abominations, quoting the usual out-of-context and/or ahistorical Bible verses, which makes it a little more okay for bigots to reject and attack difference. The Orlando massacre highlighted all this. Florida’s own governor said that all we can do is pray. Well, no, we could actually try to fix these problems. We could do something, try anything and see how it worked, rather than shrugging our shoulders and saying, “Huh. Who could have seen that coming?”

When I shared the meme, Joe jumped on me with both feet, arguing that only a victim or a victim’s friends and family had any right to reject politicians’ lip-service “solutions.” I don’t pretend to understand Joe’s reasoning, but I pointed out that anyone can speak out against injustice, hatred, and inaction. I argued that the writer was correct in saying that individual hate crimes happen every day in America and that much of our rhetoric and politics actually encourage such events. For the meme’s author—for me, and millions of others—the Orlando tragedy was not an abstract, distant event. it was one more link in a long historical chain. It was not a matter of politics or culture wars. It was a matter of survival. In terms of our personal relationship, Joe and I could find little common ground in our positions.

Arguments about race finally fractured our friendship. Heated debates happened every time a white police officer killed an unarmed black person or people of color protested racist actions. To be fair, Joe clarified that he does not hate people of color and finds obvious acts of racism as repugnant as everyone else. When Eric Garner died on a New York City sidewalk, rasping “I can’t breathe” while caught in a white officer’s chokehold, Joe condemned the officer’s actions.

Whenever events seemed more ambiguous, though, or conflicting evidence surfaced, Joe tended to side with white people. He insisted that Mike Brown was guilty and Darren Wilson innocent. While this conclusion is hardly uncommon, Joe’s vehement rejection of racism’s possible role in Brown’s death and Wilson’s fear bothered me—as did Joe’s refusal to acknowledge our own privilege in debating racism as a theoretical possibility instead of a concrete, everyday reality. Given the history of Ferguson, Missouri, and America in general; the institutional racism and ethnocentrism that European settlers brought to North America and perpetuated through chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynch culture, and a thousand other manifestations; and the fact that Darren Wilson represented a traditionally white supremacist authority during a time of increasing police militarization, it seems all but certain that race played some role in Brown’s death, even if Darren Wilson himself never had a conscious racist thought in his life. Institutional racism tends to ingrain in white people a fear of color, particularly blackness. Too many people respond to fear with violence, and if those people are white, our system tends to exonerate them, as it did Wilson. At the time, I argued that racism is so deeply entrenched in the American psyche that it almost certainly contributed to the conflict between Mike Brown and the police and to Brown’s death at their hands.

This is a complex position that asks us to shine a harsh, introspective light on our nation and its myths. It requires us to remember that people seldom, if ever, make decisions in moral/ethical/sociohistorical vacuums. It reminds us that we must treat the disease, not just the symptoms. This is not to say that the position is perfect or always true, but its premise of complexity encourages deeper thought and intricate, tough solutions.

In this instance, though, Joe was more comfortable painting Mike Brown as a questionable character who should have complied with authority. I found this position too simple.

Then there was the response from Ferguson’s enraged citizenry. So much of the country condemned their actions as mindless rioting perpetrated by thugs. To me, it seems much more likely that the post-trial violence represented an emotional breaking point for marginalized and persecuted people. I do not condone violence as a solution, but I can understand the appeal of violence as a response to generations of oppression and anger and frustration and fear. In the wake of Ferguson, I found myself in several arguments wherein some people wanted to dismiss the town’s citizens’ concerns and their life experiences. Some even demanded that we never criticize the police and always comply with them, no matter what. A truly puzzling aspect to these arguments: the people making them also often insisted that we need an unlimited arsenal of automatic weapons to resist the tyranny of the very government that the police represent. But recognizing this contradiction would require introspection. Thus, many people on social media defaulted to arguments about nonwhite bogeymen from whom we (whoever “we” are) must defend ourselves and our property.

For Joe, Black Lives Matter particularly struck a nerve. He believed that Black Lives Matter is responsible for an atmosphere of hatred that led to events like the murder of Dallas police officers. This conclusion seems akin to blaming the French Resistance for World War II. Several times, I pointed out that Black Lives Matter is not about hating white people or trying to hurt/abuse/oppress white folks. It is about calling attention to violence against black people and peacefully trying to stop it. I pointed out that BLM has disseminated a manifesto, which does not call for violence or Othering white people. I pointed out that, in Dallas, the police and the peaceful protestors coexisted well, even posed for pictures together, before one very troubled person murdered people from ambush. I pointed out that Black Lives Matter spokespeople condemned these killings. I pointed out that the killer had perverted the aims and methods of BLM.

Whenever I posted about issues like this, Joe argued every point, never considering any possibility other than the ones he had already accepted as fact. He conflated a group responding to hatred with groups that act hatefully. My wife and friends privately expressed concern and wondered why I endured an alleged troll. I answered that we were like brothers, that I loved Joe, that I was willing to listen even when I disagreed, that I need people like him in my life to make me question my own beliefs and assumptions. It is also worth repeating that he is, in his own way, forward-thinking on many issues. He is not some back-to-1800 knuckle-dragger.

None of that made it any easier for other people who love me to tolerate his barrage of aggressive rhetoric, though.

Once, I shared an article about a burglary victim in Oklahoma who hung from a tree on his property several nooses and a sign suggesting that would-be thieves should not linger after dark. The sight of this display upset many locals. According to the article, the man removed the sign after he realized that people found it racist.

I commented that this situation demonstrated one more reason why we have to keep fighting racism and privilege rather than shutting down conversations about them, the latter strategy being one that Joe had advocated in a previous exchange. Joe made the first comment on the thread, simply asking how this situation related to racism. I responded that nooses hanging from trees evoked the long and brutal history of lynching, not frontier justice, which no longer exists and always seemed problematic anyway. Such an evocation causes real pain for people whose family members suffered such a horrible fate. Moreover, the sign echoed the history of “sundown towns,” in which nonwhite peoples were warned not to be caught inside the city limits after dark. These evocations and the resulting pain and anguish further diminish the ability of nonwhite people to live full, happy lives. I also suggested that the Oklahoman’s ignorance of all this history might have sprung directly from shutting down conversations about race, meaning that he was, in his own way, a victim.

A few nitwits ignored the complexities of this position and posted racist responses. I refuted their arguments and then banned them from my page, since I didn’t know them or how they found my wall in the first place. I am uninterested in debating entrenched bigots, especially ones I don’t know. Joe posted several times, mostly about how nooses don’t signify lynching to him (an idea I attributed to his white privilege) and how Black Lives Matter was guilty of far worse offenses. At this point, some of my other friends got involved. One investigated Joe’s wall, found some anti-BLM posts, and called Joe a racist. Others groaned at his not-uncommon belief that progressive open-mindedness means we have to respect to every idea, no matter how dangerous or offensive. My wife even responded, which she had resisted for a long time, mostly to point out Joe’s use of unintentionally belittling language when speaking to one of my female friends.

When Joe replied, my wife told him not to mention her name again. Rightly or wrongly, she was fed up. Joe responded aggressively.

After that, we fed off of each other’s anger. We were both at fault. I said things I shouldn’t have said. Unable to understand his own role in my wife’s attitude and seemingly shocked that I would defend her, Joe unfriended me.

We have since reconciled to a certain extent. We are no longer friends on social media, but we have exchanged private messages that re-established our affection. I still love him like a brother, and when my wife experienced a serious health problem, he reached out with well-wishes and prayers. He is a good man, no more flawed than most of us.

Still, our conflict made me think about the costs of activism.

When I speak out online, I risk the wrath of trolls who will dog my every word with illogical, offensive, angry diatribes. I also risk being misunderstood. If I do not communicate an exact, unambiguous meaning and cover every possible counter-thought in a single Tweet, I can expect a deluge of missives from the human equivalent of rabid wolves. They snarl and bark and bite, driven by motives at which we can only guess.

When I participate in rallies or marches or protests or Pride Parades, I risk violence—verbal abuse, terroristic threats, Photoshopped pictures that ridicule or mislead, thrown objects, fisticuffs, knives and bullets and bombs.

When I advocate for causes and beliefs that do not match those of my family and friends, I risk censure, angry lectures, calls for me to fall in line. Several people have disappeared from my life because they disagreed with me, even if my advocacy and my causes/beliefs do not directly connect to them.

Yet when I do nothing, I risk losing my self-respect. When I abandon those in need, I do not just ignore their problems; I contribute. When I remain silent, I consent to the status quo and disconnect myself from the world spirit that should unite us all.

I am no saint. I do not hold the moral high ground over anyone but the worst of humanity. I do not consider my positions to be correct because they are mine. Rather, I adopt the positions that seem right, independent of my first reactions, and I am willing to alter my positions based on new evidence. I try to champion causes that will make America what it has always claimed to be and never yet has been—a land of true equality and love and peace, the city on a hill. In serving my conscience and my ethics, I can live with the verbal abuse and the threats of violence. I can give as good as I get, and I deal with trolls and social terrorists in much the same way I deal with political and religious ones. I say that you can harass me and even kill me, but you cannot make me afraid. You cannot stop me from trying to live a life of truth and integrity.

I wonder, though, how America has come to this point, where we have to choose between our beliefs and the people with whom we have shared our lives. When did our default mode of discourse become antagonistic and spiteful? When did our lives become an Internet article’s comments section? We lament similar attitudes and actions in our politicians, yet we build ever-higher walls around ourselves every day.

The idea that social media may isolate us as much as connect us is not new, nor is the conception that these media can be used as tools for bullying, domination, unprecedented hostility. What seems newer, in method and severity, is how social media and their instant call-and-response discourse can kill long-time, otherwise solid relationships. All of us, including me, can and should do better. If we cannot communicate civilly with our loved ones, how much chance do we have of reaching strangers? We have to find a way to share our differences, listen to each other, learn, and act without surrendering to the vagaries of our worst selves. Our choices should not be limited to silent and oppressive consent or isolation. Otherwise, social media, the connections they make possible, and even activism itself are threatened as we shout at each other across the borders of what David Foster Wallace once called “our tiny, skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.”

One answer, I believe, is empathy—the simple ability to see a situation from another’s perspective, to understand how they feel, to realize that we don’t know the specific circumstances of their lives and have not experienced their pain, to get out of our own heads and see the world in fresh ways. Through blind certainty and obstinacy, we break our connections and shrink the world. Through empathy, we build bridges to new possibilities.

The world needs fewer kingdoms and more bridges. We can build the latter one word at a time.

Email me: officialbrettriley@gmail.com

Twitter and Instagram: @brettwrites

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BrettRileyAuthor/?eid=ARBUSGoLJQnBhzsS1S6UYpwT4lIShRjn-yew0xm3EvKwaS108u-9pK9cBmuk1csLGNNZVXFI5OWugAfE

Tumblr: http://brettrileywrites.tumblr.com/

Mother of Exiles

Leave a reply

**NOTE** I wrote this approximately one year ago. I sent it out to two or three of the usual MSM outlets, where it was summarily ignored, and then moved on to other writings. I figured it would just go in my metaphorical trunk, where half-finished and unpublished manuscripts sleep in silence. In the wake of today’s Supreme Court ruling upholding one of Trump’s travel bans, though, I thought I’d post it here, in its original form (I’m not even sure the original links work). Perhaps there is relevance here; perhaps not. Make of it what you will.

***

As the Predator-in-Chief, Donald J. Trump, took the oath of office, whitehouse.gov pages for climate change, LGBTQ issues, healthcare, and civil rights vanished, as did Spanish-language content. In the coming weeks and months, Americans of conscience will resist any attempt to roll back or eliminate laws and rights that protect all people, not just the members of the white rich nativist conservative (allegedly) Christian ableist heteropatriarchy. Others will uncritically accept the Predator’s vision.

Recently, one of my old friends, caught in the grip of a patriotism that seemed closer to jingoism or nationalism, conflated my anti-Trump stance with anti-Americanism. This is, of course, an old argument, and a highly problematic one, as measured, thoughtful, researched criticism of one’s nation is much more patriotic than blind devotion. I refused to recount all my reasons and evidence for resisting the Predator’s positions and values—reasons and evidence that I have stated and defended for the better part of two years—but I did summarize a few of the positions that I find unconscionable, including his characterizations of the Mexican people.

“He didn’t call all Mexicans rapists and murderers,” said my friend. “Show me where he did that.”

“Look at his speeches,” I said, “and do your own research, from multiple sources.”

It’s true that Trump did not characterize every Mexican immigrant as a rapist or murderer. But it’s also true that he purposefully, strategically downplayed their humanity. His racist and distorted attacks on Mexicans, and Hispanic people in general, outweigh his disingenuous praise. Parsing all of these comments would take more time and space than I have available here, but an examination of the Predator’s inflammatory comment about rapists and murderers might be useful, especially when juxtaposed with self-serving, thinly veiled advertisements for his own products.

Back in June of 2015, Trump said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Like George W. Bush before him, the Predator-in-Chief lacks linguistic sophistication. His use of “bigly” still staggers me. In the above quote, “they’re” is confusing. At first, “they” refers to Mexico, a place—an “it,” or, if you accept traditional gender assignations of objects and places, a “she.” Later, though, “they” refers to immigrants. Sometimes, he uses both in the same sentence; they send people with problems, and they bring those problems to us. Trump seems to conflate the entire country of Mexico with “people that have lots of problems,” and those same people are next characterized as drug-runners and/or mules, criminals, and rapists. He uses Othering language, establishing a victimized us and an evil, corrupt them.

To some people, that might seem like splitting a grammatical hair, so let’s look at his presentation of these ideas.

The quote begins with the idea that Mexico “sends” people across the border, as if the land has a mind of its own and wants to stick it to Americans. This anthropomorphic characterization of a geographical locale seems nonsensical unless Trump is speaking of the Mexican government, which would suggest a series of offices where mustache-twirling bureaucrats interview citizens and assign “bad hombres” to cross the border en masse. Nothing is impossible, I suppose, but one would think such an organized and wide-ranging assault on American stability from a border country might attract the intelligence community’s attention.

Next, look at how Trump organizes his ideas—the generalized “people that have lots of problems,” followed by a general list of what those problems allegedly are, drugs and rape and the much vaguer “crime,” which could mean anything. He states all of this as if it were fact, and he provides no specific support for his assertions. Like so many things he says, he wants us to believe these statements are true because he made them. Only after he spends five sentences denouncing immigrants from Mexico does he tack on the qualification, which is notable not only for its lack of development but for his admitting that their goodness is hypothetical. Trump seems to be saying, “Factually, immigrant criminals rape and run drugs, but because I am so magnanimous, I am willing to assume that some of them don’t.” Gosh, isn’t he nice?

In short, Trump did not say that all Mexicans are rapists or criminals, but he emphasized criminal traits when describing them, a rhetorical strategy meant to make his audience fear immigrants and support whatever Fascist strategy might keep them out or deport them. Even his “I love Hispanics” taco-bowl tweet, so ridiculous and self-aggrandizing, reduces an entire culture to servers of food for rich white men.

To combat this influx of marauding chefs, Trump continues to insist on a border wall. What does he plan to do about the existing barriers or the enormous stretches of land along the Rio Grande—drain the river? Which Goldman Sachs executive will get that job?

Trump wants to make Mexico pay for this wall, but he can’t even manage to pay his own contractors. To be fair, he has said that he would be fine with having a big door in that wall for legal immigration, but then why not just embrace President Obama’s call for an easier path to citizenship? How does Trump factor in the ever-expanding Border Patrol, and why doesn’t he mention that illegal border crossings have already been declining for years? (See the “Unauthorized Immigrants” section here.) Why doesn’t he say much more about the good, desperate people who come to America, which still casts itself as the Biblical/Winthropian “city on a hill,” seeking a better life? Has the light of the world burned out?

Why hasn’t he spent much time discussing unauthorized immigration from other countries, across other borders, including victims of sex trafficking? Why the focus on Mexico, Hispanics, “bad hombres”?

Something is going on here beyond a concern for national security or economics—perhaps blatant racism or a cynical appeal to his base’s xenophobia.

In any case, as of this writing, whitehouse.gov’s new, and rather spare, “Issues” page lists nothing about immigration reform. Instead, the Predator-in-Chief has given us something called (rather problematically, from a grammar perspective) an “America First Foreign Policy.” It’s a blustery statement, vaguely threatening to nations that have the temerity to put their own concerns above America’s. You can read Trump’s pre-election positions on immigration here. As for details about the wall, or immigrants who have lived in America most of their lives without citizenship, well, it’s all anybody’s guess. We can, however, glean more about his conscience, or lack thereof, from his recent executive order banning immigrants, especially Muslims, from certain African and Middle Eastern countries. Trump’s abandonment of those in dire need, such as Syrian refugees, and his anti-Hispanic, nationalist, exceptionalist rhetoric echoes Nazi Germany’s demonization of Jews and the contemporaneous call for a national identity predicated, to a great extent, on destroying this Demonic Other.

Near the Statue of Liberty, a plaque bears Emma Lazarus’s famous poem, “The New Colossus.” This sonnet names America the “Mother of Exiles.” Though this romanticized view of the country glosses over our blood-soaked bedrock of Native American genocide and displacement, we cannot ignore that, even before its Declaration of Independence, America as a nation has always consisted of immigrants and their descendants. Yet the Predator-in-Chief rejects our national valuation of embracing those in need. He uses language and imagery that dehumanize the desperate and the destitute. He wants to turn off the lamp and shut the golden door.

We all need to ask ourselves if we can live with that.

A Publication, and News

Leave a reply

Please check out my latest publication, an essay on politics and the recent election, at Role Reboot.

If you’re into political writing and art, follow a new Medium site with which I’m associated, A Time to Speak.

You might also want to read a piece of narrative nonfiction I’ve posted on my personal Medium site. Check it out here.

 

Returning with …

Returning with Some Random Thoughts

So I guess I should start out with an apology for not updating this blog over the last three or four months. Last semester got really crazy and pretty much stayed that way, and then the Christmas holiday travel and gift-shopping schedule took over, and then I had to prepare for this semester. In short, I’ve been swamped. I got very little done on my ongoing projects, including this blog. But I’m trying to start off this semester on a better note. I’ve been working on my young adult novel and have finished first drafts of two other projects. I continue to submit finished works to various places. And I’ve got a comic-book project percolating at the moment. As for this blog, I will do my best to update regularly, though when the grading crunch arrives, I’ll probably have to take some time off. Sometimes there aren’t enough hours in the day.

As a way of reconnecting to all my faithful readers (all three of you), I thought I’d return to this blog with some random thoughts on things that have happened since the last update.

The Political Circus

In no particular order:

1)      I support the Occupy movement. It’s good to see Americans returning to their roots as protestors, dissenters, and activists. Naturally, the mainstream media’s dismissal of the now-worldwide movement was both expected and disheartening, but it’s done very little to stem the tide of the movement. Keep on occupying, folks. When they try to dismiss you as if you don’t matter, you know you’ve at least gotten their attention.

 2)      I have stated before that many Republicans seem to have gone functionally insane in the post-9/11 world, but this latest round of–*ahem*–“candidates” should make any thinking Republican shudder with fear and contempt. As they all scramble to take ever more reactionary positions in order to appease the fringe nutjobs, they get more and more laughable yet dangerous. Is the moderate Republican (and no, I don’t count Romney in that bunch after some of the things he’s said) really extinct? I hope not.

 3)      Barack Obama should have this election sewn up since the right can’t find anybody even remotely appealing to run against him. I’ve got mixed feelings. As an Independent, I have no particular loyalties to the Democrats, though the ever-more-radically-conservative Republicans present no candidates I could stomach voting for. That pretty much leaves the Democrats, since this country has no viable party beyond those two. It’s a damn shame, because we should be able to choose the best candidate, not the less-crappy one. As for Obama himself, I like a lot of what he’s done—ending the Iraq war and DADT, passing some semblance of health care reform, and so forth. But I’m troubled by other things he’s done or failed to do. He hasn’t addressed true financial reform; you can’t do that and still leave the same guys that got us into this mess in charge. I didn’t like the compromises in the health care bill, especially the lack of a public option. Some sources claim we’re the only first-world country without universal health care. If that’s even remotely possible, we’re not whom we claim to be as a people. And we still need to address LGBT and women’s rights, especially given how they’ve come under fire from the Republican candidates. Those are just a few of the actions and positions that please or disturb me, but I hope they demonstrate my concerns with the country’s directions. We’re much more on track now than we were under that jackass Bush, but we’ve still got a long way to go, and too many people still want to live in 1830, not 2012. I hope the President and his party gets off the fence and start addressing more of those issues.

Mixed Martial Arts

1)      I truly think that Shogun Rua vs. Dan Henderson was the best fight I’ve ever seen, but the end result was wrong. The fight should have been scored a draw, and I can’t believe that not even one judge saw it that way. Under the current scoring system, the winner of a round gets ten points, the loser nine or less. Judges are supposed to score rounds 10-8 or below only when one fighter truly dominates the round. Under that system, I would have given the first three rounds to Dan Henderson, all of them 10-9. Henderson’s camp has argued that you could have scored the round a 10-8 because Henderson dominated Shogun and almost finished him, but that only occurred over approximately one minute of a five-minute round. Later in the round, Shogun came back to stagger Henderson with several hard punches. That’s hardly a dominant round; it’s a dominant minute. But, demonstrating the kind of heart that both fighters have and that made the fight so special, Shogun came back and completely dominated Henderson throughout the fifth round. He stayed on top, much of the time in full mount, and bashed Henderson throughout the round. Henderson did nothing offensive and very little that could be called defense, other than rolling from side to side and covering up. If that wasn’t a 10-8 round at least, I don’t know what is. Thus, since the bout went to a decision, the final score should have been 47-47. This is especially true because, earlier in the night, these same judges gave Stephan Bonnar a couple of 10-8 rounds, even though he maintained less dominant positions (fighting in half-guard, for instance) for lesser periods of time. Inconsistent judging caused Shogun to take a loss, when both guys deserved equal status.

 2)      I’m glad Brock Lesnar is healthy again, but I’m not shedding any tears if he’s really retiring. I’ve never cared for the guy on a personal level, and it isn’t as if he needs the money. Go have a great life, Brock, and let the martial artists get that money now.

 3)      Jon Jones is hard to figure out, and I don’t mean his fighting style. One minute he seems like the most humble, respectful guy you’ll ever meet. The next, he has to be told to check on a downed opponent after a win. Weird.

 4)      So both Anderson Silva and Lyoto Machida have knocked people out using what is essentially a Karate Kid-style crane kick, and now Edson Barboza has knocked out Terry Etim using a spinning-heel kick. I can’t believe either move worked in real life, but I watched it happen. What’s next? Shooting-star presses? Asai moonsaults? Crazy stuff, man.

The BCS Championship Game

The LSU Tigers had what may well be the greatest regular season ever. You’ve all heard the numbers—wins over eight ranked teams, a division title, a conference title, wins over two or three top-three teams, wins over two BCS-bowl-bound AQ conference champions. Certainly no team has accomplished so much in my lifetime, and only that one Notre Dame team from seventy or eighty years ago has come close. I’d say it’s much harder to accomplish today, too, given the methods of preparation and the state of today’s athletes.

But the team that played in the regular season was not the team that showed up in New Orleans. They looked flat, lifeless, uninterested—especially on offense. The regular season showed that they were the best team in the nation, but on that night, I’m not sure they would have beaten anybody. As an LSU graduate, I’m very proud of them for the year as a whole, though that final game leaves a bad taste in my mouth. In theirs too, I’m sure.

Most of LSU’s problems over the last four years can be traced back to two things—poor quarterback play, and Les Miles’ refusal to take Jordan Jefferson out of the game. I don’t like to pick on college players; they’re all very young. They are amateurs. They have their whole lives in front of them, and I don’t want to throw them under the bus. But four years of Jefferson’s lack of pocket presence, middling accuracy, and panic-mode bone-headed mistakes have tried my patience. I truly believe that LSU would have been near-unstoppable over the last four years if we had had a strong quarterback. What else have they lacked? The offensive line was porous for only one year. The running backs and receivers have all been awesome. The defense has been great. But at the most important position on the field, we’ve been lacking.

I don’t know what Jefferson has on Miles, but it must have been really damning. I can’t think of any other reason Miles would have stuck with Jefferson against all logic, common sense, and evidence. It took Jefferson’s arrest to get him out of the lineup, and even then, Miles seized on the first opportunity to yank Jarrett Lee out of the game—when he had two interceptions in a row against Alabama. Lee seldom saw the field after that, in spite of his excellent play in the first two-thirds of the season. And when did LSU’s offense start struggling? When did they suddenly find themselves trailing in games, needing the special teams to give them the spark they needed to come back? It all happened after Jefferson took over.

All of this was never more evident than in the title game. Jefferson was the only player on the field who looked terrified, overwhelmed not by Alabama (whom he has faced multiple times and beaten before) but by the stage he was playing on. He made bad decision after bad decision, looking completely lost. And yet Miles never pulled him. When asked why, Miles claimed that he thought about going with Lee, but that given the pass rush, he needed a quarterback that could run.

Yet Jefferson was not running effectively. More often than not, he folded like a cheap card table. At some point—trailing, in the last half of the last game, the national championship on the line, the crowd chanting for Lee—why not try something?

I still don’t get it. But at least now LSU goes into next season with new people at quarterback. We don’t know if they’ll be better yet, but we know they can’t be much worse. And on behalf of Tiger Nation, I’d like to wish Jarrett Lee a great life. You deserved better than you got.

Aftermath of the BCS Title Game

I’ve been really dismayed by the responses to the game I’ve seen, both from the national media and from people I know personally.

The AP ruined its credibility in my eyes when they failed to vote for a split championship. If ever a year screamed out for co-champions, this was it. Look, the Alabama Crimson Tide are my second-favorite college football team. I have worked at the University for six years. I don’t begrudge them their national title; they were certainly the better team on championship night.

But they weren’t the best team this season. Not even close. Like I said above, no one had a season like LSU’s—not this season, perhaps not ever. They won their division; Alabama didn’t. They, not Alabama, won the SEC. The Tide did not beat every SEC team they played, or Oregon, or West Virginia, and so forth. Going into the title game, everybody in the nation agreed that LSU should be there. The controversy revolved around Alabama, given that they didn’t win any championships to get there and lost to LSU during the regular season.

The voters have split the national championship several times before, for much worse reasons. LSU certainly did a hell of a lot more this year than USC did when they got to split the championship with LSU.

No, the refusal to split had nothing to do with credentials, or fairness, or a holistic view of the season. It was borne out of a backlash against the SEC.

In the wake of the all-SEC title game rematch, the BCS is considering changes to negate any such possibility in the future. Before the rematch was announced, fans and sportswriters from all over the country lamented the possibility and voiced their displeasure with the SEC’s dominance, as if the conference’s strength was somehow a bad thing for which it should apologize. Tons of people threatened to boycott the game, even though the only non-SEC team with any claim on the title game was Oklahoma State. I publicly claimed that Oklahoma State had an excellent argument for being in the title game; they had a better regular season than Alabama, even though I still felt that Alabama would beat them if they ever played. Eventually, Alabama got its rematch, leaving the rest of the country out of the sixth straight SEC national championship. And the whining, kvetching, and tantrums commenced.

None of that was LSU’s fault. It wasn’t Alabama’s fault. But LSU—the only team to truly dominate on a national scale—was the only team to pay the price. I truly believe that the AP was terrified of the backlash against their own writers and voting system if they let not one but TWO SEC teams take home a national title. So they acted like chickens and voted for the team that won, even though all logic, evidence, and precedent screamed for a split title. Shame on you, AP writers. As far as I’m concerned, you undermined your own integrity.

Some of my Alabama friends and acquaintances have also been a bit overenthusiastic about how things turned out, to say the least. When LSU beat Bama in the regular season, theoretically ending their national title hopes, I could have rubbed it in. I could have acted immaturely. But I knew that the game and the team were really important to my colleagues and students, so all I did was congratulate the Tide on a good game and a great season.

Unfortunately, in many cases, that courtesy was not returned. As soon as the game was over, I saw several Facebook posts whose contents might be summarized thusly: “Nan-neh nan-neh boo boo, my team won and your team sucks! Ha ha-ha-ha-ha!” The LSU jokes flew fast and furiously. In other words, even though many people knew that my team and that game were important to me, they did not congratulate my team on a great season. They took the opportunity to poop on something that I cared about. And these are highly-educated, really nice people that I like very much.

I even had one fifty-to-sixty-something acquaintance who got on Twitter and taunted Tyrann Mathieu. He’s like nineteen years old and can thus be excused for a certain amount of immaturity. I wonder what my acquaintance’s excuse was.

Then there’s the contradictions in attitudes that drive me crazy. Bring up the idea of a split title with some Alabama fans, and they’ll shake their heads firmly and say, “No way.” Uh-huh. Right. But I guarantee you that if the situations were reversed—if Bama had had the kind of season that LSU did, and beat LSU on Nov. 5th, and won the division and then the conference, but lost the title game—this entire state would be screaming bloody murder for a split title. (Well, probably not in Auburn, but you get my meaning.)

The advent of social media has taught me that there’s something about sports that make people act irrationally, even with mean spirits. You don’t have to like LSU’s football team to respect me and have some courtesy for my feelings. Why are your loyalty to your team and your investment in them more important or legitimate than mine?

I saw a lot of this earlier in the season from some of my Arkansas acquaintances. I grew up in Arkansas, so, according to some people, I’m legally and morally required to root for the Razorbacks. I reject that notion. I’ve got actual ties to LSU and Bama; I’m going to root for them over a team that happens to be located in a state I used to live in. But according to some folks, I’m not allowed to choose my own teams.

Moreover, there’s been a real double standard about who can say what. My Arkansas friends can apparently make all the LSU jokes they want, even when such “jokes” attack the character of the young men on the team or the intelligence of the schools’ personnel. I find nothing funny about those kinds of jokes. They’re just mean and have nothing to do with football. But these folks claim that they can do whatever they want, whenever they want. If I say anything back, though, all bets are off. I made some football-related Arkansas jokes and got lambasted for being unfaithful to my home state (whatever that means) and for taking college football too seriously. I should also point out that when my team beat theirs, I didn’t rub it in. You can bet I wouldn’t have gotten the same consideration. I know, because I didn’t last year.

See how that works? When they do something, it’s fine, all in good fun, light-hearted. When I do the same thing, it’s overly sensitive, disloyal, grumpy. I didn’t think you could have it both ways.

Here’s grumpy: “Oooh, I see what you did there. I’m shocked the Nobel committee doesn’t know about you—your depth of thought, your awesome creativity, your sheer originality! You actually managed to rhyme the word ‘who’ with the letter ‘U!’ Wow! I bow to your awesome intellectual and comedic prowess!”

I didn’t say that. I have tried to be light-hearted and generous and kind in both victory and defeat. I’m not perfect, but I’ve sure tried. I wish everybody I knew would do the same.

Basically, social media is ruining sports for me, not because people root for different teams but because so many are hateful or hypocritical about it. We’re all mean and distant from each other for so many reasons already; do we really want to let sports divide us even further?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Kalene and I went to see it on our ten-year anniversary (yes, I know it’s hardly a romantic choice). We both liked it a little better than the original. Excellent film, but for God’s sake, don’t take the kids. Hoo boy.

More soon, I hope. And more focus next time.

Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

Email me at semioticconundrums@gmail.com

Catch-Up: Random Thoughts #nonfiction

Leave a reply

Catch-Up: Random Thoughts about Events and People in the News

            So thanks to the end of the semester, I haven’t written anything here in nearly two weeks. In that time, lots of things have happened—some incredibly important, some less so. I cannot possibly comment on everything, so to get back into the swing of things, I decided to write about whatever struck my fancy at the moment. Here, for better or worse, are the results. Hopefully I’ll be back to more coherent and cohesive posts soon. I should also note that for the most part, I don’t spend a lot of my blog time on political commentary, but sometimes I feel the need. Feel free to skip over whatever section below doesn’t catch your fancy.

Amy Winehouse

            Much has been made of the dreaded “27 Club,” populated by such notables as Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Kurt Cobain. Amy Winehouse joined that august group recently, not long after a terribly disjointed and ultimately abortive return to the stage in Europe. The tributes piled up immediately, as well they should; whenever anyone dies, he or she leaves a hole in the world, and when a talented artist leaves us, the hole is all the bigger for their having touched so many lives.

            I was never a huge Winehouse fan. Her look frightened me; her music was not the kind I tend to seek out. But having heard her tracks and seen some of her televised performances, I was well aware of her talent. The music she released demonstrated her songwriting ability, the bravery she drew upon in laying her life bare in lyrics, and the smoky voice that distinguished her from so many other pop starlets. One can only wonder what kind of art she might have produced in the future.

            Her death was hardly surprising, and yet I was stunned when I heard about it. I offer my heartfelt condolences to her family, her friends, and her fans. And I beg the young and the talented to stay out of that goddam club.

The National Football League Lockout

            Since my last post, the NFL lockout ended, with concessions given on both sides. If only our politicians could take note on how real compromise works, they might learn that neither side is ever likely to get everything they want. To achieve compromise, each side has to gain something, and each side has to give something up. While I have not studied the complexities of the new collective bargaining agreement, I have heard enough to know that some progress was made along these lines.

            Generally, in any strife between labor and management, I side with labor. History is crammed full of examples of corporate excesses enjoyed at the expense of workers; unions help avoid that and, by doing so, help stave off the kind of proletariat revolution that Marx predicted. You would think, then, that political conservatives and bourgeois managers would thank God for unions. But that doesn’t happen in America, at least not often.

            Sure, sometimes unions indulge in excesses of their own, and sometimes labor leaders seem more intent on keeping their constituents happy than in enacting lasting, positive change. The film Waiting for “Superman” details problems in teachers’ unions, for instance; watch that movie and you may find yourself ready to hire union-busting thugs to work over your local math instructor. But the film glosses over why those unions are needed in the first place, the unstable and inequitable and unfair and underpaid conditions under which people labor when management goes unchecked. It would be nice if we could do away with unions and government regulations, but until corporations and administrations act responsibly, putting people’s lives and happiness above their own greed, we simply cannot do without unions. Read your history, or listen to your common sense instead of your lobby-funded representative, and you’ll see that.

            When I heard that owners wanted a bigger slice of the revenue streams, more games in the season without any subsequent and equitable rise in health care and job security, and no new resources for retired, injured, and debilitated players, I sided with the players’ union, knowing as I did so that professional athletes tend to be spoiled, overprivileged, selfish prima donnas. Even when all of that is true about an individual player, you can’t paint everyone with the same brush, and you can’t abandon the broken players who gave their best years (and body parts) for you.

            So I hope that the players really got enough concessions from the lockout. I hope they (and their barely-able-to-walk forbears) can live with the new CBA. I hope that the practice squad player and the guys who sign for the league minimum can live happy, productive lives. And I hope that our nation’s leaders—especially you, Republicans—learn that none of us win when somebody refuses to engage in reasonable negotiation.

            Frankly, I don’t want to think about such weighty matters when somebody brings up football. I just want to see Peyton Manning throw a beautiful, crisp pass, or DeMarcus Ware pulverize a quarterback (preferably Michael Vick, Eli Manning, or whoever starts for the Redskins this year), or Andre Johnson pull down another touchdown pass that appeared just out of reach.

The Debt Ceiling Debate

            Sigh. Ever since September 11th, 2001—when so many people in our country seem to have dropped the very pretense of moderation from their political beliefs—I have found innumerable political events, figures, and concepts that have stomped all over my very last nerve. The latest seems to be the debt ceiling debate, a fake issue brought about and writ large by an increasingly radical, out of touch Republican Party.

            Time was that most Republicans seemed like basically good, reasonable people with whom I simply disagreed ideologically. Though I was, for instance, pro-choice and they were (and here’s a term I loathe, as if pro-choicers embrace death) pro-life, all but the most radical factions on both sides could discuss the issue with reason and respect. The same could be said of gun control, capital punishment, foreign policy, and just about anything else you could name. Sure, the right had its racist, xenophobic, homophobic, classist, religiously intolerant warhawks, and the left had its cuckoo birds who employed right-wing militia tactics in order to tout their allegedly left-wing ideologies. But most of us seemed to live somewhere between those extremes. Now, especially on the right, moderation seems to be as endangered as the animal species Republicans’ corporate masters seem intent on obliterating in the service of the great god Profit.

            You can’t just blame the so-called Tea Party, another term I hate because it co-opts historic American dissent in favor of those who would perpetuate a dangerous stratification along racial, sexual, class, and religious barriers. The Tea-Baggers (now there’s a term I love) mostly seem like a gaggle of loonies who live in their own world, a place I wouldn’t even like to visit, but you also have to fault mainstream Republicans for giving in to their insanity, as well as Democrats who won’t stand up to them for fear of offending a voter. This voter is likely imaginary anyway; anybody who would vote Democrat is highly unlikely to vote for the Tea-Baggers under any circumstances, and nobody in the Tea Party’s going to cast a vote for a Democrat no matter how milquetoast the candidate appears. Frankly, the two-party system is strangling this country, and until we throw them all out and move past the either-or dilemma we’ve gotten ourselves into, nothing is likely to change.

            What we need is a peaceful revolution in which we vote in people who are interested in service and in making this country better for every single person in it—white or black, rich or poor, legal or otherwise, gay or straight, Christian or otherwise.

            Why? Because our politics have degenerated into a schoolyard tussle between rival gangs of spoiled brats. As numerous columnists have pointed out, the debt ceiling “crisis” was manufactured by Republicans who want to look economically tough in the eyes of what they see as an increasingly radicalized base. They don’t tell you that George W. Bush (who I still have trouble labeling as a “President” of anything, much less the nation) raised the debt ceiling several times. They gloss over the fact that the conservative demi-god Reagan raised it something like 18 times over eight years. Republicans don’t have a problem raising the debt ceiling; they only have a problem doing it when it might make some Democrat look competent.

            They also blame Barack Obama and Democrats for the system that calls for raising the debt ceiling in order to pay for critical social and infrastructural programs, as if Obama invented that system. But the system has been in place for decades, and used by Republicans as much as Democrats, possibly more so. If you don’t like the system, then by all means, advocate for change, as long as you’ve got a solution in mind beyond eliminating all taxes, an unreasonable demand that ignores the facts of America’s economic structure. But don’t use the system when it benefits you and then hypocritically hold the country hostage so that you can metaphorically fellate a radical minority on your side of the aisle.

            The most blatantly hypocritical part of this debate is that Republican policies and administrations (including the trickle-down lovers in the Bush and Reagan years) caused the crisis more than anyone else. Then they refused to work with Obama and the Democrats to fix the economy—unless, of course, the Democrats agreed to bypass the very nature of democracy and give the right every single thing it wanted. Then they blamed Obama for the problems and the lack of a solution. I’d admire the sheer chutzpah of the right if they weren’t taking us all into such dangerous waters.

            We need the right to abandon its lunatic fringe and reach back across that aisle. In the absence of such a step, we need Democrats (notice I don’t call them “the left”) to find the guts to stand up for themselves and the rest of America, even if that means telling unpleasant truths about the opposition. We need the American people to stop taking what their politicians say at face value, to investigate things on their own using a variety of reputable and objective sources, to vote for everyone’s good instead of selfish reasons.

            If we don’t, then one of these days we really will see the fall of the American empire, and it won’t be Barack Obama’s fault, or John McCain’s (how radically right do you have to be when McCain is too liberal for you??), or even Osama bin Laden’s. We’ll each have to look in the mirror and blame the person we see there.

Captain America

            I saw the movie. It wasn’t the greatest film I’ve ever seen, but it was far from the worst, especially for a super-hero flick. I’d give it a solid B on the sliding summer blockbuster scale.

            In my summer II course, one of my students asked me what I thought about the film. I responded as I did above, while admitting that I haven’t read a comic since the mid-1990s, when the stories’ quality took a nosedive, and death became a cynical commercial vehicle, and no tale had stakes anymore because everybody came back from the dead. When the major companies copped out by replacing many of their heroes with new, poorer versions and little things like plot and characterization took a back seat to how cool the penciling looked.

            My student then said, “Well, it’s not like they based the story on what’s happened in the last fifteen years.”

            No, but in large part, they based it on the needs and desires of the last fifteen years’ audience. And I am not part of that audience. I don’t pretend to know the tone and flavor of today’s Captain America, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a film that catered to them and their sensibilities, not to mine.

            For me, Captain America was always something of a conundrum. You couldn’t find a squarer character; the guy made Superman look grim and edgy. Steve Rogers was sincere, patriotic, faithful, honorable, ethical—all the things you wish your politicians were. He never seemed to represent a particular political viewpoint (well, except in those execrable 50s “Captain America—Commie Smasher” comics, and we’ve long known that the guy in those comics wasn’t Steve Rogers). He never threw his weight behind any particular administration. Instead, he truly seemed to represent the America where most of us lived—sometimes a bit conservative, sometimes a bit liberal, but mostly just human. He encouraged dissent, yet he believed in institutions.

            I thought the film did a pretty good job of representing that Cap. As written in the film and played by Chris Evans, Steve Rogers is the guy who joins the army because it’s the right thing to do—because in those days, everyone believed that they knew who the enemy was and why we were fighting and what was at stake. We didn’t fight in the best possible ways; the poor were still overly represented, and women and non-whites weren’t treated well, but it was about as united as the nation has ever been, including, I think, during the Revolution. Rogers doesn’t go in as a mouthpiece for Roosevelt or the minority leader. He doesn’t champion a corporation or an ideology beyond a firm belief in America itself.

            Truly, if Captain America were real, I’d probably write him in on the Presidential ballot. I came away from the film feeling like I had seen at least a version of the guy I knew from the comics. Perhaps that’s about as much as we can ask of our film adaptations. I won’t advise you to run to your nearest theater and catch it if you haven’t already, but give it a shot on DVD at least. You may find yourself wishing that Cap could swoop in and save us from the machine we’ve built to govern our lives, the same one that seems to be chewing us all up in the gears.

Fedor Emelianenko, Dana White, Chael Sonnen, and Rashad Evans

            In the world of Mixed Martial Arts, everything seems to be in flux. Aging warhorses like Wanderlei Silva, Mirko Cro Cop, Matt Hughes, the Nogueira brothers, and Tito Ortiz, though only in their mid-30s, seem to be showing the effects of all their battles. Unable to take punches or dominate as they once did, they now face the roles of gate-keepers to the championships, rather than serious contenders. All these men are young enough to reach the top again, but like an NFL player of the same age, they can no longer be penciled in to dominate. It’s always a shame when age and the limitations of one’s body catch up with a great athlete, but it happens to everyone eventually. It happened suddenly to Chuck Liddell. It finally caught up to Randy Couture. Even the current exception to the rule, Dan Henderson, can’t go on forever.

            UFC president Dana White has stuck behind most of the men on that list. He dropped Ortiz from the roster once, but that was due more to their personal conflicts and Ortiz’s desire for more money than eroding skills. As every MMA fan knows, he was about to cut Ortiz before a recent out-of-nowhere submission victory over young gun Ryan Bader. At that point, you could hardly blame White; he had given Ortiz every chance, and while Ortiz had not been dominated since his last loss to Liddell years ago, he had not won a fight since 2006. The victory over Bader saved Ortiz’s job, and his stepping up to face 205-pound title contender Rashad Evans on short notice only endeared him to White. But since Tito lost that fight, one wonders how many more chances he’ll get.

            Matt Hughes has admitted that he only has so many fights left in him, but White keeps matching him with top competition. Cro Cop might not get another shot in the UFC if he loses his next fight, but he won’t be battling a no-name; he has to fight former IFL champ Roy Nelson, himself a veteran with a two-fight losing streak. White has stated his desire to “Liddell” Wanderlei Silva into retirement, referencing how White had to browbeat Liddell into stepping away from the sport for his own health’s sake; he has shown no desire to cut Silva or demote him to prelims. No one has stated that the Nogueiras’ jobs are in jeopardy—especially Big Nog, whose losses might have been attributable to the nagging injuries that have kept him out of action for over a year.

            The point here is that Dana White has, to the best of his ability, stood beside each of these men whenever they’ve lost and/or contemplated retirement and/or asked for more shots to get back on the winning track. Of course, they all fight in the UFC, meaning that White has a vested interest in their careers and a sense of loyalty to them. He doesn’t stick by them strictly because he’s such a nice guy.

            All of which brings me to the case of Fedor Emelianenko. Long considered the greatest heavyweight fighter ever to step into an MMA ring or cage, Fedor has struggled of late. He lost by submission to one of the world’s best jiu-jitsu artists, Fabricio Werdum. He lost by TKO (doctor’s stoppage) to a much larger opponent, Antonio “Bigfoot” Silva, when one of his eyes swelled shut between rounds. And then he lost by knockout to Henderson, one of the greatest fighters in history. No shame in any of those losses, but in the “what have you done for me lately?” world of MMA, three losses in a row bring out the haters. “Fedor should retire,” they said, even after his second loss. “He was never that good in the first place,” they said, ignoring how he went undefeated for ten years and won titles in several organizations, including PRIDE.

            No one has been more vocally critical of Fedor’s losses than White, who seems to take personal satisfaction in another human being’s misfortune. Oh, he makes sure to say that he doesn’t hate Fedor, but it’s hard not to read malice into White’s venomous tirades. In one internet video, White runs through a list of Fedor’s past opponents, trying to punch holes in the myth of the man’s greatness. And the opponents he names in that list are certainly unimpressive. But he leaves out a lot of names, too: Semmy Schilt, Heath Herring, Big Nog (three times), Mark Coleman (twice), Cro Cop, Kevin Randleman, and even less decorated but respected veterans like Gary Goodridge and Kazuyuki Fujita.

            You can’t say that Fedor fought only tomato cans when the list of people he beat includes three former UFC champions, one of the most feared strikers of all time, some strong wrestlers, and a bunch of plain old tough guys. And that’s ignoring his wins over both Tim Sylvia and Andrei Arlovsky, who have certainly fallen on hard times themselves but who are also former UFC champs.

            White’s vendetta against Fedor seems to stem from the latter’s refusal to sign with the UFC, to put more money in White’s bank accounts. White is correct in saying that the UFC is the only place where the best fighters always fight the best competition and that Fedor (or his management team) has tarnished his legacy by avoiding the UFC. But White is dead wrong and just plain vindictive to ignore Fedor’s accomplishments, especially since most of them happened in what was, at the time, the best heavyweight division on the planet.

            Whatever Fedor’s reasons for not signing with the UFC, the fact is that he didn’t. He seems at peace with himself and his career, even his recent setbacks. White should make peace with it too, because all his gloating only makes him seem like an ungracious bully.

            I don’t have much to say about Chael Sonnen, who seems unable to grasp the fact that Anderson Silva beat him. Certainly Sonnen dominated the fight for well over twenty minutes, but Silva caught him in a triangle choke, and he tapped out. I saw the fight. I saw him give up. He can call himself the uncrowned Middleweight champion all he wants, but no one in their right mind believes that. He fought a good fight, but he lost. End of story.

            Except that it’s not. Sonnen has always had such a big mouth that it’s impossible to take him seriously. You get the feeling that even he doesn’t believe most of what he says, but that doesn’t stop him from saying it. He blathers and brags, but he has yet to achieve the kinds of results that would to some extent justify his brashness. Where is Sonnen’s years-long win streak? Where is his UFC championship?

            Lots of fans try to excuse his poor sportsmanship and the sad example he sets of how to be a decent human being, but you can promote a fight without being a completely unlikable jerk. Since returning from suspension for performance-enhancing drugs (a suspension compounded by his role in money-laundering), he’s been more vocal than ever, but his hijinks seem even more desperate than usual. He’s now insulted the entire country of Brazil and just about every other fighter in the UFC. Nice guy.

            If you take him seriously, you’d have to point out that he’s never accomplished anything near what the objects of his bile have achieved. Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira has won championships in both PRIDE and the UFC, and is always a top contender. Wanderlei Silva destroyed all his competition for years and held the PRIDE middleweight title all that time. (And for all his talk about Wanderlei, one has to remember that Sonnen is talking from a distance. If you’re an MMA fan, you’ve probably seen the video of Wanderlei and Sonnen on a promotional trip together, sitting in the same vehicle as Wanderlei takes him to task for disrespecting the Nogueiras.   “When you show respect, you keep your teeth,” Silva says, and literally all Sonnen does is nod and say thank you. Yet when Silva is nowhere nearby, Sonnen becomes a tough guy?). Jose Aldo is a UFC champ. Anderson Silva is a UFC champ. Lyoto Machida is a former UFC champ. Even non-Brazilians have felt the sting of Sonnen’s sharp tongue, but Quinton Jackson is also a former UFC champ, and Jon Fitch is every bit as accomplished as Sonnen. Perhaps moreso, since his unsuccessful title shot did not end in his submission.

            But Sonnen keeps talking, even though his speeches are now largely considered a joke. Perhaps Brian Stann will knock some sense into him. If not, he’s probably going to meet Anderson Silva again, and then we’ll see if he can keep all his teeth. Perhaps Sonnen should join the WWE, where his utter lack of sportsmanship and decency would be welcome.

            As for Rashad Evans, he wonders why people keep booing him when he’s really a nice guy. Allow me to take a page out of Dana White’s recent interviews, in which I look into the camera and speak directly to Rashad, WWE-style.

            Rashad, I’ll tell you why people boo you. It’s not because some of your fights are dull. Most fighters have dull fights every now and then. It’s not because you brag on yourself. All fighters are confident. It’s because you showboat. You did it back on The Ultimate Fighter, and though your style has matured since then, your in-ring personality hasn’t. When Forrest Griffin was beating you for two and a half rounds, you weathered one flurry and then grabbed your cup and blew him a kiss. Really, Rashad? Are you that insecure? Are you that immature? You’re 31 years old now, man. Grow up.

            Once you get over yourself, perhaps more people will back you. Maybe then they’ll recognize you for the nice guy you really are. Until then, keep on expecting those boos.

QUICK UPDATE: Matt “the Hammer” Hamill has retired from MMA. The sport has just lost one of its finest ambassadors and best human beings. Hamill, for those who don’t know, is deaf. Yet he was a D-III national wrestling champion and went 9-4 in the UFC, including victories over Tito Ortiz and Mark Munoz. He also beat Michael Bisping in the eyes of everyone but the ringside judges. Always humble and sweet of disposition, a classy person and a tough fighter, Matt Hamill will be missed.

Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

Email me at semioticconundrums@gmail.com