Lily Salter's Blog, page 955
November 13, 2015
This is not about political correctness or Internet outrage. It’s about where we draw the line
I know why you’re here. Something has happened that has pushed you over the edge. You know, with regards to “political correctness.” Or “call-out culture,” or the “Internet outrage machine,” or whatever you want to call it.
It’s been a lot of little things up until now — you know, comments that you’ve seen on social media, or protests that you’ve heard about, all condemning people for supposedly “bad” things they may have said or done. But something recently happened to someone famous, or someone you respect — for anonymity’s sake, let’s just call them the Person of Stature. And as an example, let’s pretend the Person of Stature was invited to speak at a University, but then some students started complaining about supposedly “bigoted” things that this Person of Stature has said about some minority group in the past. Or present. And these students started protesting. They even passed a petition around. The nerve of them!
And now you are the one who is outraged! No, sorry, outrage is too strong of a word. You are a well-reasoned journalist and/or pundit. So instead of leaving angry comments in the comment section (like all the other troglodytes), you will pen a seemingly well-reasoned article that will be published in a well-established news/media outlet, and that compels readers to identify with your outrage (by which I mean well-reasoned position).
And here is how you will do it:
1) Make it clear from the very beginning that you are an open-minded, social justice supporter, preferably on the left side of the political spectrum. This will contrast your take on “political correctness run amok” from those of right wing commentators — you know, those hypocrites who are pro-free speech when it comes to white, straight, Christian people making fun of minorities, but against free speech when it comes to #BlackLivesMatter, or discussions about sex education and women’s reproductive rights, or secular holiday celebrations, or homosexuals and their so-called “agenda.” You are nothing like those hypocrites! Plus, you are pitching your soon-to-be-trending article to someplace like The Nation or The Atlantic, so you will most certainly need to win over liberal readers.
2) Repeatedly remind readers (through both blatant and subtle appeals) that Free Speech = Good; Censorship = Bad. Be sure *not* to mention that the Person of Stature’s freedom of speech is not really at stake — like the rest of us, they are free to make any bigoted comments any time they want. Even more importantly, whatever you do, *never* acknowledge the fact that protests, petitions, and social media comments critiquing the Person of Stature also constitute acts of free speech. This is Pandora’s Box #1 — whatever you do, do not open it! Because if both the protesters and the Person of Stature are seen as having free speech, then this becomes a “marketplace of ideas” issue, and your readers will then feel entitled to make up their own minds as to who is in the right and who is in the wrong. And you can’t let this happen, because you have already decided this for them!
3) This can’t just be any Person of Stature, or any old comments or actions against a minority group. To use a few extreme examples, if the person was a Neo-Nazi, or if their platform was returning to the time when women were considered their husband’s property, or if they called for homosexuality to be punished by death, then the article won’t work at all. First off, your liberal readers would likely feel that these things (while constituting free speech) are beyond the pale, and they will be disturbed by your attempts to go out of your way to defend such people. Indeed, you yourself probably feel the same way: If these sorts of people were invited to speak at a University, and if students protested, you would not find such protests to be outrageous at all. Who knows, you might even join in those protests yourself! But we will never know for sure, because it’s unimaginable that any University would ever give any of these extreme groups a public platform to speak in the first place.
Actually, come to think of it, these examples highlight the fact that there is already an established (albeit unwritten) code in our society regarding what expressions are deemed tolerable and which are deemed to be beyond the pale. This is Pandora’s Box #2 — once again, do not open it! Because if you bring attention to this unspoken line-in-the-sand regarding acceptability, then your readers will recognize that this story is not really about “free speech versus censorship” (because once again, all the aforementioned people are free to speak their minds), but rather how do we (whether as a society, a public institution, a workplace, or as individuals) decide where to draw this line? Where does one person’s right to free speech end and another person’s right to go to work or school without having to deal with bigotry or harassment begin? This is an extremely complicated matter that would take way more than one pithy article to cover. Plus, there is no cut-and-dried answer to this question, just a mess of differing opinions as to where to precisely to draw this line. So you need to pose a different question, one that has a clear right answer (which non-coincidentally coincides with your position).
What you need is defendable Person of Stature — someone who is likeable and/or on the right side of most issues, despite the current controversy. And the controversy itself has to be something that most mainstream self-identified liberals will consider to be a “minor issue” or much ado about nothing. Perhaps the Person of Stature has made comments or used language that you could easily get away with five, or ten, or fifteen years ago, but which now seems somewhat problematic or unsavory (because the unspoken line-in-the-sand is always shifting over time — but remember that’s Pandora’s Box #2, so don’t mention this!). This is perfect, because your readers have maybe said similar things themselves way back when, so they will identify somewhat with the Person of Stature. Or maybe they feel somewhat disgruntled by how fast the times are a-changin’ (they can barely keep up!) and/or they are starting to think that things were better in “the good old days” when they were younger (i.e., when they were the upstarts who mocked people who believed that things were better in “the good old days”).
But what’s even more perfect is if the minority group in question is one that has made some progress, but is still far from being fully accepted. To this end, might I suggest transgender people? Because as far as most of your mainstream self-identified liberal readers are concerned, there weren’t really any transgender people at all (outside of the occasional Hollywood movie or Jerry Springer show) just five, or ten, or fifteen years ago. But now they’re on television all the time, and there are all these articles and books about them — it’s like they’re suddenly crawling all over the place! And as if that wasn’t bad enough, now they are asking for things! Like, safe bathrooms. Or having their identities respected. Or not having to constantly face hateful or derogatory speech on a regular basis. And while your readers are not opposed to transgender people per se — hey, whatever Caitlyn Jenner decides to do with her body and in her own bedroom is her own business — they definitely feel like this is all happening way too fast! For them, at least. Plus, they probably feel confused or squeamish about trans people themselves (although unlike the Person of Stature, they probably know better than to say that out loud in public).
Okay, so now that we’ve found the appropriate minority group and Person of Stature to generate outrage — I mean, serious concern — in our readers, onto the next step:
4) Pick an overarching theme: There are two obvious paths here.
Make it about “political correctness run amok”: For instance, you might open the article with the transgender students’ protesting the Person of Stature’s University talk. But then you will pan back and show that this is but one instance among many in a much larger and disturbing trend sweeping the nation — aka, “political correctness running amok.” (I am not sure why political correctness is always “running amok” as opposed to other synonymous phrases, but just roll with it.) And at this point, you can simply provide readers with a laundry list of seemingly similar incidents of activists and minority groups taking things way too far with their “political correctness” and “censorship.” For examples of this laundry-list approach, see recent high profile pieces by Jonathan Chait, Michelle Goldberg, and Caitlin Flanagan (there are countless others — The Atlantic alone seems to be churning out one or two of these per month!). The benefit of this approach is that you don’t have to go too in depth about any specific issue (e.g., interviewing all the parties involved, accurately conveying their differing perspectives, etc.) — you can just hastily depict all of them as being outrageous. Additionally, this allows you to conflate some potentially legitimate issues (e.g., protests of the Person of Stature) with a bunch of random mean things that random people (who have no stature) have said on Twitter.
Make it about the “minority group gone too far”: In this strategy, you will place the focus squarely on this one minority group (i.e., transgender people) and portray them as crossing a line that no other respectable minority group would dare cross. The advantage to this is that most people are already suspicious of transgender people and unfamiliar with trans issues, so it will be relatively easy to convince your readers that this group is up to no good and/or overreacting to things. The disadvantage is that, if not handled adeptly, you may come off as being prejudiced against this group yourself. So you have to at least create an aura (however superficial) of fairness. One way to do this is to go to great lengths to make it seem like you are telling both sides of the story, even though your retelling of events is heavily slanted. (Don’t worry, 95-ish percent of your readers will not know enough about trans people and issues to recognize this bias.)
Alternatively, if you are writing a shorter op-ed, then you may want to go with a hybrid of the two approaches. Make it mostly about the transgender protests of the Person of Stature’s talk, but don’t offer any details that may raise concerns for your readers. For instance, do not include any of the Person of Stature’s actual quotes (see bottom of linked article), and most definitely do not link to or include trans activists’ perspectives or concerns about the matter. (Pro tip: putting “transphobia” in scare-quotes, to subtly suggest that its very existence is questionable, goes a long way!) And after a brief mentioning of this particular affair, you will broaden the lens and make the case that this is a free speech/censorship issue. And you will passionately argue that we all need to be more tolerant. Not tolerant of transgender people of course, that would be preposterous! But rather, tolerant of People of Stature who are right about most issues, but maybe wrong about others (and I say “maybe” here because your readers will not be able to judge for themselves, because you didn’t share any of the Person of Stature’s actual quotes or beliefs about transgender people).
5) All of this may sound straightforward enough. But there are a couple more Pandora’s Boxes that you will need to avoid in order to be successful:
Pandora’s Box #3: If the Person of Stature happens to be a renowned feminist, then whatever you do, do *not* remind readers that the things that the transgender protesters are doing now — penning critiques of the Person of Stature’s previous comments, passing around petitions, trying to convince the University not to offer this Person of Stature a public platform to potentially spew even more prejudice and disinformation about the marginalized group in question — these are all things that feminists themselves have done over the years! In fact, during the late ’60s and early ’70s (back when sexism was rampant, when women were not taken very seriously, and when this very Person of Stature first came to prominence as a feminist), feminists were routinely protesting institutions and events that they felt contributed to their marginalization. These are simply the types of things that you need to do when you are a marginalized group who no one takes seriously, and if you want people to pay attention to your issues and potentially change their minds. Otherwise, why would they even care? Or take a stance on the issues you face? Or god forbid, potentially even lift a finger?
If you accidentally open Pandora’s Box #3, then readers might begin to see parallels between feminists back then and transgender activists today. They might recognize that these sorts of tactics are simply how marginalized groups slowly move the unspoken line-in-the-sand (that we are not supposed to mention — see Pandora’s Box #2) toward their preferred direction. Toward respect and equity, as far as they are concerned.
Pandora’s Box #4: Remember earlier, when I mentioned how (in your mainstream self-identified liberal readers’ recollection) there were hardly any transgender people at all a mere five, or ten, or fifteen years ago? Well, they were actually around that whole time! It’s just that they were hardly ever given the opportunity to speak, or to be heard, in public settings. Hell, just ten years ago, it was far more common for such protests to be directed against transgender people speaking at Universities rather than the other way around.
And if you were to ask trans people who lived through that time, they would likely point out that freedom of speech — which as an abstract concept, virtually everyone embraces — doesn’t mean shit when 95-ish percent of people think that you are worthless, and/or abominable, and/or immoral, and when they use their overwhelming-majority freedom-of-speech powers to make sure that you are never allowed to share your experiences or perspectives in a public setting, or hold a position where you can influence public policy or popular perception in any way.
So as I’ve been saying all along, this story is not really about free speech. It’s about where we — as individuals, as a society — draw that unspoken line-in-the-sand with regards to what we deem to be permissible, and what (and often whom) we deem beyond the pale.
And if you can’t see that the real issue at stake here is the unspoken line-in-the-sand, then that’s most likely a sign that who you are and what you believe is already deemed permissible in our society. But as a trans person who has lived most of my life being deemed by 95-ish percent of society as being beyond the pale — who stayed closeted the first twenty-seven years of my life because I knew most people wouldn’t accept me, who attended secretly-held trans community meetings because it was not safe for us to congregate in a public space during that time and place, who still to this day faces regular discrimination and harassment that large swaths of our society condones — to me, that unspoken line-in-the-sand is blatantly obvious. It basically determines whether or not I am allowed to exist, whether or not my perspective and concerns are taken seriously.
That unspoken line-in-the-sand is right there, doing real work, directly impacting many people’s lives, even if you choose not to see it, or refuse to acknowledge its existence.
So if you want to write an article called “Feminism Needs More Thinkers Who Aren’t Right 100 Percent of the Time,” go ahead — freedom of speech and all that. And I generally agree with the sentiment expressed in your title — hell, I even wrote an entire book about how we need to be more accepting of difference (including differences of opinion) within feminism. But when accepting people who “Aren’t Right 100 Percent of the Time” is coded language for accepting someone who didn’t just say one offhand remark that made a few trans people upset, but rather someone who is fiercely committed to the idea that trans people are beyond the pale, that our identities should not in any way be accepted by society — if this is what you think we should accept — then you are not promoting tolerance. You are condoning intolerance. And you are not championing Germaine Greer’s freedom of speech (she still has that, and as a Person of Stature, she also has a platform to express it), but rather you are drawing a line-in-the-sand — a line that renders me and other trans people’s concerns as irrelevant and unimportant.
You have every right to draw the line wherever you want. Just as I have every right to try to push the line in my preferred direction (which may, or may not, include protesting people who express vitriol and disinformation about trans people, and/or people who tacitly condone that vitriol and disinformation). But don’t obfuscate this particular matter by pretending that this is about free speech, or tolerating dissenting views, or activists going too far.
This is about the line-in-the-sand.
You can’t have a society where women are fully respected, but where expressions of rampant sexism are also condoned. It is simply not possible — as a feminist, surely you can see this. By the same token, it is simply not possible to fully respect trans people while at the same time condoning people who express rampant transphobia — these things are mutually exclusive.
So go ahead and draw your line, the one that determines whether you deem trans people to be beyond the pale (as historically has been the case), or whether you deem transphobia (sans scare-quotes) beyond the pale. But you can’t have it both ways.
And once you draw that line, own it. Because this is all about the line.
Finally, to all the people who have written, or are considering writing, articles rallying against “political correctness,” or “call-out culture,” or the “Internet outrage machine,” or whatever you want to call it: This may surprise you, but sometimes I agree with some of the points you make. As I previously mentioned, I wrote an entire book about how activism — in the course of advocating on behalf of certain marginalized groups — sometimes veers into the realm of invalidating or marginalizing other groups. So I strongly believe that there is common ground for us to have smart and necessary conversations about how we can balance civil discourse and differences of opinion, while at the same time fully respecting one another as people.
But if instead of engaging in such smart and necessary conversations, you’d rather just write the flip-side of the “Internet outrage machine” article — where instead of stoking outrage about people who have allegedly committed acts of sexism, or racism, or transphobia, and so on, you instead stoke outrage about the people who are protesting these potential acts of sexism, or racism, or transphobia, and so on — and/or if you want to dismiss or condemn these activists’ and minority groups’ protests without addressing any of the Pandora’s Boxes that I have described along the way in this article, then fuck you. Seriously. Fuck you. You are a hack who does not want to have a serious conversation about these super-important and super-complex issues. You just want to be in the right.
And I think you are wrong. That is where I draw my line-in-the-sand.
Originally published on Medium (along with this follow-up)
I know why you’re here. Something has happened that has pushed you over the edge. You know, with regards to “political correctness.” Or “call-out culture,” or the “Internet outrage machine,” or whatever you want to call it.
It’s been a lot of little things up until now — you know, comments that you’ve seen on social media, or protests that you’ve heard about, all condemning people for supposedly “bad” things they may have said or done. But something recently happened to someone famous, or someone you respect — for anonymity’s sake, let’s just call them the Person of Stature. And as an example, let’s pretend the Person of Stature was invited to speak at a University, but then some students started complaining about supposedly “bigoted” things that this Person of Stature has said about some minority group in the past. Or present. And these students started protesting. They even passed a petition around. The nerve of them!
And now you are the one who is outraged! No, sorry, outrage is too strong of a word. You are a well-reasoned journalist and/or pundit. So instead of leaving angry comments in the comment section (like all the other troglodytes), you will pen a seemingly well-reasoned article that will be published in a well-established news/media outlet, and that compels readers to identify with your outrage (by which I mean well-reasoned position).
And here is how you will do it:
1) Make it clear from the very beginning that you are an open-minded, social justice supporter, preferably on the left side of the political spectrum. This will contrast your take on “political correctness run amok” from those of right wing commentators — you know, those hypocrites who are pro-free speech when it comes to white, straight, Christian people making fun of minorities, but against free speech when it comes to #BlackLivesMatter, or discussions about sex education and women’s reproductive rights, or secular holiday celebrations, or homosexuals and their so-called “agenda.” You are nothing like those hypocrites! Plus, you are pitching your soon-to-be-trending article to someplace like The Nation or The Atlantic, so you will most certainly need to win over liberal readers.
2) Repeatedly remind readers (through both blatant and subtle appeals) that Free Speech = Good; Censorship = Bad. Be sure *not* to mention that the Person of Stature’s freedom of speech is not really at stake — like the rest of us, they are free to make any bigoted comments any time they want. Even more importantly, whatever you do, *never* acknowledge the fact that protests, petitions, and social media comments critiquing the Person of Stature also constitute acts of free speech. This is Pandora’s Box #1 — whatever you do, do not open it! Because if both the protesters and the Person of Stature are seen as having free speech, then this becomes a “marketplace of ideas” issue, and your readers will then feel entitled to make up their own minds as to who is in the right and who is in the wrong. And you can’t let this happen, because you have already decided this for them!
3) This can’t just be any Person of Stature, or any old comments or actions against a minority group. To use a few extreme examples, if the person was a Neo-Nazi, or if their platform was returning to the time when women were considered their husband’s property, or if they called for homosexuality to be punished by death, then the article won’t work at all. First off, your liberal readers would likely feel that these things (while constituting free speech) are beyond the pale, and they will be disturbed by your attempts to go out of your way to defend such people. Indeed, you yourself probably feel the same way: If these sorts of people were invited to speak at a University, and if students protested, you would not find such protests to be outrageous at all. Who knows, you might even join in those protests yourself! But we will never know for sure, because it’s unimaginable that any University would ever give any of these extreme groups a public platform to speak in the first place.
Actually, come to think of it, these examples highlight the fact that there is already an established (albeit unwritten) code in our society regarding what expressions are deemed tolerable and which are deemed to be beyond the pale. This is Pandora’s Box #2 — once again, do not open it! Because if you bring attention to this unspoken line-in-the-sand regarding acceptability, then your readers will recognize that this story is not really about “free speech versus censorship” (because once again, all the aforementioned people are free to speak their minds), but rather how do we (whether as a society, a public institution, a workplace, or as individuals) decide where to draw this line? Where does one person’s right to free speech end and another person’s right to go to work or school without having to deal with bigotry or harassment begin? This is an extremely complicated matter that would take way more than one pithy article to cover. Plus, there is no cut-and-dried answer to this question, just a mess of differing opinions as to where to precisely to draw this line. So you need to pose a different question, one that has a clear right answer (which non-coincidentally coincides with your position).
What you need is defendable Person of Stature — someone who is likeable and/or on the right side of most issues, despite the current controversy. And the controversy itself has to be something that most mainstream self-identified liberals will consider to be a “minor issue” or much ado about nothing. Perhaps the Person of Stature has made comments or used language that you could easily get away with five, or ten, or fifteen years ago, but which now seems somewhat problematic or unsavory (because the unspoken line-in-the-sand is always shifting over time — but remember that’s Pandora’s Box #2, so don’t mention this!). This is perfect, because your readers have maybe said similar things themselves way back when, so they will identify somewhat with the Person of Stature. Or maybe they feel somewhat disgruntled by how fast the times are a-changin’ (they can barely keep up!) and/or they are starting to think that things were better in “the good old days” when they were younger (i.e., when they were the upstarts who mocked people who believed that things were better in “the good old days”).
But what’s even more perfect is if the minority group in question is one that has made some progress, but is still far from being fully accepted. To this end, might I suggest transgender people? Because as far as most of your mainstream self-identified liberal readers are concerned, there weren’t really any transgender people at all (outside of the occasional Hollywood movie or Jerry Springer show) just five, or ten, or fifteen years ago. But now they’re on television all the time, and there are all these articles and books about them — it’s like they’re suddenly crawling all over the place! And as if that wasn’t bad enough, now they are asking for things! Like, safe bathrooms. Or having their identities respected. Or not having to constantly face hateful or derogatory speech on a regular basis. And while your readers are not opposed to transgender people per se — hey, whatever Caitlyn Jenner decides to do with her body and in her own bedroom is her own business — they definitely feel like this is all happening way too fast! For them, at least. Plus, they probably feel confused or squeamish about trans people themselves (although unlike the Person of Stature, they probably know better than to say that out loud in public).
Okay, so now that we’ve found the appropriate minority group and Person of Stature to generate outrage — I mean, serious concern — in our readers, onto the next step:
4) Pick an overarching theme: There are two obvious paths here.
Make it about “political correctness run amok”: For instance, you might open the article with the transgender students’ protesting the Person of Stature’s University talk. But then you will pan back and show that this is but one instance among many in a much larger and disturbing trend sweeping the nation — aka, “political correctness running amok.” (I am not sure why political correctness is always “running amok” as opposed to other synonymous phrases, but just roll with it.) And at this point, you can simply provide readers with a laundry list of seemingly similar incidents of activists and minority groups taking things way too far with their “political correctness” and “censorship.” For examples of this laundry-list approach, see recent high profile pieces by Jonathan Chait, Michelle Goldberg, and Caitlin Flanagan (there are countless others — The Atlantic alone seems to be churning out one or two of these per month!). The benefit of this approach is that you don’t have to go too in depth about any specific issue (e.g., interviewing all the parties involved, accurately conveying their differing perspectives, etc.) — you can just hastily depict all of them as being outrageous. Additionally, this allows you to conflate some potentially legitimate issues (e.g., protests of the Person of Stature) with a bunch of random mean things that random people (who have no stature) have said on Twitter.
Make it about the “minority group gone too far”: In this strategy, you will place the focus squarely on this one minority group (i.e., transgender people) and portray them as crossing a line that no other respectable minority group would dare cross. The advantage to this is that most people are already suspicious of transgender people and unfamiliar with trans issues, so it will be relatively easy to convince your readers that this group is up to no good and/or overreacting to things. The disadvantage is that, if not handled adeptly, you may come off as being prejudiced against this group yourself. So you have to at least create an aura (however superficial) of fairness. One way to do this is to go to great lengths to make it seem like you are telling both sides of the story, even though your retelling of events is heavily slanted. (Don’t worry, 95-ish percent of your readers will not know enough about trans people and issues to recognize this bias.)
Alternatively, if you are writing a shorter op-ed, then you may want to go with a hybrid of the two approaches. Make it mostly about the transgender protests of the Person of Stature’s talk, but don’t offer any details that may raise concerns for your readers. For instance, do not include any of the Person of Stature’s actual quotes (see bottom of linked article), and most definitely do not link to or include trans activists’ perspectives or concerns about the matter. (Pro tip: putting “transphobia” in scare-quotes, to subtly suggest that its very existence is questionable, goes a long way!) And after a brief mentioning of this particular affair, you will broaden the lens and make the case that this is a free speech/censorship issue. And you will passionately argue that we all need to be more tolerant. Not tolerant of transgender people of course, that would be preposterous! But rather, tolerant of People of Stature who are right about most issues, but maybe wrong about others (and I say “maybe” here because your readers will not be able to judge for themselves, because you didn’t share any of the Person of Stature’s actual quotes or beliefs about transgender people).
5) All of this may sound straightforward enough. But there are a couple more Pandora’s Boxes that you will need to avoid in order to be successful:
Pandora’s Box #3: If the Person of Stature happens to be a renowned feminist, then whatever you do, do *not* remind readers that the things that the transgender protesters are doing now — penning critiques of the Person of Stature’s previous comments, passing around petitions, trying to convince the University not to offer this Person of Stature a public platform to potentially spew even more prejudice and disinformation about the marginalized group in question — these are all things that feminists themselves have done over the years! In fact, during the late ’60s and early ’70s (back when sexism was rampant, when women were not taken very seriously, and when this very Person of Stature first came to prominence as a feminist), feminists were routinely protesting institutions and events that they felt contributed to their marginalization. These are simply the types of things that you need to do when you are a marginalized group who no one takes seriously, and if you want people to pay attention to your issues and potentially change their minds. Otherwise, why would they even care? Or take a stance on the issues you face? Or god forbid, potentially even lift a finger?
If you accidentally open Pandora’s Box #3, then readers might begin to see parallels between feminists back then and transgender activists today. They might recognize that these sorts of tactics are simply how marginalized groups slowly move the unspoken line-in-the-sand (that we are not supposed to mention — see Pandora’s Box #2) toward their preferred direction. Toward respect and equity, as far as they are concerned.
Pandora’s Box #4: Remember earlier, when I mentioned how (in your mainstream self-identified liberal readers’ recollection) there were hardly any transgender people at all a mere five, or ten, or fifteen years ago? Well, they were actually around that whole time! It’s just that they were hardly ever given the opportunity to speak, or to be heard, in public settings. Hell, just ten years ago, it was far more common for such protests to be directed against transgender people speaking at Universities rather than the other way around.
And if you were to ask trans people who lived through that time, they would likely point out that freedom of speech — which as an abstract concept, virtually everyone embraces — doesn’t mean shit when 95-ish percent of people think that you are worthless, and/or abominable, and/or immoral, and when they use their overwhelming-majority freedom-of-speech powers to make sure that you are never allowed to share your experiences or perspectives in a public setting, or hold a position where you can influence public policy or popular perception in any way.
So as I’ve been saying all along, this story is not really about free speech. It’s about where we — as individuals, as a society — draw that unspoken line-in-the-sand with regards to what we deem to be permissible, and what (and often whom) we deem beyond the pale.
And if you can’t see that the real issue at stake here is the unspoken line-in-the-sand, then that’s most likely a sign that who you are and what you believe is already deemed permissible in our society. But as a trans person who has lived most of my life being deemed by 95-ish percent of society as being beyond the pale — who stayed closeted the first twenty-seven years of my life because I knew most people wouldn’t accept me, who attended secretly-held trans community meetings because it was not safe for us to congregate in a public space during that time and place, who still to this day faces regular discrimination and harassment that large swaths of our society condones — to me, that unspoken line-in-the-sand is blatantly obvious. It basically determines whether or not I am allowed to exist, whether or not my perspective and concerns are taken seriously.
That unspoken line-in-the-sand is right there, doing real work, directly impacting many people’s lives, even if you choose not to see it, or refuse to acknowledge its existence.
So if you want to write an article called “Feminism Needs More Thinkers Who Aren’t Right 100 Percent of the Time,” go ahead — freedom of speech and all that. And I generally agree with the sentiment expressed in your title — hell, I even wrote an entire book about how we need to be more accepting of difference (including differences of opinion) within feminism. But when accepting people who “Aren’t Right 100 Percent of the Time” is coded language for accepting someone who didn’t just say one offhand remark that made a few trans people upset, but rather someone who is fiercely committed to the idea that trans people are beyond the pale, that our identities should not in any way be accepted by society — if this is what you think we should accept — then you are not promoting tolerance. You are condoning intolerance. And you are not championing Germaine Greer’s freedom of speech (she still has that, and as a Person of Stature, she also has a platform to express it), but rather you are drawing a line-in-the-sand — a line that renders me and other trans people’s concerns as irrelevant and unimportant.
You have every right to draw the line wherever you want. Just as I have every right to try to push the line in my preferred direction (which may, or may not, include protesting people who express vitriol and disinformation about trans people, and/or people who tacitly condone that vitriol and disinformation). But don’t obfuscate this particular matter by pretending that this is about free speech, or tolerating dissenting views, or activists going too far.
This is about the line-in-the-sand.
You can’t have a society where women are fully respected, but where expressions of rampant sexism are also condoned. It is simply not possible — as a feminist, surely you can see this. By the same token, it is simply not possible to fully respect trans people while at the same time condoning people who express rampant transphobia — these things are mutually exclusive.
So go ahead and draw your line, the one that determines whether you deem trans people to be beyond the pale (as historically has been the case), or whether you deem transphobia (sans scare-quotes) beyond the pale. But you can’t have it both ways.
And once you draw that line, own it. Because this is all about the line.
Finally, to all the people who have written, or are considering writing, articles rallying against “political correctness,” or “call-out culture,” or the “Internet outrage machine,” or whatever you want to call it: This may surprise you, but sometimes I agree with some of the points you make. As I previously mentioned, I wrote an entire book about how activism — in the course of advocating on behalf of certain marginalized groups — sometimes veers into the realm of invalidating or marginalizing other groups. So I strongly believe that there is common ground for us to have smart and necessary conversations about how we can balance civil discourse and differences of opinion, while at the same time fully respecting one another as people.
But if instead of engaging in such smart and necessary conversations, you’d rather just write the flip-side of the “Internet outrage machine” article — where instead of stoking outrage about people who have allegedly committed acts of sexism, or racism, or transphobia, and so on, you instead stoke outrage about the people who are protesting these potential acts of sexism, or racism, or transphobia, and so on — and/or if you want to dismiss or condemn these activists’ and minority groups’ protests without addressing any of the Pandora’s Boxes that I have described along the way in this article, then fuck you. Seriously. Fuck you. You are a hack who does not want to have a serious conversation about these super-important and super-complex issues. You just want to be in the right.
And I think you are wrong. That is where I draw my line-in-the-sand.
Originally published on Medium (along with this follow-up)
A week of victories for student protesters: Here’s the latest on nationwide campus demonstrations
No, Ms. magazine: College campuses are not like ISIS
I shouldn't have to point this out, but that argument is complete nonsense. While many American colleges have been legitimately criticized for handling sexual assault poorly or even not taking the problem seriously enough, that is worlds apart from deliberately promoting rape. Which is what ISIS does: They see rape, openly, as a weapon to use against women and girls, to force them to submit to their version of Islam. On what planet is there anything like that going on at American college campuses? You can't hide behind the claim that the difference is one of degree and not kind, either. That's an argument that might work, for instance, in drawing parallels between Muslim cultures that bury women under burkas and the milder version Christian fundamentalists pull of demanding that women be "modest". Or between terrorist acts committed in the name of Islamic fundamentalism and those committed in the name of Christian fundamentalism. Those are legitimate situations where the intensity may differ, but the basic premises are the same. But what ISIS is doing and what is happening on some campuses is a difference of degree and of kind. There is a meaningful difference between promoting something and not doing enough to stop it. (If there wasn't, then we are all Hitler because we spend too much time napping and not enough trying to prevent genocidal violence.) Ignoring that difference or trying to paper it over by using an overextended and frankly garbage definition of the word "complicity" is intellectually dishonest. Look, I get it. There is a problem in the United States, on-campus and off, of not taking rape seriously as a crime or even, as the controversy over the Bloomingdale's ad shows, making "jokes" that imply that it's not always rape to force sex on women. But first of all, almost none of the campus administration problems with sexual assault stem from a winking approval of sexual violence, so much as an unwillingness to deal with what they know is immoral behavior. You're really not finding college administrators who think it's a good thing to force sex on unwilling women, so much as college administrators who don't want to deal with it and use "he said/she said" as a convenient way to wriggle out. Second of all, even when you do get to cultural elements that veer more closely to rape promotion---that Bloomingdale's ad, songs that suggest a little force is an acceptable part of dating, frat boys yelling, "No means yes! Yes means anal!", the comment sections on any article about rape, whatever the hell Rush Limbaugh is on about---it's usually framed in a way to create plausible deniability. Whoever is saying rape-y things will usually deny that they're promoting rape, they just don't think it's fair to call all non-consensual sex rape. They are full of it, of course, but it's still a far cry from just openly saying rape is good, which is the level that ISIS is at. This piece is more than intellectually dishonest, but it also fails politically. There are a lot of anti-feminists out there who cannot wait to claim that anti-rape activism is nothing but hysterical bitches being hysterical, and this piece is red meat for them. Sure enough, every cave-dwelling right winger on Twitter is running with this as hard as they can:While ISIS endorses rape, American college administrations similarly facilitate the rape of women on campuses https://t.co/kxz5KrwVAS
— Ms. Magazine (@msmagazine) November 11, 2015
If college campuses were really like ISIS when it comes to rape, we wouldn't be calling administrators - we'd call the police or military. — Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) November 12, 2015
Writer for Ms. Magazine Compares Rape on College Campuses to ISIS https://t.co/IcHhLjfuJ4
— College Insurrection (@CollegeInsurrec) November 13, 2015
There we have it: College administrators are worse than ISIS (a real take in a real magazine) https://t.co/XQjit2bRUq h/t @guypbenson
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) November 13, 2015
American colleges "just like ISIS" because they "facilitate rape" https://t.co/1Xa41o0MCl leftwing airhead relativism abounds — Crude Libertarian (@RudeLibertarian) November 13, 2015
We've reached the point in the "CAMPUS RAPE" story trend where American colleges are no different from ISIS. https://t.co/mhYH6Tczwd — T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) November 12, 2015The creepers of Twitter are going to scream about how every single anti-rape effort is crazy feminazi nonsense, of course. But that's all the more reason not to give them a free shot. It makes them look like they're the sane ones, which is patently untrue. Once in a great long while, you see a piece, presumably penned by a liberal, with such poor judgment that you have to wonder if it was really written by a right-wing plant and meant to make us all look bad. Such is the case with this post put up at Ms. Magazine's blog by a woman named Amy Lauricella titled, "Institutionalized Rape: It’s Not Just an ISIS Problem." The title doesn't seem so bad---it is true that ISIS isn't the first group or organization that uses rape as a weapon to punish women who violate their bizarre rules, religious or otherwise---but things go south quickly as Lauricella tries to draw a direct line between ISIS's program of deliberately promoting rape and the problem of some American college campuses failing to adequately protect students from rape. "While ISIS endorses sexual assault, American college administrations similarly facilitate and perpetuate the rape of women on campuses," Lauricella writes. "Sexual violence becomes institutionalized through complicity." This is made worse by the tweet sent out to promote the piece:
I shouldn't have to point this out, but that argument is complete nonsense. While many American colleges have been legitimately criticized for handling sexual assault poorly or even not taking the problem seriously enough, that is worlds apart from deliberately promoting rape. Which is what ISIS does: They see rape, openly, as a weapon to use against women and girls, to force them to submit to their version of Islam. On what planet is there anything like that going on at American college campuses? You can't hide behind the claim that the difference is one of degree and not kind, either. That's an argument that might work, for instance, in drawing parallels between Muslim cultures that bury women under burkas and the milder version Christian fundamentalists pull of demanding that women be "modest". Or between terrorist acts committed in the name of Islamic fundamentalism and those committed in the name of Christian fundamentalism. Those are legitimate situations where the intensity may differ, but the basic premises are the same. But what ISIS is doing and what is happening on some campuses is a difference of degree and of kind. There is a meaningful difference between promoting something and not doing enough to stop it. (If there wasn't, then we are all Hitler because we spend too much time napping and not enough trying to prevent genocidal violence.) Ignoring that difference or trying to paper it over by using an overextended and frankly garbage definition of the word "complicity" is intellectually dishonest. Look, I get it. There is a problem in the United States, on-campus and off, of not taking rape seriously as a crime or even, as the controversy over the Bloomingdale's ad shows, making "jokes" that imply that it's not always rape to force sex on women. But first of all, almost none of the campus administration problems with sexual assault stem from a winking approval of sexual violence, so much as an unwillingness to deal with what they know is immoral behavior. You're really not finding college administrators who think it's a good thing to force sex on unwilling women, so much as college administrators who don't want to deal with it and use "he said/she said" as a convenient way to wriggle out. Second of all, even when you do get to cultural elements that veer more closely to rape promotion---that Bloomingdale's ad, songs that suggest a little force is an acceptable part of dating, frat boys yelling, "No means yes! Yes means anal!", the comment sections on any article about rape, whatever the hell Rush Limbaugh is on about---it's usually framed in a way to create plausible deniability. Whoever is saying rape-y things will usually deny that they're promoting rape, they just don't think it's fair to call all non-consensual sex rape. They are full of it, of course, but it's still a far cry from just openly saying rape is good, which is the level that ISIS is at. This piece is more than intellectually dishonest, but it also fails politically. There are a lot of anti-feminists out there who cannot wait to claim that anti-rape activism is nothing but hysterical bitches being hysterical, and this piece is red meat for them. Sure enough, every cave-dwelling right winger on Twitter is running with this as hard as they can:While ISIS endorses rape, American college administrations similarly facilitate the rape of women on campuses https://t.co/kxz5KrwVAS
— Ms. Magazine (@msmagazine) November 11, 2015
If college campuses were really like ISIS when it comes to rape, we wouldn't be calling administrators - we'd call the police or military. — Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) November 12, 2015
Writer for Ms. Magazine Compares Rape on College Campuses to ISIS https://t.co/IcHhLjfuJ4
— College Insurrection (@CollegeInsurrec) November 13, 2015
There we have it: College administrators are worse than ISIS (a real take in a real magazine) https://t.co/XQjit2bRUq h/t @guypbenson
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) November 13, 2015
American colleges "just like ISIS" because they "facilitate rape" https://t.co/1Xa41o0MCl leftwing airhead relativism abounds — Crude Libertarian (@RudeLibertarian) November 13, 2015
We've reached the point in the "CAMPUS RAPE" story trend where American colleges are no different from ISIS. https://t.co/mhYH6Tczwd — T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) November 12, 2015The creepers of Twitter are going to scream about how every single anti-rape effort is crazy feminazi nonsense, of course. But that's all the more reason not to give them a free shot. It makes them look like they're the sane ones, which is patently untrue.
November 12, 2015
The dog I could not let go: The love story I couldn’t tell anyone
I fretted about putting my dog Eddie down from the time I noticed the first gray whiskers on his snout, some years before the actual event. I talked to others about what it would be like. I wrote an article for a large daily on pet euthanasia: how to do it, how to expect to feel about it, what he or she could sense or know. I trolled sites like Rainbow Bridges and others meant to memorialize and advise on how to deal with grief because I knew mine was coming.
Nothing helped, of course. I would fall apart as do most people who love their animals. When I found myself upright again, I flew to Los Angeles to hang with my sister near the little horse ranch where I first lived with Eddie, where I planted a peach tree next to the one my neighbors planted for Eddie’s first friend, Mowgli.
By then, I had managed to leave the death of two dogs to one ex-husband and one ex-boyfriend. They did decent jobs, I guess, but I wouldn’t really know — I wasn’t there, and I didn’t ask too many questions. For that I would be haunted. I’d always been terrified of falling apart publicly thanks to a crippling fear of shame for showing any emotion when I was a kid.
Eddie was like an old-school car salesman, fast, nosy, schmoozy (hence his original name “Fast Eddie”) but with terrible separation anxiety. He had the body and head of a German Shepherd but with the legs of a Corgi: ridiculous and adorable. He would sit up for no reason, apparently from my defective lessons on teaching him to sit up. He would sit up sometimes when the front door opened and always around food — just in case it was required.
I found Eddie while hiking in the Angeles Forest. He skulked past me, a terrified, probably road-tripped, year-old pup who had noticeably not eaten much for weeks, maybe months. About a half-hour into tracking him, I blocked him against an embankment and got a terrified howl when I went to pick him up, upon which he went completely limp in my arms from fear.
By then, I felt I couldn’t have another dog. I asked at the ranger station if there had been any reports of missing pups with his description, nothing. So, I brought him home, fed him a can of wet food and bathed him. I wondered that day if I had traumatized him. Then that night, the Northridge Earthquake toppled a bookshelf on the two of us mid-sleep. He seemed to cheerily survive it all. From day one, the way he looked at me was slightly unnerving: “You are She Who Saved Me. I will never let me (or you) or pretty much anyone forget that.”
He became a formidable shape shifter. He could get through places a quarter of his size and wind up in the canned goods isle at Ralphs looking for me, or wandering under a mechanic’s lift, again looking for me. I once caught him trying to negotiate the revolving door to an evening council meeting I was covering for a local paper.
Often it was endearing, but it was also frustrating. He was so afraid of losing me that he had become emotionally wired to the thing that moves, so it was a chore getting him out of a car, anyone’s car. I didn’t know how awful his separation anxiety was until I left him for the first time with a buddy to visit friends who couldn’t have dogs.
I’d put food and water in a side bedroom, kissed him and left for three days. My friend later told me a story of a dog I felt as though I hadn’t met. When I got back, he said Eddie hadn’t left the spot where I had left him, that he had not eaten or gone out to pee the entire time I was gone; he was so riddled with fear of abandonment that my friend couldn’t get near him without him growling.
It was heartbreaking. I felt as though I had a child, or as though I was learning what it was like to love someone clinging to a primary caregiver after being diagnosed with battle fatigue; it was deep and sad, and I, of course, loved him more for it.
So, he traveled around with me in a truck I got for both of us with a camper shell and a little window between bed and cab. He would only put up with being in back when a human occupied the passenger seat and then only with his head in between us. We lived in L.A. until I left for Montana to work on a photography magazine. We later trekked back and down the country, nearly 3,000 miles from Glacier National Forest to Fort Lauderdale.
Along that long trip full of side trips, I took him leashless into wilderness bars to meet (smell) new people and test my own mettle. I sometimes would let him signify which way to go, his big head acting as way post. He never got over being abandoned, and I forever felt bad for not trying harder to help him. The best I could manage was to keep him with me as much as I could, which is what I did for the 16 years or so that I had him.
I would eventually buy a house in Nashville with a sizable backyard I thought he would love; he hated it, unless all doors that led to me were wide open including the sliding glass door to the backyard (even with a doggie door) and the door to my bedroom. He slowly went from bounding about to fading. When Eddie’s eyesight and balance began to fail, I made him a ramp from the porch to the front lawn and one from the back deck to the backyard. I fretted about Eddie’s departure but also about my state of mind when he did.
While my vet one day was palpating around his frail frame, I told him the one thing I knew to be true about putting down a pet was that one week too early was better than one week too late. I’d heard that somewhere, and it stuck in my head. My vet once asked me if Eddie was my “best buddy.” I didn’t think I seemed like a person a normally non-inquisitive vet would ask that of, so I was a little shocked at his sudden powers of observation or, worse, that I had unwittingly revealed myself, a threadbare soul whose best friend was a dog.
So, we came to an agreement, my vet and I, that he would “wink” when he thought Eddie’s time was at hand. I loved my vet for not proselytizing about that not being a vet’s “job” or how owners “know when it’s time.” We don’t, or most of us don’t. Love blinds even those who understand what disease or age does to a pet’s body and brain. How could we?
The week of that visit, I got laid off a miserable pressure-cooker of a gig, so I was afforded the great gift of time with Eddie. I took him on a short car trip to Chattanooga. With a little help, he could still manage to get up on the arm rest and let the wind fly through his fur. Because he could no longer manage the stairs, I planted myself on the living room couch and caught up with every foreign film I could think of, his head within scratching distance of my hand. He would sometimes bark at what seemed like ghosts and found it harder and harder to manage the ramps unless I got him halfway down.
My vet told me a few months later that Eddie had congestive heart failure, and that it was making it continually harder for him to breathe. On his way out of the examining room, he made eye contact with me … and winked. I am sure I stared at the door he closed behind him for no less than a minute.
Two days later, my vet and I set the date for the following Thursday at 11 a.m., because he needed to come to my house. I told my vet that I could not bring my dog to his death; death would have to come to us. He had tacitly understood how I felt about Eddie, and agreed.
I spent every moment after that brushing Eddie, kissing his noggin, hoping he could see that I could “see” him, so he would be “known” by me — a thing I imagined he’d always wanted. I was that crazy. On Wednesday evening, I went out and got a filet mignon, cooked it, and fed it to Eddie in tiny bites. I eventually went to bed but got no sleep.
In the morning, I took Eddie’s collar off and waited on the couch with a view to the driveway. Eventually, a black pickup rolled up, and my vet and his assistant, carrying a medical bag, walked up the ramp. No one smiled or said a word from the truck to my house, a thing for which I would forever be grateful, because now when I look back, I feel that Eddie’s death was as honored as he deserved.
I put Eddie’s favorite blanket over his sleeping mat (I wanted to be effective before breaking down). I picked him up and sat him down on the blanket, the assistant letting me help hold him, my grip for comfort, hers for ballast, while my vet got out the works, an action that made me start to sob — hard, embarrassing sobs with little bits of sound eking out in a high pitch. I had wanted to say something meaningful as a goodbye, but could only muster, “Sorry, little man.” The assistant began stroking my arm because I, without a doubt, was crying the hardest I’d ever cried in front of another person.
My vet found Eddie’s vein easily without him seeming to notice. In went the cocktail and, within seconds, Eddie let out the air left in his lungs and quietly slumped over in my arms for the second time in his life.
I don’t remember too much after that. I remember the assistant and I gently laying him across the blanket. The vet hugged me, respectfully saying nothing, and I went directly upstairs to lie down because I needed to sob horizontally, to get on with that first mother lode of grief. They wrapped Eddie’s body in his blanket and were quickly, and silently, gone, my two angels of death.
The next few days were hazy. I would spiral down and then level out, fall precipitously and then level out again. I had girded against Eddie’s actual dying, but had made zero plans for missing him. I felt stricken. I would have it out of my head for a moment and then be shocked to see his mat still at the foot of the stairs. I dumbly smelled his brush once, only to be viscerally reminded of the primal hard-wiring between the olfactory system and the frontal lobe.
As I began writing this, I came across E. B. White’s memoir of the death of his pig, Fred, bred for slaughter until he became suddenly sick, upon which Fred, I can only gather, became humanized from the tending, which seemed to upend White’s organized farm life.
“I went back up to the house and to bed, and cried internally -- deep hemorrhagic in tears. I didn't wake till nearly eight the next morning, and when I looked out the open window the grave was already being dug, down beyond the dump under a wild apple.”
E.B. White’s wild apple tree, I’m sure, still bore fruit after Fred died, as I am sure did the peach tree at my old ranch in L.A., the one I planted to grieve the loss of, and to celebrate the life of, Fast Eddie.
Life went on, and I didn’t go permanently mad from holding my dog as he passed away or from the mourning that followed.
Eddie died in May of 2009; this is the first time I’ve written about him. I know the process is different for everyone, but, for me, Eddie’s death was a good death. It is what I, who had blown through years in a blur of selfish neuroticism, really had just wanted for him and for me — to get it right.
As I look back now, I know I did. Eddie’s coming into my life gave me a sense that there was something to serendipity, something spiritual. His exit afforded me the comfort of knowing that a certain kind of riling pain is manageable even while on duty to life elsewhere, that I could survive the up-close-and-personal loss of someone I loved. I had avoided that even with the death of my own dad.
About two years after Eddie died, I rescued Happy, a small, muscular mixed-breed terrier who is oddly polite, affectionate and brilliant. She has fewer issues than Eddie did, a different problem — for me. Nothing bad has happened to her, so she approaches any living creature without fear.
I don’t love Happy any more or less than I did Eddie, but I do love her differently. If I am lucky enough to be around as she approaches her last days, I hope to have a say in how she leaves this planet. I’d like to say I am better prepared, and I am, somewhat, but I’m not, not really; love and the loss of it are the crosses we have to bear, being human, I guess.
I fretted about putting my dog Eddie down from the time I noticed the first gray whiskers on his snout, some years before the actual event. I talked to others about what it would be like. I wrote an article for a large daily on pet euthanasia: how to do it, how to expect to feel about it, what he or she could sense or know. I trolled sites like Rainbow Bridges and others meant to memorialize and advise on how to deal with grief because I knew mine was coming.
Nothing helped, of course. I would fall apart as do most people who love their animals. When I found myself upright again, I flew to Los Angeles to hang with my sister near the little horse ranch where I first lived with Eddie, where I planted a peach tree next to the one my neighbors planted for Eddie’s first friend, Mowgli.
By then, I had managed to leave the death of two dogs to one ex-husband and one ex-boyfriend. They did decent jobs, I guess, but I wouldn’t really know — I wasn’t there, and I didn’t ask too many questions. For that I would be haunted. I’d always been terrified of falling apart publicly thanks to a crippling fear of shame for showing any emotion when I was a kid.
Eddie was like an old-school car salesman, fast, nosy, schmoozy (hence his original name “Fast Eddie”) but with terrible separation anxiety. He had the body and head of a German Shepherd but with the legs of a Corgi: ridiculous and adorable. He would sit up for no reason, apparently from my defective lessons on teaching him to sit up. He would sit up sometimes when the front door opened and always around food — just in case it was required.
I found Eddie while hiking in the Angeles Forest. He skulked past me, a terrified, probably road-tripped, year-old pup who had noticeably not eaten much for weeks, maybe months. About a half-hour into tracking him, I blocked him against an embankment and got a terrified howl when I went to pick him up, upon which he went completely limp in my arms from fear.
By then, I felt I couldn’t have another dog. I asked at the ranger station if there had been any reports of missing pups with his description, nothing. So, I brought him home, fed him a can of wet food and bathed him. I wondered that day if I had traumatized him. Then that night, the Northridge Earthquake toppled a bookshelf on the two of us mid-sleep. He seemed to cheerily survive it all. From day one, the way he looked at me was slightly unnerving: “You are She Who Saved Me. I will never let me (or you) or pretty much anyone forget that.”
He became a formidable shape shifter. He could get through places a quarter of his size and wind up in the canned goods isle at Ralphs looking for me, or wandering under a mechanic’s lift, again looking for me. I once caught him trying to negotiate the revolving door to an evening council meeting I was covering for a local paper.
Often it was endearing, but it was also frustrating. He was so afraid of losing me that he had become emotionally wired to the thing that moves, so it was a chore getting him out of a car, anyone’s car. I didn’t know how awful his separation anxiety was until I left him for the first time with a buddy to visit friends who couldn’t have dogs.
I’d put food and water in a side bedroom, kissed him and left for three days. My friend later told me a story of a dog I felt as though I hadn’t met. When I got back, he said Eddie hadn’t left the spot where I had left him, that he had not eaten or gone out to pee the entire time I was gone; he was so riddled with fear of abandonment that my friend couldn’t get near him without him growling.
It was heartbreaking. I felt as though I had a child, or as though I was learning what it was like to love someone clinging to a primary caregiver after being diagnosed with battle fatigue; it was deep and sad, and I, of course, loved him more for it.
So, he traveled around with me in a truck I got for both of us with a camper shell and a little window between bed and cab. He would only put up with being in back when a human occupied the passenger seat and then only with his head in between us. We lived in L.A. until I left for Montana to work on a photography magazine. We later trekked back and down the country, nearly 3,000 miles from Glacier National Forest to Fort Lauderdale.
Along that long trip full of side trips, I took him leashless into wilderness bars to meet (smell) new people and test my own mettle. I sometimes would let him signify which way to go, his big head acting as way post. He never got over being abandoned, and I forever felt bad for not trying harder to help him. The best I could manage was to keep him with me as much as I could, which is what I did for the 16 years or so that I had him.
I would eventually buy a house in Nashville with a sizable backyard I thought he would love; he hated it, unless all doors that led to me were wide open including the sliding glass door to the backyard (even with a doggie door) and the door to my bedroom. He slowly went from bounding about to fading. When Eddie’s eyesight and balance began to fail, I made him a ramp from the porch to the front lawn and one from the back deck to the backyard. I fretted about Eddie’s departure but also about my state of mind when he did.
While my vet one day was palpating around his frail frame, I told him the one thing I knew to be true about putting down a pet was that one week too early was better than one week too late. I’d heard that somewhere, and it stuck in my head. My vet once asked me if Eddie was my “best buddy.” I didn’t think I seemed like a person a normally non-inquisitive vet would ask that of, so I was a little shocked at his sudden powers of observation or, worse, that I had unwittingly revealed myself, a threadbare soul whose best friend was a dog.
So, we came to an agreement, my vet and I, that he would “wink” when he thought Eddie’s time was at hand. I loved my vet for not proselytizing about that not being a vet’s “job” or how owners “know when it’s time.” We don’t, or most of us don’t. Love blinds even those who understand what disease or age does to a pet’s body and brain. How could we?
The week of that visit, I got laid off a miserable pressure-cooker of a gig, so I was afforded the great gift of time with Eddie. I took him on a short car trip to Chattanooga. With a little help, he could still manage to get up on the arm rest and let the wind fly through his fur. Because he could no longer manage the stairs, I planted myself on the living room couch and caught up with every foreign film I could think of, his head within scratching distance of my hand. He would sometimes bark at what seemed like ghosts and found it harder and harder to manage the ramps unless I got him halfway down.
My vet told me a few months later that Eddie had congestive heart failure, and that it was making it continually harder for him to breathe. On his way out of the examining room, he made eye contact with me … and winked. I am sure I stared at the door he closed behind him for no less than a minute.
Two days later, my vet and I set the date for the following Thursday at 11 a.m., because he needed to come to my house. I told my vet that I could not bring my dog to his death; death would have to come to us. He had tacitly understood how I felt about Eddie, and agreed.
I spent every moment after that brushing Eddie, kissing his noggin, hoping he could see that I could “see” him, so he would be “known” by me — a thing I imagined he’d always wanted. I was that crazy. On Wednesday evening, I went out and got a filet mignon, cooked it, and fed it to Eddie in tiny bites. I eventually went to bed but got no sleep.
In the morning, I took Eddie’s collar off and waited on the couch with a view to the driveway. Eventually, a black pickup rolled up, and my vet and his assistant, carrying a medical bag, walked up the ramp. No one smiled or said a word from the truck to my house, a thing for which I would forever be grateful, because now when I look back, I feel that Eddie’s death was as honored as he deserved.
I put Eddie’s favorite blanket over his sleeping mat (I wanted to be effective before breaking down). I picked him up and sat him down on the blanket, the assistant letting me help hold him, my grip for comfort, hers for ballast, while my vet got out the works, an action that made me start to sob — hard, embarrassing sobs with little bits of sound eking out in a high pitch. I had wanted to say something meaningful as a goodbye, but could only muster, “Sorry, little man.” The assistant began stroking my arm because I, without a doubt, was crying the hardest I’d ever cried in front of another person.
My vet found Eddie’s vein easily without him seeming to notice. In went the cocktail and, within seconds, Eddie let out the air left in his lungs and quietly slumped over in my arms for the second time in his life.
I don’t remember too much after that. I remember the assistant and I gently laying him across the blanket. The vet hugged me, respectfully saying nothing, and I went directly upstairs to lie down because I needed to sob horizontally, to get on with that first mother lode of grief. They wrapped Eddie’s body in his blanket and were quickly, and silently, gone, my two angels of death.
The next few days were hazy. I would spiral down and then level out, fall precipitously and then level out again. I had girded against Eddie’s actual dying, but had made zero plans for missing him. I felt stricken. I would have it out of my head for a moment and then be shocked to see his mat still at the foot of the stairs. I dumbly smelled his brush once, only to be viscerally reminded of the primal hard-wiring between the olfactory system and the frontal lobe.
As I began writing this, I came across E. B. White’s memoir of the death of his pig, Fred, bred for slaughter until he became suddenly sick, upon which Fred, I can only gather, became humanized from the tending, which seemed to upend White’s organized farm life.
“I went back up to the house and to bed, and cried internally -- deep hemorrhagic in tears. I didn't wake till nearly eight the next morning, and when I looked out the open window the grave was already being dug, down beyond the dump under a wild apple.”
E.B. White’s wild apple tree, I’m sure, still bore fruit after Fred died, as I am sure did the peach tree at my old ranch in L.A., the one I planted to grieve the loss of, and to celebrate the life of, Fast Eddie.
Life went on, and I didn’t go permanently mad from holding my dog as he passed away or from the mourning that followed.
Eddie died in May of 2009; this is the first time I’ve written about him. I know the process is different for everyone, but, for me, Eddie’s death was a good death. It is what I, who had blown through years in a blur of selfish neuroticism, really had just wanted for him and for me — to get it right.
As I look back now, I know I did. Eddie’s coming into my life gave me a sense that there was something to serendipity, something spiritual. His exit afforded me the comfort of knowing that a certain kind of riling pain is manageable even while on duty to life elsewhere, that I could survive the up-close-and-personal loss of someone I loved. I had avoided that even with the death of my own dad.
About two years after Eddie died, I rescued Happy, a small, muscular mixed-breed terrier who is oddly polite, affectionate and brilliant. She has fewer issues than Eddie did, a different problem — for me. Nothing bad has happened to her, so she approaches any living creature without fear.
I don’t love Happy any more or less than I did Eddie, but I do love her differently. If I am lucky enough to be around as she approaches her last days, I hope to have a say in how she leaves this planet. I’d like to say I am better prepared, and I am, somewhat, but I’m not, not really; love and the loss of it are the crosses we have to bear, being human, I guess.
Bernie Sanders is a cruise-missile progressive: False hope, foreign policy and the stubborn endurance of American exceptionalism
* * *
I have for some months looked favorably on numerous aspects of the Sanders campaign. He and his people may or may not have thought this through, but his use of plain language and honest vocabulary marks an important advance in our political culture. He may be no more than a right-wing social democrat by any worldly standard, but we are talking about socialism in America for the first time in seven or eight decades. He has made it possible to discuss such things as universal healthcare—I have always considered “single-payer system” a ridiculous dodge—and corporate thievery. Goodness, we can now converse even about “working people.” In time we might get to “working class.” “He has at least temporarily liberated Democratic Party liberals from the silence imposed upon them by party leaders for decades,” a commentator named Brian Becker wrote in a political newsletter that periodically arrives in my inbox. Again, this stands to deliver consequences quite beyond the Sanders campaign. Free university tuition, a decent minimum wage, a broad shift from deregulation to reregulation: These are sound positions; Sanders has put them on the table. I started to reconsider Sanders while watching one of his television interviews some weeks ago. “Inequality… inequality… inequality”—he reverted to this theme a few too many times, driving home a point he surely did not intend to convey: Sanders is an “issue politician,” as they say. But he is not a political mind, well- or mal-intended. Or if he has one he keeps it thoroughly in check. On either side of the aisle, to harp on a single issue is another way of refusing to engage others just as vital. To put the point another way, Sanders has no holistic take as to the American predicament—top-to-bottom cause and effect—or, if he understands the crisis we find ourselves in, he declines to say so. (Given his evident political sophistication, I incline to the latter explanation.) He is not willing to look squarely at, or tell us, where we stand in the second decade of the 21st century. We live in a daunting moment, admittedly. Too bad for us, maybe. But if you are going to traffic in the aspirations, hopes and dreams Sanders likes to reference, you have to begin with an honest appraisal of our circumstances. This is the essence of the Sanders problem: He insists on flinching from anything close to such an appraisal. All in, this is a disqualifier, in my view. “Bernie Sanders” is nothing more than vapor. Bernie Sanders is a string of promises waiting to be broken. Neither is ever going to do anything for those who support him. Readers will be familiar with my views as to where we stand. We are an empire and the empire is crumbling. We are in the late-exceptionalist phase all people whose ideologies define them as chosen must eventually pass through. This imposes a very big burden. In our time one must stand outside the tent and urinate in. This is how things that need to get done will get done. It is our bitter reality. Everyone knows the Dylan line: “To live outside the law you must be honest.” This is not an easy thing to do, as anyone who does so can tell you. Sanders is simply among the many who do not want to face this and break the molds we must break.* * *
I do not think this is anywhere more evident than in Sanders’ thoughts, such as one can make them out, on America’s conduct abroad. My strong impression is that the Sanders campaign has little interest and no depth on the foreign policy side. I have heard this from several people close to the senator and his campaign. I conclude that the Sanders foreign policy is at bottom a collection of go-along, get-along default positions, safety being the prized value. (In the way of transparency, my brief effort, just after he announced his candidacy, to begin a conversation with his campaign on foreign policy questions yielded perfect indifference. Blessing in disguise, I now conclude, having heard him articulate a few positions and having learned that what foreign policy advisers he has include former staff at AIPAC, the Israeli lobby in Washington.) As we have it the policy includes, among a few other things, 1) support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including President Obama’s recent decision to maintain a troop presence; 2) blank-check support of Israel, including its savage bombing campaign in Gaza last year; 3) a freshly articulated commitment to Obama’s illegal use of drones, with faintly expressed regrets that they claim the lives of so many innocent civilians; 4) full-on enthusiasm for our ruinous military spending, especially when it sends jobs Vermont’s way—witness his fight to get the latest F-35 fighter jet based at Burlington Air Base. You get the picture. Sanders is a cruise-missile progressive, to borrow a friend’s pithy phrase. He is all for our dangerous, intentionally provoked confrontation with Russia in the name of NATO expansion. Let the “war on terror” proceed just as it has since Bush II declared it. Given Sanders has so far said nothing conclusive about the Syria crisis—the most pressing foreign policy question of the year—you have to assume he waits to see which way the wind blows. The other week an interviewer on another television program asked Sanders if he thought America was an exceptional nation. The question is key, of course. But Sanders flinched. After stumbling for half a minute he replied that of course he did: His father arrived in America “without a dime in his pocket,” and look how far the son has come. A straight shuck. Sanders deflected the question, which concerned America’s claim to primacy and unchallenged prerogative abroad. To me this is a decisive question. As a political calculation in an election year I may be wrong, but I do not see how one cannot partake of a political process so corrupt that we must send to high office anyone unwilling to address the essential questions: exceptionalism, hegemony, empire. Credit where due. Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank, respectively, editor and managing editor at CounterPunch, have been blasting Sanders on the foreign policy side for months. Two recent zingers, both straight to the point, are here and here. It is this kind of work that has shoved me toward the conclusions you are now reading about. “His is a disgusting record,” Frank writes bluntly in the second of the pieces linked above. “Want to change in the U.S.’s meddling in the Middle East? Bernie isn’t your guy. Bernie doesn’t oppose U.S. power, nor does his campaign do a single thing to build independent politics in the country, perhaps the last chance to salvage any democracy we may have left.” Frank makes two essential connections in this passage. One, any thought that our conduct abroad is somehow unrelated to the way we live, an adjunct of the domestic policy platform, is preposterous. It is nothing of the kind. In the end, foreign policy and domestic policy are one. What is at issue abroad, the motor of all policies, is the extension of the neoliberal economic model. It is precisely the same that is at issue at home. Ask yourself: Who shapes American foreign policy and whose interests are served by it? How, then, can Bernie Sanders continue to advance policies serving political cliques and corporations while fundamentally altering relations of power at home? Answer: It is a logical impossibility. Not even worth arguing about. If you need any further persuasion, think about what Hillary Clinton stands for, why, and where she gets her money. Two, Sanders’ decision to abandon his political stance as an independent and run as a Democratic candidate was fateful. It tells you all you need to know as to where he wants to be in relation to the tent, inside or outside. The “socialist” bit goes down like a stick of butter when this politician gets even a glimpse of the brass ring. “He’s a Cold War liberal lost in a post-Cold War world,” Jeff St. Clair wrote in the first column linked above. It is an astute description with several implications worth thinking about, but if we go back further in history we learn even more about this man. I am thinking of the 1820s, believe it or not. In 1819, our republic all of three decades old, Americans suffered the first severe economic and financial crisis in the nation’s brief existence. The Panic of 1819, as these events are named in the history books, exposed Americans for the first time to a few things we may find familiar: the boom and bust of capitalism, mass impoverishment and persistent inequality, banks with too much power, rampant speculation, unchecked power and corruption in Washington in behalf of said banks and speculators—and most of all an assault on all values other than market values. The 1820s, in consequence, amounted to a decade-long convulsion. The funny thing is, while one could change “1819” to “2008” in the above description without altering much else, most of us would find Americans of this time utter strangers. Radical politics, militant farmer-labor movements, class consciousness and charged rhetoric were all part of the scene—as American as the Declaration, which was, of course, among the principal inspiration. What happened? How did we get from then to now? Well, Jackson was elected in 1828—an Indian killer, yes, but a fighter of the good fight against the “moneyed interests.” But before then, something else: Jackson’s rise and the political irruptions long-earlier evident led people into what is now too familiar: a two-party system wherein party identification was supposed to express political preference but ended up fixing the parameters of political discourse. It was in 1824 that Jeffersonian Republicans began to call themselves Democrats. From this flowed one other thing worth noting. As paper-money elites in Eastern cities fretted over the politically rambunctious masses spread across the 22 states, it was expedient to adopt their rhetoric and pledge allegiance to their demands. This was done by way of a new technique in American politics, the co-opting of popular leaders. More or less ever since the 1820s, Americans have lived in a sort of ideologically defined corridor: We are all members of the well-wishing middle class: This is a de rigueur article of faith. Democratic capitalism as it emerged during this time, with the market at the center of life, is the only way to go. Whatever may be wrong or out of whack in our Providential (and therefore perfect) land, it is nothing that one or the other of our two parties cannot repair with a few adjustments around the edges. Anyone who does not accept these things is—no other word for it—anti-American. Bernie Sanders, to put the point another way, has ancestors going back 190 years. Are you ready yet to feel the burn? Footnote: Doozy of the week comes from John Kirby, the State Department spokesman. In response to The AP’s ever-persistent Mike Lee, he insisted that—I can hardly write this—Russia is on NATO’s doorstep. Yes, Russian troops within their borders are a threat to NATO—which knows none, of course. Watch this surreal video here. As you do, ask yourself: As the decorated admiral speaks for State, can the Pentagon’s long intrusion into American foreign policy be any more plainly displayed? What would “President Sanders” have to say about this very fundamental problem in the policy process and how we see and portray the world? By the evidence, as much as candidate Sanders: nothing.Whatever happened to Bernie Sanders? It is always preferable to be first in my trade, but this is not why I pose so loaded a question. Neither am I into political predictions. If called upon in this case I would make one: The senator from Vermont is not going to be our 45th president. Forecasting this has lately become like shooting at the side of a barn, in my view, but this is not my point, either. It is time we think anew and very hard about Sanders, for there are two of them before us now. There is “Bernie Sanders” the progressive fixer of all that ails us, the broom who will set America on a positive course, the savior of all those hopes that are near to dying within us. This Bernie Sanders requires quotation marks. And there is Bernie Sanders plain and simple, just as he is. This is the working-class Brooklyn boy who migrated to Vermont in 1968, that totemic year in the counterculture scene, and who went on to the mayor’s office in Burlington and then multiple terms in both houses of Congress. Given Sanders’ political tilt, this is an impressive record of survival in a two-party system. At the University of Chicago Sanders had joined the Young People’s Socialist League, which was founded in 1907, the Debs era, on the thought that the ballot box was the key to our great republic’s transformation into something it was always supposed to be but never quite was. A socialist Sanders has ever since professed to be, roughly in the Michael Harrington mold. These are two different people with a shared fate, it is important to understand. “Bernie Sanders” lives solely in some people’s minds—many, by the extraordinary opinion poll numbers coming in week after week. I am beginning to find this sad. The thought that “Bernie Sanders” as president could effect anything like the fundamental change in direction “Sandernistas” seem to expect is sheer angélisme, as the French say. In politics as in love, to sustain false hope is exceeding cruel. As to Bernie Sanders sans quotation marks, we are required to keep our eyes very wide open, no blinking. Put this man in the context of American political history and he is not merely in danger of co-optation by the forces that control this nation: He awaits his chance to sign up for it. Bernie Sanders, socialist? It is hard to type while laughing. This real Sanders is merely an imaginative variant on the vote-the-lesser-evil mode in American politics, so sadly familiar to all of us. Never mind “Feel the Bern,” if you are behind this guy. The slogan that awaits you is “Feel the Burn.”* * *
I have for some months looked favorably on numerous aspects of the Sanders campaign. He and his people may or may not have thought this through, but his use of plain language and honest vocabulary marks an important advance in our political culture. He may be no more than a right-wing social democrat by any worldly standard, but we are talking about socialism in America for the first time in seven or eight decades. He has made it possible to discuss such things as universal healthcare—I have always considered “single-payer system” a ridiculous dodge—and corporate thievery. Goodness, we can now converse even about “working people.” In time we might get to “working class.” “He has at least temporarily liberated Democratic Party liberals from the silence imposed upon them by party leaders for decades,” a commentator named Brian Becker wrote in a political newsletter that periodically arrives in my inbox. Again, this stands to deliver consequences quite beyond the Sanders campaign. Free university tuition, a decent minimum wage, a broad shift from deregulation to reregulation: These are sound positions; Sanders has put them on the table. I started to reconsider Sanders while watching one of his television interviews some weeks ago. “Inequality… inequality… inequality”—he reverted to this theme a few too many times, driving home a point he surely did not intend to convey: Sanders is an “issue politician,” as they say. But he is not a political mind, well- or mal-intended. Or if he has one he keeps it thoroughly in check. On either side of the aisle, to harp on a single issue is another way of refusing to engage others just as vital. To put the point another way, Sanders has no holistic take as to the American predicament—top-to-bottom cause and effect—or, if he understands the crisis we find ourselves in, he declines to say so. (Given his evident political sophistication, I incline to the latter explanation.) He is not willing to look squarely at, or tell us, where we stand in the second decade of the 21st century. We live in a daunting moment, admittedly. Too bad for us, maybe. But if you are going to traffic in the aspirations, hopes and dreams Sanders likes to reference, you have to begin with an honest appraisal of our circumstances. This is the essence of the Sanders problem: He insists on flinching from anything close to such an appraisal. All in, this is a disqualifier, in my view. “Bernie Sanders” is nothing more than vapor. Bernie Sanders is a string of promises waiting to be broken. Neither is ever going to do anything for those who support him. Readers will be familiar with my views as to where we stand. We are an empire and the empire is crumbling. We are in the late-exceptionalist phase all people whose ideologies define them as chosen must eventually pass through. This imposes a very big burden. In our time one must stand outside the tent and urinate in. This is how things that need to get done will get done. It is our bitter reality. Everyone knows the Dylan line: “To live outside the law you must be honest.” This is not an easy thing to do, as anyone who does so can tell you. Sanders is simply among the many who do not want to face this and break the molds we must break.* * *
I do not think this is anywhere more evident than in Sanders’ thoughts, such as one can make them out, on America’s conduct abroad. My strong impression is that the Sanders campaign has little interest and no depth on the foreign policy side. I have heard this from several people close to the senator and his campaign. I conclude that the Sanders foreign policy is at bottom a collection of go-along, get-along default positions, safety being the prized value. (In the way of transparency, my brief effort, just after he announced his candidacy, to begin a conversation with his campaign on foreign policy questions yielded perfect indifference. Blessing in disguise, I now conclude, having heard him articulate a few positions and having learned that what foreign policy advisers he has include former staff at AIPAC, the Israeli lobby in Washington.) As we have it the policy includes, among a few other things, 1) support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including President Obama’s recent decision to maintain a troop presence; 2) blank-check support of Israel, including its savage bombing campaign in Gaza last year; 3) a freshly articulated commitment to Obama’s illegal use of drones, with faintly expressed regrets that they claim the lives of so many innocent civilians; 4) full-on enthusiasm for our ruinous military spending, especially when it sends jobs Vermont’s way—witness his fight to get the latest F-35 fighter jet based at Burlington Air Base. You get the picture. Sanders is a cruise-missile progressive, to borrow a friend’s pithy phrase. He is all for our dangerous, intentionally provoked confrontation with Russia in the name of NATO expansion. Let the “war on terror” proceed just as it has since Bush II declared it. Given Sanders has so far said nothing conclusive about the Syria crisis—the most pressing foreign policy question of the year—you have to assume he waits to see which way the wind blows. The other week an interviewer on another television program asked Sanders if he thought America was an exceptional nation. The question is key, of course. But Sanders flinched. After stumbling for half a minute he replied that of course he did: His father arrived in America “without a dime in his pocket,” and look how far the son has come. A straight shuck. Sanders deflected the question, which concerned America’s claim to primacy and unchallenged prerogative abroad. To me this is a decisive question. As a political calculation in an election year I may be wrong, but I do not see how one cannot partake of a political process so corrupt that we must send to high office anyone unwilling to address the essential questions: exceptionalism, hegemony, empire. Credit where due. Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank, respectively, editor and managing editor at CounterPunch, have been blasting Sanders on the foreign policy side for months. Two recent zingers, both straight to the point, are here and here. It is this kind of work that has shoved me toward the conclusions you are now reading about. “His is a disgusting record,” Frank writes bluntly in the second of the pieces linked above. “Want to change in the U.S.’s meddling in the Middle East? Bernie isn’t your guy. Bernie doesn’t oppose U.S. power, nor does his campaign do a single thing to build independent politics in the country, perhaps the last chance to salvage any democracy we may have left.” Frank makes two essential connections in this passage. One, any thought that our conduct abroad is somehow unrelated to the way we live, an adjunct of the domestic policy platform, is preposterous. It is nothing of the kind. In the end, foreign policy and domestic policy are one. What is at issue abroad, the motor of all policies, is the extension of the neoliberal economic model. It is precisely the same that is at issue at home. Ask yourself: Who shapes American foreign policy and whose interests are served by it? How, then, can Bernie Sanders continue to advance policies serving political cliques and corporations while fundamentally altering relations of power at home? Answer: It is a logical impossibility. Not even worth arguing about. If you need any further persuasion, think about what Hillary Clinton stands for, why, and where she gets her money. Two, Sanders’ decision to abandon his political stance as an independent and run as a Democratic candidate was fateful. It tells you all you need to know as to where he wants to be in relation to the tent, inside or outside. The “socialist” bit goes down like a stick of butter when this politician gets even a glimpse of the brass ring. “He’s a Cold War liberal lost in a post-Cold War world,” Jeff St. Clair wrote in the first column linked above. It is an astute description with several implications worth thinking about, but if we go back further in history we learn even more about this man. I am thinking of the 1820s, believe it or not. In 1819, our republic all of three decades old, Americans suffered the first severe economic and financial crisis in the nation’s brief existence. The Panic of 1819, as these events are named in the history books, exposed Americans for the first time to a few things we may find familiar: the boom and bust of capitalism, mass impoverishment and persistent inequality, banks with too much power, rampant speculation, unchecked power and corruption in Washington in behalf of said banks and speculators—and most of all an assault on all values other than market values. The 1820s, in consequence, amounted to a decade-long convulsion. The funny thing is, while one could change “1819” to “2008” in the above description without altering much else, most of us would find Americans of this time utter strangers. Radical politics, militant farmer-labor movements, class consciousness and charged rhetoric were all part of the scene—as American as the Declaration, which was, of course, among the principal inspiration. What happened? How did we get from then to now? Well, Jackson was elected in 1828—an Indian killer, yes, but a fighter of the good fight against the “moneyed interests.” But before then, something else: Jackson’s rise and the political irruptions long-earlier evident led people into what is now too familiar: a two-party system wherein party identification was supposed to express political preference but ended up fixing the parameters of political discourse. It was in 1824 that Jeffersonian Republicans began to call themselves Democrats. From this flowed one other thing worth noting. As paper-money elites in Eastern cities fretted over the politically rambunctious masses spread across the 22 states, it was expedient to adopt their rhetoric and pledge allegiance to their demands. This was done by way of a new technique in American politics, the co-opting of popular leaders. More or less ever since the 1820s, Americans have lived in a sort of ideologically defined corridor: We are all members of the well-wishing middle class: This is a de rigueur article of faith. Democratic capitalism as it emerged during this time, with the market at the center of life, is the only way to go. Whatever may be wrong or out of whack in our Providential (and therefore perfect) land, it is nothing that one or the other of our two parties cannot repair with a few adjustments around the edges. Anyone who does not accept these things is—no other word for it—anti-American. Bernie Sanders, to put the point another way, has ancestors going back 190 years. Are you ready yet to feel the burn? Footnote: Doozy of the week comes from John Kirby, the State Department spokesman. In response to The AP’s ever-persistent Mike Lee, he insisted that—I can hardly write this—Russia is on NATO’s doorstep. Yes, Russian troops within their borders are a threat to NATO—which knows none, of course. Watch this surreal video here. As you do, ask yourself: As the decorated admiral speaks for State, can the Pentagon’s long intrusion into American foreign policy be any more plainly displayed? What would “President Sanders” have to say about this very fundamental problem in the policy process and how we see and portray the world? By the evidence, as much as candidate Sanders: nothing.Whatever happened to Bernie Sanders? It is always preferable to be first in my trade, but this is not why I pose so loaded a question. Neither am I into political predictions. If called upon in this case I would make one: The senator from Vermont is not going to be our 45th president. Forecasting this has lately become like shooting at the side of a barn, in my view, but this is not my point, either. It is time we think anew and very hard about Sanders, for there are two of them before us now. There is “Bernie Sanders” the progressive fixer of all that ails us, the broom who will set America on a positive course, the savior of all those hopes that are near to dying within us. This Bernie Sanders requires quotation marks. And there is Bernie Sanders plain and simple, just as he is. This is the working-class Brooklyn boy who migrated to Vermont in 1968, that totemic year in the counterculture scene, and who went on to the mayor’s office in Burlington and then multiple terms in both houses of Congress. Given Sanders’ political tilt, this is an impressive record of survival in a two-party system. At the University of Chicago Sanders had joined the Young People’s Socialist League, which was founded in 1907, the Debs era, on the thought that the ballot box was the key to our great republic’s transformation into something it was always supposed to be but never quite was. A socialist Sanders has ever since professed to be, roughly in the Michael Harrington mold. These are two different people with a shared fate, it is important to understand. “Bernie Sanders” lives solely in some people’s minds—many, by the extraordinary opinion poll numbers coming in week after week. I am beginning to find this sad. The thought that “Bernie Sanders” as president could effect anything like the fundamental change in direction “Sandernistas” seem to expect is sheer angélisme, as the French say. In politics as in love, to sustain false hope is exceeding cruel. As to Bernie Sanders sans quotation marks, we are required to keep our eyes very wide open, no blinking. Put this man in the context of American political history and he is not merely in danger of co-optation by the forces that control this nation: He awaits his chance to sign up for it. Bernie Sanders, socialist? It is hard to type while laughing. This real Sanders is merely an imaginative variant on the vote-the-lesser-evil mode in American politics, so sadly familiar to all of us. Never mind “Feel the Bern,” if you are behind this guy. The slogan that awaits you is “Feel the Burn.”* * *
I have for some months looked favorably on numerous aspects of the Sanders campaign. He and his people may or may not have thought this through, but his use of plain language and honest vocabulary marks an important advance in our political culture. He may be no more than a right-wing social democrat by any worldly standard, but we are talking about socialism in America for the first time in seven or eight decades. He has made it possible to discuss such things as universal healthcare—I have always considered “single-payer system” a ridiculous dodge—and corporate thievery. Goodness, we can now converse even about “working people.” In time we might get to “working class.” “He has at least temporarily liberated Democratic Party liberals from the silence imposed upon them by party leaders for decades,” a commentator named Brian Becker wrote in a political newsletter that periodically arrives in my inbox. Again, this stands to deliver consequences quite beyond the Sanders campaign. Free university tuition, a decent minimum wage, a broad shift from deregulation to reregulation: These are sound positions; Sanders has put them on the table. I started to reconsider Sanders while watching one of his television interviews some weeks ago. “Inequality… inequality… inequality”—he reverted to this theme a few too many times, driving home a point he surely did not intend to convey: Sanders is an “issue politician,” as they say. But he is not a political mind, well- or mal-intended. Or if he has one he keeps it thoroughly in check. On either side of the aisle, to harp on a single issue is another way of refusing to engage others just as vital. To put the point another way, Sanders has no holistic take as to the American predicament—top-to-bottom cause and effect—or, if he understands the crisis we find ourselves in, he declines to say so. (Given his evident political sophistication, I incline to the latter explanation.) He is not willing to look squarely at, or tell us, where we stand in the second decade of the 21st century. We live in a daunting moment, admittedly. Too bad for us, maybe. But if you are going to traffic in the aspirations, hopes and dreams Sanders likes to reference, you have to begin with an honest appraisal of our circumstances. This is the essence of the Sanders problem: He insists on flinching from anything close to such an appraisal. All in, this is a disqualifier, in my view. “Bernie Sanders” is nothing more than vapor. Bernie Sanders is a string of promises waiting to be broken. Neither is ever going to do anything for those who support him. Readers will be familiar with my views as to where we stand. We are an empire and the empire is crumbling. We are in the late-exceptionalist phase all people whose ideologies define them as chosen must eventually pass through. This imposes a very big burden. In our time one must stand outside the tent and urinate in. This is how things that need to get done will get done. It is our bitter reality. Everyone knows the Dylan line: “To live outside the law you must be honest.” This is not an easy thing to do, as anyone who does so can tell you. Sanders is simply among the many who do not want to face this and break the molds we must break.* * *
I do not think this is anywhere more evident than in Sanders’ thoughts, such as one can make them out, on America’s conduct abroad. My strong impression is that the Sanders campaign has little interest and no depth on the foreign policy side. I have heard this from several people close to the senator and his campaign. I conclude that the Sanders foreign policy is at bottom a collection of go-along, get-along default positions, safety being the prized value. (In the way of transparency, my brief effort, just after he announced his candidacy, to begin a conversation with his campaign on foreign policy questions yielded perfect indifference. Blessing in disguise, I now conclude, having heard him articulate a few positions and having learned that what foreign policy advisers he has include former staff at AIPAC, the Israeli lobby in Washington.) As we have it the policy includes, among a few other things, 1) support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including President Obama’s recent decision to maintain a troop presence; 2) blank-check support of Israel, including its savage bombing campaign in Gaza last year; 3) a freshly articulated commitment to Obama’s illegal use of drones, with faintly expressed regrets that they claim the lives of so many innocent civilians; 4) full-on enthusiasm for our ruinous military spending, especially when it sends jobs Vermont’s way—witness his fight to get the latest F-35 fighter jet based at Burlington Air Base. You get the picture. Sanders is a cruise-missile progressive, to borrow a friend’s pithy phrase. He is all for our dangerous, intentionally provoked confrontation with Russia in the name of NATO expansion. Let the “war on terror” proceed just as it has since Bush II declared it. Given Sanders has so far said nothing conclusive about the Syria crisis—the most pressing foreign policy question of the year—you have to assume he waits to see which way the wind blows. The other week an interviewer on another television program asked Sanders if he thought America was an exceptional nation. The question is key, of course. But Sanders flinched. After stumbling for half a minute he replied that of course he did: His father arrived in America “without a dime in his pocket,” and look how far the son has come. A straight shuck. Sanders deflected the question, which concerned America’s claim to primacy and unchallenged prerogative abroad. To me this is a decisive question. As a political calculation in an election year I may be wrong, but I do not see how one cannot partake of a political process so corrupt that we must send to high office anyone unwilling to address the essential questions: exceptionalism, hegemony, empire. Credit where due. Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank, respectively, editor and managing editor at CounterPunch, have been blasting Sanders on the foreign policy side for months. Two recent zingers, both straight to the point, are here and here. It is this kind of work that has shoved me toward the conclusions you are now reading about. “His is a disgusting record,” Frank writes bluntly in the second of the pieces linked above. “Want to change in the U.S.’s meddling in the Middle East? Bernie isn’t your guy. Bernie doesn’t oppose U.S. power, nor does his campaign do a single thing to build independent politics in the country, perhaps the last chance to salvage any democracy we may have left.” Frank makes two essential connections in this passage. One, any thought that our conduct abroad is somehow unrelated to the way we live, an adjunct of the domestic policy platform, is preposterous. It is nothing of the kind. In the end, foreign policy and domestic policy are one. What is at issue abroad, the motor of all policies, is the extension of the neoliberal economic model. It is precisely the same that is at issue at home. Ask yourself: Who shapes American foreign policy and whose interests are served by it? How, then, can Bernie Sanders continue to advance policies serving political cliques and corporations while fundamentally altering relations of power at home? Answer: It is a logical impossibility. Not even worth arguing about. If you need any further persuasion, think about what Hillary Clinton stands for, why, and where she gets her money. Two, Sanders’ decision to abandon his political stance as an independent and run as a Democratic candidate was fateful. It tells you all you need to know as to where he wants to be in relation to the tent, inside or outside. The “socialist” bit goes down like a stick of butter when this politician gets even a glimpse of the brass ring. “He’s a Cold War liberal lost in a post-Cold War world,” Jeff St. Clair wrote in the first column linked above. It is an astute description with several implications worth thinking about, but if we go back further in history we learn even more about this man. I am thinking of the 1820s, believe it or not. In 1819, our republic all of three decades old, Americans suffered the first severe economic and financial crisis in the nation’s brief existence. The Panic of 1819, as these events are named in the history books, exposed Americans for the first time to a few things we may find familiar: the boom and bust of capitalism, mass impoverishment and persistent inequality, banks with too much power, rampant speculation, unchecked power and corruption in Washington in behalf of said banks and speculators—and most of all an assault on all values other than market values. The 1820s, in consequence, amounted to a decade-long convulsion. The funny thing is, while one could change “1819” to “2008” in the above description without altering much else, most of us would find Americans of this time utter strangers. Radical politics, militant farmer-labor movements, class consciousness and charged rhetoric were all part of the scene—as American as the Declaration, which was, of course, among the principal inspiration. What happened? How did we get from then to now? Well, Jackson was elected in 1828—an Indian killer, yes, but a fighter of the good fight against the “moneyed interests.” But before then, something else: Jackson’s rise and the political irruptions long-earlier evident led people into what is now too familiar: a two-party system wherein party identification was supposed to express political preference but ended up fixing the parameters of political discourse. It was in 1824 that Jeffersonian Republicans began to call themselves Democrats. From this flowed one other thing worth noting. As paper-money elites in Eastern cities fretted over the politically rambunctious masses spread across the 22 states, it was expedient to adopt their rhetoric and pledge allegiance to their demands. This was done by way of a new technique in American politics, the co-opting of popular leaders. More or less ever since the 1820s, Americans have lived in a sort of ideologically defined corridor: We are all members of the well-wishing middle class: This is a de rigueur article of faith. Democratic capitalism as it emerged during this time, with the market at the center of life, is the only way to go. Whatever may be wrong or out of whack in our Providential (and therefore perfect) land, it is nothing that one or the other of our two parties cannot repair with a few adjustments around the edges. Anyone who does not accept these things is—no other word for it—anti-American. Bernie Sanders, to put the point another way, has ancestors going back 190 years. Are you ready yet to feel the burn? Footnote: Doozy of the week comes from John Kirby, the State Department spokesman. In response to The AP’s ever-persistent Mike Lee, he insisted that—I can hardly write this—Russia is on NATO’s doorstep. Yes, Russian troops within their borders are a threat to NATO—which knows none, of course. Watch this surreal video here. As you do, ask yourself: As the decorated admiral speaks for State, can the Pentagon’s long intrusion into American foreign policy be any more plainly displayed? What would “President Sanders” have to say about this very fundamental problem in the policy process and how we see and portray the world? By the evidence, as much as candidate Sanders: nothing.
Stupid biology: 7 reasons breakups wreak such emotional havoc
There are plenty of good reasons why the death of a relationship is so unbearable. There's shame, failure, guilt, sadness, anger and incredulousness, plus the personal rejection of your very being. The Czechs have a lovely word for it: litost. "Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery," writes Milan Kundera in "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting." But this torment is more than just the nature of breakups, the need to experience darkness to appreciate the light, blah blah blah. Breakups also activate all kinds of neurochemical, physical and psychological fuckery that makes the whole business even more painful. Stupid biology. 1. Breakups turn you into a jonesing addict. If the beginning of a love affair is a kind of chemical-fueled madness, so is the ending, but in reverse. In one of the crueler aspects of neurochemistry, just when you're hitting the personal low of a breakup is also when dopamine—the reward chemical that made you feel so damn good in the beginning—decides to flee the scene, making you desperate for another hit. Dopamine acts in the same way as any drug of abuse, according to Helen Fisher in "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love": “If the beloved breaks off the relationship, the lover shows all the common signs of withdrawal, including depression, crying spells, anxiety, insomnia, loss of appetite (or binge eating), irritability, and chronic loneliness. Like all addicts, the lover then goes to unhealthy, humiliating, even physically dangerous lengths to procure their narcotic.” 2. Breakups actually hurt, physically. In one study researchers had subjects “who recently experienced an unwanted breakup view a photograph of their ex-partner as they think about being rejected.” This was pretty rough and probably not worth the 50 bucks or whatever the subjects got, but we learned that psychic trauma activates the same parts of the brain that process physical pain. Meaning, your brain experiences emotional pain as it would if you spilled hot coffee on yourself. Or more accurately, keep spilling coffee on yourself every time you hear that one song on the radio, go on Instagram, etc. 3. Breakups are depressing, officially. In a study of poor sods who had been rejected by a partner within the past eight weeks, 40 percent experienced clinically measurable depression, with 12 percent of those having moderate to severe depression. All breakups involve an amount of grief (and indeed, in another of those “think about your breakup while we MRI your brain” studies, the parts of the brain associated with grief lit up). But sometimes the grief becomes “complicated grief"—an unwieldy beast of grief lasting six months or more, featuring unpleasantries like over-rumination and mooning, bad dreams, and the excessive playing of Elliot Smith songs. 4. Your stupid brain can actually start to get off on your suffering. Anyone who has looked in the mirror to examine their tragic selves mid-cry knows there is a certain joy in one's own deep suffering. But sometimes that sort of self-schadenfreude can become addictive. In some people, enduring grief triggers the reward center in their brains, making them seek the dark feelings so they can get a little happy chemical hit. 5. You lose your sense of self. Without the identity created within the relationship (i.e., “We like paddleboarding”), some emerge bleary-eyed from a breakup with a hazy sense of self. That sort of psychic rootlessness is compounded by the loss of the sense of having a secure base within the relationship and with that partner. “Wherever that person is, that's your emotional home,” writes Emily Nagoski in "Come As You Are." Without that, you're kind of emotionally homeless. 6. It's even worse for people with “anxious attachment styles.” Some people have a “secure attachment style,” that is, they have relationships easily and trust others like normal healthy beings. The rest of us flounder about, either clinging too much (anxious attachment) or preemptively cutting and running (attachment avoidant). Those with anxious attachment styles show “greater preoccupation with the lost partner, greater perseveration over the loss, more extreme physical and emotional distress, exaggerated attempts to reestablish the relationship, partner-related sexual motivation, angry and vengeful behavior, interference with exploratory activities, dysfunctional coping strategies, and disordered resolution.” Meanwhile, the attachment avoidant (you know who you are) experience little such emotional fallout. Bastards. 7. Breakups kick in our survival biology. Attachment is a survival mechanism. A baby needs secure attachment or it will die. “When (our relationships) are threatened, we do whatever it takes to hold on to them, because there are no higher stakes than our connection with our attachment objects,” writes Nagoski, citing Harry Harlow's “monster mother” studies. In a sickeningly cruel experiment, Harlow bonded infant monkeys with mechanical “mothers,” then rigged the mothers to shake the babies, spike them or jet cold air on them to force them away. The babies responded to this treatment by running right back into the arms of those unpredictably cruel, rejecting mothers. Not only that, they became desperate to fix the relationship and tried to win back the mother by flirting with her, grooming and stroking her. That is, behavior some among us may recognize quite well. So yeah, it's bad. With the combination of biological, chemical and emotional havoc a breakup causes, it's a wonder any of us ever get over it. But we do. If you can just accept you're going to be miserable for a while, the appeal of spending car rides furtively weeping to Joni Mitchell's “All I Want” will eventually fade and you will indeed get over it. At some point. You might have to listen to a whole lot of “All I Want.” In the meantime, take solace in the words of Nietzche and Louis C.K., two dudes not exactly known for being consoling. “Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love,” wrote Nietzche. That is, that passion is still in you regardless of who its recipient is. And the next person might be even better at appreciating it. And said Louis C.K., in a typically genius statement that could apply to any relationship: “No good marriage has ever ended in divorce. It's really that simple.” In other words, you're probably better off without 'em. Jill Hamilton writes In Bed With Married Women (www.inbedwithmarriedwomen.com). Follow her on Twitter @Jill_Hamilton. 
Grimes isn’t a novelty act: Maybe we’ll see more female producers when we stop treating them like kooky freaks
GOP’s Obamacare repeal shambles: Turns out taking away health coverage isn’t super popular
“I am very concerned about the 160,000 people who had Medicaid expansion in my state. I have difficulty with that being included,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from West Virginia. […] Sen. John Hoeven (R), who represents North Dakota, where an estimated 19,000 people gained access to Medicaid after Republican Gov. Jack Dalrymple decided to broaden the program, said he was unsure about repealing the expansion. “We’ve started to talk about it but we haven’t gotten into it in depth,” he said. “I’m going to reserve judgment until I see exactly what we’re going to do.” “I respect the decision of our legislator and our governor on Medicaid expansion,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R) of Montana, which has a Democratic governor. “I’m one who respects their rights and voices.”The biggest hurdle to these Obamacare repeal bills has always been the fact that Obamacare, whether Republicans want to acknowledge it or not, is working. Because of the law, people are getting insured. If you take away the law, you’re taking away their newly obtained health security, which obviously won’t be very popular. This problem is only compounded by the fact that we’re closing in on year six of the GOP’s “Repeal and Replace” crusade and the party still has not coalesced around a replacement plan for Obamacare. To pass this repeal measure through reconciliation puts Republicans in a tough spot: they can spare some of the more popular parts of the ACA and risk bringing down the ire of hardline Obamacare opponents and conservative activists, or they nuke the whole thing and tell constituents “we’re taking away your coverage and offering nothing in return.” It feels safe to assume that anything but a full repeal measure would be rejected by the House, so the Senate’s hands might be tied if they want to get anything through to Obama’s desk. This same dynamic is playing out for real in Kentucky, which has been one of the ACA’s biggest success stories. Newly elected governor Matt Bevin promised to end Kentucky’s state-based Obamacare exchange and do some as-yet unspecified amount of violence to the state’s expanded Medicaid program. Going through with that will inevitably result in stripping people of health coverage. The GOP is finally being forced to grapple with the human and political cost of undoing the Affordable Care Act. [image error]
