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Posts Tagged ‘Politics’

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“It’s Just a Joke”: “Humor” as deflection and excuse.

In PeaceAble on June 24, 2017 at 9:47 am

I think that I can claim a sense of humor. I can’t imagine that those who know me would not acknowledge that I can be wry, sarcastic, outrageous, droll, slapstick, sometimes vulgar and perhaps even an above-average punster. But that doesn’t mean that I will find humor in everything you think is hilarious.
So, if I criticize a meme or take exception to a “joke” please do not respond by telling me it is just a joke or telling me that I need to get a sense of humor. And I will promise to continue not telling you those things if you criticize a “joke” of mine.
“It’s just a joke” is not an excuse for being offensive. “Lighten up” is not a defense of inappropriateness, pointlessness, or trolling. “Get a sense of humor” does not address actual issues raised by objections to humor or attempted humor or the harm they can cause.
Humor is one of the most telling aspects of the norms of a culture. We are either laughing at those things which are not “normal” or we are laughing at those things which are so normal as to be indicators of our common foibles or faults. And it is usually possible to tell the difference. When we laugh at the “other” we are doing something very different from when we laugh at ourselves.
I have recently been seeing a new emergence of “humor” based on prejudice, bias, and the kinds of racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia and downright meanness that we seriously need to marginalize, not re-normalize.
So, a few suggestions from the point of view of my sense of humor.

1. Any joke which is not funny unless you make the butt of the joke a “dumb blonde” (or any other hurtful stereotype) isn’t funny to begin with. Any joke that is funny already is made less funny by making the butt of the joke a “dumb blonde.”
2. Any joke that uses an outrageous caricature of a Mexican or an Arab or an Asian or a person of color any other race or nationality in order to mock their culture, their customs, or their pronunciation of words in a language which is not their first, is not funny.
3. Any joke that marginalizes or grossly distorts the reality of any culture, nationality, race or group of any kind is not funny.
4. Any joke based on belief in a conspiracy theory, a deliberate untruth, or a misleading and debunked claim is not funny.
5. Any joke based on shaming of any kind is not funny. Any joke that targets the fundamental humanity of any individual or group, that furthers destructive stereotypes or keeps us from seeing each other as equally deserving human beings is not funny.

What is funny?

1. Jokes that point out the human frailties we all share are funny.
2. Jokes told by those on the inside of a group about themselves are funny when they tell them (but not when outsiders do).
3. Jokes that speak truth to power are funny.
4. Jokes that play with our common language, both verbal and non-verbal, are funny.
5. Jokes that point out the absurdities of life or create their own absurd universe are funny.

There are, of course, occasional exceptions to these “rules.” But those can be accounted for by differences in where individuals see humor. I don’t really mind if you don’t find something as funny as I do. And long as you focus on what is or is not funny about it, I won’t mind if you tell me it isn’t funny. I might even, on reflection, find that I understand or even agree with your perspective. I have no problem apologizing for “humor” of my I own if it has hurt someone, however unintentionally.
The problem I see here is that humor is becoming a dodge, a way to be mean-spirited, bigoted, and even cruel without taking responsibility for it. “It was just a joke” is simply another way to say, “I didn’t mean it.” But that’s a cop-out. It’s a deflection, a way of making the other person the problem rather than the action itself. This is what bullies do, and “humor” is becoming a way of bullying.
I love a good joke. Humor is an art form, and like all art forms it exists along a scale from simple, vulgar humor to sophisticated, complex humor. And at every stop along that line we can all find something to relate to. And like all art forms it has its genres, its specialties, its in-jokes, and it’s avant-garde, so that not all of it is equally appreciated even by its greatest artists or most astute critics. But I value genuine humor enough to call it out when it becomes hurtful, when it reinforces the stereotypes and biases our culture would rather keep in place.

 

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War is Easy/Peace is Hard

In PeaceAble on April 7, 2017 at 11:04 am

War is easy.

War is easy because it only requires a relatively few people to make it happen.  Currently, only about .75% of Americans between 18 and 65 years of age are serving in the military.  And it only takes 51 senators, 218 representatives, and 1 President to declare a war and fund it.  Of those people, an even smaller percentage will ever actually see combat, with the newest technologies reducing that risk even further.  And you don’t have to involve your adversary in the decision until it’s made.

Peace is hard.

Peace is hard because it’s something we would have to live every day to make it happen.  We are a nation of more than 325 million people, approximately 75% of those are adults.  In order for us to live peaceably in the world, we would first have to learn to live peaceably with each other.  The population of the world is approximately 7.5 billion.  They would all have to learn to live peaceably with themselves and then with us.  We represent about 4% of the world population, and we can only achieve a truly peaceable world if we can get the other 96% to go along with it.

War is easy.

War is easy because it’s profitable right away.  President Eisenhower warned of the military/industrial complex sixty years ago.  Since then, nothing has been done to change that reality.  The war machine eats up a lot of money.  Right now, the current President is proposing to spend 54 billion dollars more on the military.  There is big money to be spent and big profit to be made as soon as those funds are approved.  And that profit will mostly bypass the poor and middle class and go directly to the wealthy.

Peace is hard.

Peace is hard because it takes longer to turn a peace profit.  Make no mistake.  Peace is profitable, but it takes a bit longer to see the profit, and it goes to different people.  A peaceable world would allow us to use more of our resources to heal the sick, break the cycle of poverty for millions, better educate our citizens, clean up and beautify our world, end our dependence on fossil fuels and do a whole range of things we can’t do now because we spend so much on war and preparation for war and the consequences of war.  A peaceable world would make it easier for us to interact economically with other nations, profiting us both.  But the transition from a war economy (and we are always in a war economy) to a peaceable economy would take time, time to create the infrastructure, time to see where the jobs need to be, time to train people to live in such an economy, time for profit to work its way up from the bottom to the top.

War is easy.

War is easy because it produces heroes and glory and victories.  It also, of course, produces destruction, displacement, injury, disease, and death.  War produces great suffering.  But the amount of suffering is always considerably less, we are told, than the glory and the heroism.  And the glory, victories and the heroes give us reasons to party.  In fact, most, nearly all of our national holidays are celebrated with a military presence and a military flair.  Every parade has a contingent of active and veteran military, nearly every parade unit has uniforms and behaviors of some kind that are fashioned on the military.  Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, marching bands, various auxiliaries, all marching in straight lines with a military gait.  We celebrate so many of our holidays with explosions, loud militaristic and nationalistic music, grand speeches about our own greatness and the greatness of our military.  Even when we celebrate the ends of wars we celebrate the victory, not the peace.  When did you last hear a speaker at a Veteran’s Day celebration talk about the effort to rebuild Europe after WWI or WWII, to find a way to peace with Vietnam, to restore our economy, to live in peace with our former enemies?

Peace is hard.

Peace is hard because it produces invisible diplomats and unrecognized workers.  You may know the names of recent Secretaries of State –  Albright, Powell, Rice, Clinton, Kerry, Tillerson – and a few historic ones – Adams, Madison, Monroe, Rusk, Dulles, Baker, Kissinger – but how many diplomats can you name?  How many people can you name who have led efforts to reduce poverty and hunger and homelessness in the world?  How many pacifists and peace workers ever make it into the public consciousness?  And how often do we celebrate them?  How many awards do we give them for their service, how many parades, how many holidays?  Where is the glory in helping a third world community to build a self-sustaining agriculture, produce clean water, start an industry?  A member of the military is treated as a hero as soon as the uniform is donned.  To be a hero of peace you have to rise to the level of a Ghandi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Malala Yousafzai.  Why should we pursue peace when it is clearly so undervalued?

War is easy.

War is easy because we have the language for it close at hand.  Our common lexicon is flooded with words that are either directly or indirectly militarist.  From sports to business even to the pursuit of peace, we talk about campaigns that are waged, victories that are won, adversaries that are defeated.  When we want love, we read articles about how to seduce and win a lover, how to catch a spouse.  In our everyday activities we talk about beating, conquering, destroying, killing, and fighting.  We value winners, and second place is a loser.  We label enemies more quickly than friends, and we are always a bit suspicious of our friends.  We put our children into troops; and they may know the words for guns and rockets and bombs, but not really understand what love is, or empathy, or compassion.  Patriotism is rarely seen as pacifist or even gentle.

Peace is hard.

Peace is hard because we have too little language for it.  Try to describe what you think world peace would be like?  What words do you use?  How concrete and specific are they?  How general and vague?  We know what a battle is; but what is it’s opposite?  Are you stuck on words like love, acceptance, tolerance, understanding, empathy?  Can you make those concrete?  How do you actually do those things?  Perhaps we can’t all get along because we have no common language to describe what that would be like.  And so many of our peace words carry a cultural connotation of weakness: acceptance, accommodation, tolerance.  We not only don’t know what “love your enemy” means, we don’t want to do it.

War is easy.

War is easy because it can coexist with fear.  If we were not afraid we would not go to war.  Fear is essential to war, both declaring it and waging it.  If we cannot identify an enemy we are supposed to fear, how do we justify war?  Any soldier who does not understand and feel fear risks recklessness and is a danger to his comrades.  We don’t give medals to people who were not afraid, but to those who overcame their fear.  Fear is the enemy, we’re told; something to be vanquished as much as the physical enemy is.

Peace is hard.

Peace is hard because it requires us to be fearless.  In order to build a peaceable world we must allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to trust, see the human face of the other.  We must let the other in, and we must seek him out without fear.  We must learn to love unconditionally.  We cannot be afraid of our pain, our suffering, our challenges; but we must form the habit of seeking causes rather than blame, profound solutions rather than easy fixes.  We have to be in it for the long haul.  Peace requires courage of us all, we cannot pass it off on a small percentage of our citizens; we need to work at our problems together, all of us, not wait for someone else to make them go away.

And it is important that we learn that war never leads to peace.  War only creates the conditions that lead to the next war.  But war is easy.  Only living peaceably will lead to peace.  But living peaceably is hard.  Peace is hard.

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The Fallacy of “Liberal Guilt”

In PeaceAble on March 24, 2017 at 7:53 am

There is an idea circulating that liberals seek things like civil rights, women’s rights, religious tolerance, LGBTQ rights, Native American rights, and so on, out of guilt; guilt about being male, about being white, about being Christian, about being whatever is the opposite of whatever they are championing.

Claiming that people act out of guilt is nothing more than an attempt to delegitimize their actions.  If you are doing something out of guilt, we are told, then it’s a bad thing to do, it’s dishonest, it isn’t genuine.  And it says to those who benefit from the work that the liberal activist doesn’t really care about you, it’s just guilt, so you should resent what they’re doing.  And you should be glad that I, who am doing nothing for you, am not demeaning you or being dishonest to you out of guilt. 

This idea of guilt is also associated with accusations of colonialism, of a supposed sense of superiority and entitlement.  In discussing the social safety net, for example, it works for the liberal activist this way:  1. You feel guilty about the fact that you have plenty of food and a home and a comfortable life when others don’t; 2. This guilt is derived from your belief that you are privileged and therefore superior; 3. When you advocate for the poor you are acting out your superiority, telling the poor that they need your superior largess because they can’t do it themselves; 4. This makes them dependent on you and deprives them of some of their freedom because they believe they are entitled to what you want to give them.  For the recipient it works this way:  1. The liberal doesn’t really care about you, he’s just feeling guilty because he has stuff you don’t have; 2.  What the liberal is telling you is that he is superior to you and you aren’t good enough to do what you need to for yourself; 3.  You should resent the liberal for his guilt and imperialism; 4. You need to learn to take responsibility for yourself instead of feeling entitled to help from guilty liberals; 5. We’re your real friends because we don’t feel guilty about our privilege and our wealth, and we want to give you the freedom to do it on your own, because we respect you.

In other words, if someone helps you they aren’t helping you, and if they don’t help you they are helping you. 

What a crock.

Guilt is an illusionary emotion.  It reduces complex events of cause and effect into simplistic arguments of blame. It masquerades as responsibility when it is really fear; it pretends to be empathy when it is really ego.  Guilt imagines that if one suffers sufficiently, then the wrongs of the past are atoned for.  And guilt doesn’t actually motivate action; rather, it seeks absolution and forgiveness. 

Guilt is a much more showy and public condition than responsibility.  Private, unexpressed guilt is a poison that slowly kills its host.  The only way to rid oneself of guilt is to make it known, and by making it known seek forgiveness.  On the other hand, we don’t seek to rid ourselves of honest and genuine responsibility, nor do we feel the need to make it public. Guilt emotes, responsibility acts.

Is it so hard to believe, especially among those who claim the mantle of Christianity, that any person, regardless of their political, religious, ethnic or other standing, might just have empathy, compassion, concern for another human being?

Is it not possible to feel a responsibility to correct historic wrongs without feeling guilty about the wrongs themselves?  A white person who recognizes that people of color have been enslaved, oppressed, discriminated against, disenfranchised and marginalized by white people can certainly also see that something needs to be done to correct those things without feeling personal guilt.  A man who sees that women have been disadvantaged and disenfranchised by a male-dominant culture can certainly also see that these things need to be corrected without feeling guilty.  A heterosexual or cisgender person does not have to feel guilty about the historic treatment of LGBTQ persons in order to want to correct the injustices.  When a wrong can be clearly seen, guilt is not necessary to motivate the desire to make it right.

If you feel guilty about something, examine it.  How is the guilt helping you?  What is it getting you?  Replace the guilt with understanding and knowledge about what the real problems and issues are, and what can be done about them.  Let your compassion come from empathy not from debt.  Let the past, both cultural and personal, put wind in the sails of positive change, not throw out an anchor that keeps us from moving forward.  And don’t listen to those who try to tell you that not feeling guilty means not having to do anything.

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A Warning About the End of Life as We Know It

In PeaceAble on March 7, 2017 at 1:40 pm

 

Life as we know it is in danger.  If we are to prevent the end of life as we know it, we must all remember these basic truths:

 

The Others are not like us.

 

They speak a different language and when they learn our language they speak with a strange accent.  They think that we should learn their language.  They dress differently and strangely, they eat strange food, they worship false gods and they have strange customs and habits.  They have their own laws that are not exactly like ours.  You can recognize them because they look different from us.

 

The Others hate us.

 

They hate our laws, they hate our customs, they hate our beliefs.  They may even hate us because we have things they want to take away from us.  They hate our culture and our way of life.

 

The Others are trying to destroy us.

 

Because they hate us and want what we have, they are determined to attack us, go to war with us.  They want to destroy our culture, our country; they will kill our people; they want to destroy us and everything we have.  They want to steal from us all that we value and take it for themselves.

 

 

 

But if we are to prevent the end of the world as we know it, we must also forget some basic truths:

 

Whenever we leave this place and go elsewhere in the world, WE are The Other.

 

We want to believe that The Other must always be The Other, because WE are WE.  There can be no greater truth than this:  as I look out onto the world, I am at its center; all else is Other; and wherever I am is where the center is.

 

When WE are The Other, everything stated above is still true.

 

This is life as we know it.  This is the world as we wish to preserve it.  It is this we will prevent the end of by remembering the truths above.

 

When all The Others have been destroyed then life as we know it will end.

 

And what will be left will not be what we thought it would be.  We will find no life-as-we-know-it paradise.  Whenever there are at least two people in the world, there will be I and there will be The Other. And perhaps then we will learn that if we destroy The Other, WE destroy ourselves.

 

Perhaps it would be better if we stopped trying to prevent the end of the world as we know it and started working together to build a better one.

 

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The Nonlinear Narrative: A Rhetoric of Donald Trump’s Mind

In Politics on February 21, 2017 at 10:28 am

 

Here’s what you need to realize about Donald Trump’s speaking style; and why it is both revealing and dangerous.

All of us experience reality in a non-linear way.

Each new thought, each new response to the constant barrage of stimuli is disconnected from the last thought or response until we make the connection intellectually.  Because the universe is not selective, we have to be.  We cannot respond equally to every new stimulus because there is simply too much information coming into contact with our senses all the time.  So we filter out some information, paying attention to whatever our brain in the moment considers most important.  Every stimulus except the one we have chosen to focus on is noise. 

What happens next is that we make a higher level selection that allows us to string certain stimuli together into a coherent, linear experience.  In effect, we create a story that allows us to understand and create meaning out of the experience.  The longer we can continue to string together stimuli in this way, the more coherent our experience becomes and the better able we are to articulate that experience.  Often, however, the rapid pace of life keeps us from focusing very long on any one string, any one story, while we are having the experience.  As a result, we have to create the narrative of our experience through memory at a later time.  We sort through all the stimuli, select those that seem connected, create meaning, and develop a linear narrative that expresses that meaning.  When we can’t do that, or choose not to, the result is stream of consciousness, non-sequitur, incoherence and inarticulateness.

That’s where Donald Trump lives.  He is unable or unwilling to string his thoughts together in a selective, coherent, linear narrative in order to articulate a specific complex meaning.  It would be one thing if this were simply a fault in the moment; that is, if his initial thought process was chaotic and disorganized.  That’s simply the way it is for most of us.  We need to focus, perhaps take some time with our experiences and thoughts, and find the most reasonable narrative to help us understand and express our experiences.  The problem, however, arises when we can’t make those connections in the moment and can’t or won’t do it later, either.  The mind just leaps from thought to thought, unable to maintain a linear narrative for more than a few moments. There is one advantage to this rhetorical style: it allows us to see how Trump’s mind works.

It’s easy to interpret his ravings as simply ego, but it is actually a little more complicated than that.  Everyone has ego needs.  We all want a degree of validation of our self-identity and ego gratification.  But we also have more and less dominant needs that inform that validation.  Some of us focus a significant amount of our ego on altruism; we get ego satisfaction from doing things for others.  Some focus on intellectual validation; we want others to see that we know things, are learned.  Some of us focus on material things; we are constantly telling people about our possessions. 

Trump seems to focus mostly on his social needs; he is constantly referencing what other people have told him, especially about himself.  He wants us to know how many people voted for him, how many of these people or those love him.  He wants us to know that when he claims something is true, it’s because other people, the best people, smart people, have told him they are true.  And it doesn’t really matter who, exactly, these people are, there just has to be a lot of them.

Trump references everything back to himself, of course, but it isn’t simply self-importance.  He simply has no other useful reference points for his experiences, so when he drifts off topic to talk about himself, he is making the only logical connection he can find between his otherwise random thoughts.  Instead of arranging things according to the usual linear logic, Trump creates something more like a thought web, with himself at the center and all things connected through himself.  When you listen to him speak, you can follow what is happening by looking for the rhetorical linkages back to himself.

This rhetorical style is tolerable, though certainly frustrating, in your quirky relative who thinks himself a raconteur, but actually just rambles interminably without ever finishing any particular story.  In the President, however, it is dangerous.

That’s because it means that those who recognize this rhetorical trait can use it to manipulate and control him. If you want him to believe something or act in particular way, you merely need to give him a narrative that connects the parts of the argument you want him to follow back through his self-reference.  The argument doesn’t have to make any kind of logical sense whatsoever on its own.  It only needs to make sense in the filter of that self-reference. 

It also means that you are most likely to be successful if you can make your voice the last one he hears before he has to make his decision.  Because he doesn’t develop a coherent narrative, he has no way of reviewing that narrative later to understand or even accurately remember his own process.  He only knows what his final decision was; and since it was his decision he cannot question or change it.  He can, however, be led to make a new, even contradictory, decision by the next person who can make the appropriate connections through his self-reference between the old decision and the new.

Moreover, the President cannot respond effectively to sudden or unanticipated changes; that is, think on his feet. We can see this in his press encounters and Twitter rants, where he either cycles the unexpected through his self-reference or falls back on tried and true attack lines or dominance strategies.

The danger in this, of course, is that we can neither understand nor predict his actions based on his prior choices or his current rhetoric.  The chaos of his mind leads to chaos, inconsistency, unpredictability, and lack of trust.  This chaos is especially dangerous when applied to decisions affecting domestic policy or international relationships.

For this reason, we need to pay less attention to his rhetoric, which becomes a distraction, and more attention to the rhetoric of those he has appointed as advisors and members of his administration.  We have to assume that his positions and policies will reflect not his reasoning, not his narrative, but those of people like Steve Bannon.  Whoever has his ear at any moment will create the narrative that informs the policy.

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Normalization and the Norm

In PeaceAble, Politics on December 14, 2016 at 10:28 am

There seems to be some confusion out there about what we mean when we use the word “normalize,” and how that is related to the word “normal.” Allow me to clarify.

When we talk about normalizing a particular behavior or idea, we are not saying that the person exhibiting that behavior or expressing that idea is not “normal” in the common sense of that word. We aren’t, for example, saying that the person is deranged, or intellectually deficient, or pathological. Some might actually think those things, but that is a different discussion and I would appreciate it if you did not engage in that here.

We are, rather, using the word “normal” as the adjective form of the word “norm.” A norm is a behavior or idea that our culture or society tells us, in both subtle and more obvious ways, we should expect from each other. We are trained from early on to regard these things as “the way it is.” Now norms are not necessarily the most common or most acceptable or most likely behaviors or ideas, which is what the word normal usually suggests. For instance, American culture has, for its entire history, been dominated by the behaviors and ideas of straight (at least openly), male, Puritan/Christian (at least publicly), powerful warrior men. In other words, the straight, white, Puritan/Christian, powerful male warrior is the norm. And we are socialized to view the world from that perspective.

Now, there are, in fact, more women than men in the population; there are far more people among us more who have no more than modest power, and we are quickly discovering that LGBTQ+ people are much more numerous than we have been told and the non-white population may soon outnumber the white population. And any one time, the number of people who are veterans or serving in the armed forces is less than 15% of the population.  But that only states the demographics, not the norm. The norm remains primarily straight, white, Puritan/Christian, warrior men of power (especially economic). And that means, that despite our attempts to change things, the perspectives arising from that norm continue to pervade the society.

Distrust, bigotry, discrimination and disenfranchisement of people who do not represent that norm is “normal.” Misogyny, racism, homophobia, and the Christianization of society are “normal.” The dis-education and miseducation of those not part of the norm is “normal.” Using the very genuine fears of the working class, minorities, and women to divide the masses of people and thus more easily rule over them is “normal.” The idea that success is to be defined in terms of wealth is “normal.” The idea that everyone has the same opportunities to achieve that mythological thing we call the “American Dream” is “normal.” The idea that problems can be best resolved through force is “normal.”

Now we have tried over the years to change some of those things, but progress is always slow and still fragile, as the recent election demonstrates. The things we do to create greater equality for all, to promote justice and protect the rights of those who have less power to protect them for themselves,  and to seek more peaceable solutions to our problems, are called “normalization,” or “normative behaviors.” That is, they are things we do to create new norms that better reflect our diversity, our stated American ideals, our rights, privileges and responsibilities as members of society. But our social behaviors, our laws, our public images of ourselves in the media and our demographics all change more quickly than our norms do.

So electing a non-white President did not change the norm of whiteness as the perspective through which we see things. The Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage, Roe-v-Wade, and the striking down of laws that would require the teaching of “Intelligent Design” in public school science classes, for a few examples, did not usher in a new secular norm. Women still have less access to power, non-whites and non-Christians are still marginalized, and it is still “normal” to proclaim one’s patriotism while waving the flag of a nation that went to war against the United States, and lost. We still think that the more firepower we have, the safer we are.

When we try to normalize something, we are trying to create it as a norm. We are saying that this behavior or this idea is to be expected, that it defines us as a society and a culture, that this is now the perspective from which we will evaluate and express our public and official actions.

So, what we are really seeing around us now is not the normalization of bigotry, of white supremacy, of male dominance and privilege in the affairs of the nation; we are seeing an attempt by that “normal” perspective to roll back the normalization of those things that threaten it. It is not the normalization of racism that threatens us, it is the de-normalization of diversity. It is not the normalization of misogyny, it is the de-normalization of the idea that the feminine is in all ways the equal of the masculine. It is not the normalization of xenophobia or homophobia or religious prejudice, it is the de-normalization of acceptance, tolerance, and cooperation. It is an attempt to say that who we are becomig is not who we are; an attempt to say that who we are is embodied in the worst of who we have been all along.

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SUPERMAN NEEDS LEX LUTHOR: The Problem with Superheroes

In PeaceAble, Politics on December 9, 2016 at 12:34 pm

Another superhero movie, another blockbuster. America seems to really love its costumed crusaders for truth, justice and the American way. Of course, in this case the American way would seem to be to hope a superhero comes along to take care of the problem. The superhero myth is a powerful one, but there are at least five serious problems with it.

  1. They don’t really exist. So we have to create them.

Okay, by the time most of us have reached the tween years we are fully aware that Superman and Spiderman and Batman and the rest are just comic book stories. But that doesn’t keep us from wishing they did exist; perhaps even wishing that we could be bitten by a radioactive spider, or have a lot of cool, clever gadgets to hang on our belts and make us invincible. Since neither of those things are ever going to happen, we look for substitutes for our superheroes: soldiers, explorers, inventors, policemen and firefighters, of course; but also politicians, celebrities, sports figures, the equally mythological American cowboy, and whatever larger-than-life personality has currently captured our attention. For some people, even their religious figures are cast as superheroes to be called upon in times of crisis.

And in the absence of a clear superhero, individuals may rise up and try to claim the title. The politician will present himself as the only one who can solve all the problems, vanquish all the enemies; and he doesn’t even need to say how it will be done, only convince us that he, and he alone, can do it. The NRA tells us that there are superheroes among us, good guys with guns, who are our only defense against whatever new evil may suddenly threaten us.

  1. Superheroes require supervillains.

Just as superheroes don’t really exist, neither do supervillains. When we create superheroes, or they create themselves for us, there arises a simultaneous need to create supervillains to justify the superheroes. Our supervillains can be individuals, such as Hitler; or a nation, such as Russia; or vague entities, such as multinational corporations and international cabals and the illuminati; or whole groups of people who can be quickly identified by some simple, single characteristic, like Muslims, or liberals/conservatives, or the Black Lives Matter Movement; or corrupt police, or the KKK, and so on. They can even be the more difficult problems in our society, te ones that have no easy answer, like poverty, disease, bigotry and violence. One thing is certain, though. Our supervillains will always be a characteristic of the “others,” those scary people who are not like us, and are scary precisely because they are not like us. We are encouraged to see the other as supervillain by default. And once the supervillain has been identified, we rally behind the superhero to demand their destruction.

 

  1. Superheroes and supervillains tend to inhabit a dark and dangerous world, and the problems and the solutions are nearly always about the exercise of power rather than the exercise of intelligence.

I remember the superheroes of my youth as generally clean, morally unambiguous figures. The people they served were a lot like me, ordinary folk who lived quiet, uneventful lives until some supervillain came along and created a disaster that only the superhero could resolve. But the fact is that superheroes were always vigilantes. They operated outside the constraints of law. The police both allowed and encouraged them, cooperated with them, but it was clear that the superhero could do what the normal authorities either could not or were not allowed to do. But even with that, the superheroes seemed to respect their own powers; they rarely killed an adversary, and almost never killed on purpose.

As time went on, however, things took a darker turn. Gotham City became an increasingly dirty, depraved, and crime-ridden environment; and Batman’s character and costume got darker along with it. But even with the greater moral ambiguity that suggests, there was no moral ambiguity about the need for the hero to win; and to win by whatever means necessary; and those means became increasing violent and deadly, as did the supervillains. What was once the need for a superhero to defeat the occasional supervillain – and extraordinary event that interrupted the normal flow of the average citizen’s life – became a constant need for superheroes to fight back against the constant threat of powerful and deadly supervillains in a darkly dangerous world of evil.

But in such a world the supervillains can never be actually defeated. If they could, then the superhero would be out of a job. The villains have to be so powerful that all we can do is hold them at bay for a while, and make sure that our superheroes are well armed for the battle that, if it isn’t happening right here and now, will surely come. And if we defeat one supervillain, there will be a ready supply of others. Eternal vigilance is necessary in a world where the problems cannot actually ever be finally resolved. Fear ceases to be the natural response to extraordinary events, and becomes the constant condition of our lives.

In places like Ferguson or Standing Rock and Malheur we are told that the end justifies the means, but it is always the people with the guns who, we are told, are standing up against the supervillain others who must be defeated or life as we know it will surely be destroyed. As long as we know who is the hero and who the villain, then the hero must win. But we express our shock and surprise when someone decides that he must be the superhero and shoots up a nightclub full of homosexuals or a church full of black people; or blows up an abortion clinic; because he didn’t see a superhero doing enough to rid the world of these supervillains and took on the job himself.

 

  1. Buying into the superhero culture interferes with the search for real solutions to systemic problems.

Why do we need spend time and money and our moral energy on finding reasonable and long-lasting solutions to problems if we can hold out hope for a superhero with a simple plan to swoop in and take care of it? What use is diplomacy if we believe that Captain America still exists somewhere and now has a nuclear weapon or a fleet of drones? Why do we need to rely on the justice system, the courts and the lawyers, when we have so many policemen with guns and tasers and billy clubs; and the presumption that their actions are justified? Why do we need to have our lives disrupted by protesters who want things we don’t want, when we have the National Guard with water cannons and dogs and rubber bullets and sometimes real bullets? And why do we have to put up with a government that sometimes does things that we don’t want them to do when we have our own guns?

Why do we need to really think about things like why we are ill or what is causing the stress in our lives, or how we might solve those problems, when we have a pharmaceutical industry always working on new superhero drugs to fix us? Why do we need to accept or tolerate our neighbors who are not like us, when that man over there is telling us that our problems are their fault, they are the supervillains, and he has the final solution? And why should we care how he does it as long as it’s done?

 

  1. The superhero culture prepares us to accept demagogues, war, a police state, and restrictions on our freedom by convincing us that we are individually and collectively weak and need to be saved.

We have been and are continuing to be acculturated to believe that all our problems are enormous; every conflict is a crisis; we are incapable of doing what needs to be done; .and we must therefore find a superhero to lead us, to fight for us, to keep us safe. But such leaders may be motivated to keep us only as safe as will keep us in fear that the superhero may go away and leave us defenseless.

When the planes brought down the World Trade Center, we told ourselves that it had united us as Americans, that it had restored our faith in or collective ability to come together at times of great tragedy. But we quickly looked for the supervillains, and for superheroes to lead us. And we chose as our heroes, those who would tell us who the villains were, and promise to defeat them. Then, with each new villain brought to what we were told was justice, more rose up, until the supervillain became an entire race, an entire religion, and anyone we could tell ourselves was one of them.

Whenever something begins to change and those changes make us uncomfortable, we are told that that discomfort is fear, that fear is a sign that we are under attack, and there will be someone – a politician or a priest or a pundit – who will tell us who the supervillains are, and offer to be our hero. They will describe dark conspiracies in terms of war and destruction. The crisis is present and we are in danger and only the tools of war will save us. Don’t try to understand, never compromise, do not discuss, never seek the peaceable solution. Anything but the destruction of the other, the supervillain, is weakness that will surely mean the end of us.

The thing is, it’s all a fantasy. But it is important to understand that it is a fantasy in which we participate with both our ignorance and our complicity. We do not question the fantasy and so we never learn the truth of the illusion. And we are unwilling to make ourselves uncomfortable, to face our problems together, to know the other, to confront our fears with reason. We don’t really want to deal with it all.

This isn’t the media’s fault or the politicians’ fault or religion’s fault. It’s not strictly the fault of the wealthy or the white or the male; though the culture gives them special place and therefore special responsibility. The media does not create the culture, but it reflects what we already accept as real and normal, and thereby reinforces and encourages the illusion. And the politician or the priest or the talk radio celebrity are there because we put them there.

Cultural truths do not change until we become uncomfortable enough with them to stop buying what the culture is selling us. Superheroes and supervillains will be with us until we can see that they are not real, they are not normal, and they are not the solution. When we come to the realization that we are stronger when we are not afraid of each other; that we can do this together, that we don’t need to send our superheroes destroy each other, and when we realize that far too many of our superheroes do not live among us, but rule over us; and that we may very well be the supervillains of choice tomorrow; then we can put away the fantasy and begin the real work.

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NORMAL AND VALIDATED; AND THAT’S THE PROBLEM.

In PeaceAble, Politics on November 22, 2016 at 10:08 am

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign did not validate or normalize racism, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, white supremacy or the violence, both verbal and physical, that so many people are afflicted with. What the campaign did was to show us just how normal and validated those things are and how little progress we’ve made in changing that.

Norms are a function of the dominant culture, and the culture always changes a lot more slowly than any era’s current attitudes might suggest. We have been riding the pendulum swings of cultural attitudes for a very long time without actually changing that much of the culture itself. There is one simple reason for this: the dominant cultural group, the normative identity of the culture, has not changed. We have tried to bring change from outside that group rather than from within. We tend to see social change as something that has to be done to or in spite of the dominant group, rather than something they have to do.

In America, the dominant cultural group, the normative identity, and therefore what has to change, is straight, white, Christian, capitalist, warrior men.

How does our culture genuinely work for peace, genuinely counter the argument that the way to deal with our enemies is to destroy them utterly when our language is full of the metaphors of war and violence, when so many of sports and games are microcosmic wars, when our entertainments are so predominantly about superheroes defeating supervillains in dark Gothams full of despicable characters?

How do we become a less violent society when men with guns who take over and trash public property are treated as heroes, while peaceful Native Americans protesting the actions of a private corporation are maced and beaten and arrested? The mythological westerner embodied by fictional characters such as Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger and John Wayne and (in anti-hero guise) the vigilante loners portrayed by Clint Eastwood is alive and well as a cultural norm.

How do we work toward economic and social equity when our culture portrays desirability, success and power as the unfettered accumulation of individual wealth beyond what any one person actually needs; and calls those who have less than that losers, weaklings, and takers? How can we make the best use of our resources when everyone hates to pay taxes because they focus only on what they don’t want to spend “their” taxes on rather than working for the things they do want; without recognizing that they aren’t paying nearly enough in taxes to cover any of it all by themselves. How do we learn to share the resources in a culture that teaches us that whatever someone else gets is stolen from us?

How do we overcome racism, sexism, homophobia and all kinds of bigotry and become a truly vibrant diverse society as long as there are so many accomplishments that have to be identified by hyphenated qualifiers because they are the accomplishments of the “others:” the first woman this, the first African-American that, the first Hindu-American other thing, the first openly gay American whatever?

The veneration of the Confederate battle flag and the Confederacy it represents has been normalized and validated since the Civil War ended, and we have only just recently begun the task of trying to remove it from the norm.

The truth is that all those things that the Trump campaign brought out of the woodwork are us. They are the norm.

We have tried for more than a hundred and fifty years to overcome the abomination of slavery, to create cultural and social equality for women; and yet our first non-white President greeted with an unending onslaught of racism, hatred and obstruction; and a female Presidential candidate was vilified for things that were never questioned when the candidates were male, and her opponent was elected despite his appalling treatment of women.

Hatred, fear and distrust of immigrants is as normal as apple pie.

Despite the enormous gains that our LGBTQ+ citizens have made with respect to public acceptance and specific issues such as marriage equality, we can see just how fragile those gains might still be. Heterosexuality is not just the norm, it’s a virulent, defensive, self-righteous norm.

Despite the fact that the U.S. Constitution expressly forbids the establishment of a national religion, the broad and very diverse Christian religion is seen as normative. We often find it necessary, even in situations where it can have no relevance whatsoever, to announce that someone is Jewish, or Muslim, or Hindu; or worse yet, a “self-described” something, like Deist or Atheist, or Agnostic, or the new category of “Non-Affiliated.”

So how do we change this? We either have to convince white, heterosexual, Christian, capitalist, warrior men to change because it is in their interest to do so; or we have to take the power of cultural normalizing away from them. We do that by changing our participation in the things that are keeping the norms in place. What are you buying for Christmas ane what is your holiday greeting? What movies are you watching, what TV shows? Do you forgive them their violent or sexist content because they are “well-written” or have “outstanding acting?” When you are watching sports, do you hope for the brawl, the injury; do you want to see the star quarterback on the other team not just sacked, but knocked completely out of the game? Do you think that professional wrestling is family entertainment that you want to bring your 9-year-old to? Do you still laugh at jokes about dumb blondes, do you think the recent rash of memes featuring a grotesque Mexican caricature are great fun? Do you talk about “the war on” things you want to defend, and do you celebrate warriors as heroes but don’t think very often of the heroism of peacemakers?

Keep in mind that something can be the norm of a culture long past the time that it actually represents anything more than a minority of a society’s citizens. A norm is not the reality of things, it is the yardstick by which we measure what is different and who is the other. As long as we say to ourselves at any level “that’s just the way it is,” or fail to recognize that our own otherness is the result of our seeing some norm that is not us or some different other that does not share some norm of ours, then we will tinker at the edges of the culture.

Now I should note that the culture is never going to change to suit all of us or any one of us completely. There will always be norms and there will always be exceptions to those norms. That may be the most important normative idea of all.

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The Zero Sum Politics of Scarcity Consciousness

In PeaceAble, Politics on November 9, 2016 at 10:27 am

As I reflect on the reasons People are giving for electing Donald trump to the Presidency, a single theme emerges.

They mention foreign workers taking our jobs; they make reference to variations on the drugged-up, slut of a lazy welfare mother having kids and asking us to support her with our taxes; the unemployed and homeless who want us to take care of them instead of getting a job; the immigrants who are coming here with their customs and religions that they want to force on us; the foreign terrorists disguised as refugees who won’t agree to keep their wars in their own countries instead of coming here to harm us.

Now, all of these things have long been shown by hard evidence to be false, but I it’s not my intention here to argue about them. Instead I want to point out something they have in common that is not often talked about.

They are each a variation on a theme of personal ownership and public scarcity; the idea that any acquisition or benefit or bit of power someone else gets takes something away from me. And if I can strongly identify with a group of people like myself we can declare ourselves collectively robbed.

“If a “foreign” worker comes here and gets a job, that job actually belongs to me or someone like me and has been stolen.” The same thing holds true for someone of a previously disadvantaged group; “Black people are taking white people’s jobs.” “Women in the workforce are taking jobs away from men.”

“If gay people are allowed to marry, then my marriage is less special, less uniquely blessed; so I have been robbed of that blessing.” And, corollary to that is the idea that if same-sex relationships are normal and acceptable, then the natural normality and specialness of my heterosexual relationship are diminished.

“If God can be worshipped in a multitude of ways and all those ways express valid and meaningful understandings of and relationships with God; then I am being robbed of the special righteousness of my relationship with God.” This is the “if everyone is right then no one is right” argument.

And the next step in this reasoning process is that if someone is taking something away from me then that is an attack on me.

“When people say ‘Happy Holidays” it diminishes the specialness of my “Merry Christmas,” so that’s an attack on Christianity itself.”

Now the problems with these arguments should be obvious, but let me state them as clearly as I can.

First, your sense of ownership and entitlement is based on a myth grounded in unacknowledged privilege. Put simply, you don’t own what you think you own. They are what Thom Hartmann calls the “commons.” This isn’t your country any more or less than it is mine and everyone else’s, and I want things for it that are different from what you want, but my desires are no less valid or important than yours.

They aren’t your taxes, they’re mine, too; and some of the things you don’t want to spend them on are things that I do want, and vice-versa.

You don’t own any job; and the fact that you now have to compete for it with people you used to be able to exclude from the pool takes nothing from you except a privilege that is not yours to claim in the first place.

You don’t own marriage or any other social or legal contract between people that does not include you.

And you certainly don’t own God; to think that your truth is the only possible one is arrogance and self-righteousness that is especially ironic in a religion that supposedly teaches you to be humble and leave the righteousness to that God.

Secondly, there is actually no scarcity of most of these things. There is more than enough of being an American for all of us and a great many more.

There is a limited number of jobs, but that’s not the fault of the people who have them. Economists argue that a certain percentage of people need to be unemployed at all times or the economy will suffer. (A side note here: The wealthy don’t invest or start businesses in order to create jobs. They do it to create more wealth for themselves and jobs are seen as a cost of business, not a reason for it.)

There is plenty of love and marriage and sex to go around, and each marriage is equally special for its participants. My marriage does not diminish yours any more than yours diminishes mine. And any of the benefits I may get from my marriage, such as health insurance, clear inheritance of property, lower taxes and so forth, do not reduce the availability of those benefits for you.

And if you can’t allow that there is plenty of God to go around, then the god you believe in is not as great as you claim. Why does it not make sense that a truly universal and all-powerful deity would speak to different groups of people in the ways that they will best understand? Isn’t that part of why you now accept religious texts that are written in English rather than learning to read them in Aramaic or Greek?

America has become a culture filled with people who don’t want to share, don’t play well with others, and act out, throwing a tantrum whenever they don’t get their way.

And that is really what the rise of Donald Trump has given voice to.

And it is a cultural trait that affects us all, because virtually all of our most important cultural traditions reinforce it. Ask yourself if, in fact, you have to actively decide, against your instincts, to reach out to people you’ve been taught to fear, to show compassion to people who make you uncomfortable, perhaps even disgust you. Ask yourself if, in fact, you have an inventory of things that you are protective of and hesitate to share. Be honest. And if you are the normative group of the culture, by which I mean white Christian heterosexual men, then do you not find yourself having to think about the things you do that challenge the norms and privileges associated with that?

This is why we all need allies. The truth is that we are all in this together. And we will either make it work together or destroy it together.

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What Will We Do Tomorrow?

In PeaceAble, Politics on November 8, 2016 at 10:06 am

It’s election day in America. Now it begins.

What’s that you say? You thought this was the end of the election? Well every ending is also a beginning, and in America elections are always the end of one cycle of governance and the beginning of a new one.

It’s important to remember, also, that what happens on election day is in many ways less important than what starts to happen on the day after.

I am both hopeful and confident that Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States. Some of you reading this are hoping she will not. One of these hopes will be fulfilled tonight. So what will you do tomorrow.

Consider this: after the U.S. won our revolutionary war against England we had a major advantage in getting our new democracy to work the way the founders wanted it to. The people we defeated left. We didn’t have to figure out how to include the royalists and British sympathizers into our new republic. Anyone who didn’t want to be part of this country could simply go home to England.

But we nevertheless set up a system of government that would require us be inclusive of dissent. And to agree both that the people whom we do not elect would step aside and become the loyal opposition to those we do.

We are in danger of losing that. And if we do, we are in real trouble.

Too many people in this election cycle are talking about running away if their candidate loses, or even more frighteningly, taking up arms and preparing for revolution.

The first idea is just silly, really. First of all, it’s not all that easy to emigrate. It’s more complicated than just saying you’ve decided to be Swiss now. Other countries have the same kinds of requirements for citizenship that we have. It can be time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes unsuccessful. More importantly, politics around the world this year have shown us that there is no democratic country in the world where you can escape the need every once in a while to confront politics that dismay or even frighten you. There is no democracy in which you will not have to sometimes learn how to live with a government whose philosophy and policies you despise.

That’s how democracy works. Karl Rove once spoke of establishing a permanent Republican majority. He couldn’t do it. A few Democrats have suggested that Donald Trump’s candidacy might give them the opportunity to establish a permanent Democratic majority. I sincerely hope that they are wrong. I even hope that we can shake off the idea that an either/or Democratic/Republican majority is the only possibility.

The second idea is dangerous. Revolutions make enemies of us all. It has been 150 years since the Civil War and we still haven’t figured out how to deal with the people who lost and integrate them fully into the national identity. All movements, including the Neo-Nazis, the “Patriot Militias,” the Tea Party, the Black Lives matter movement and its often insensitive imitators, the Occupy movement, and the protesters at Black Rock are motivated by a desire to be heard above the noise, to have their needs and grievances addressed. They feel disenfranchised, marginalized and oppressed. They need to be heard.

That doesn’t mean that the country needs to give them everything they say they need, or even anything they need, depending on what they are asking for. But we have to include them, we have to validate their existence even if we need to vigorously oppose their ideas.

There are people I know who are planning to vote for Donald Trump. These are good people. Their votes are sometimes based on fear or anger or ignorance; sometimes their vote is based on one or two issues of importance to them, local issues, even personal issues, personal experiences. Often they simply have a different understanding than mine, a different moral compass; they are coming from a different place. I can both disagree with them and respect their choices.

I need to do that or I risk forgetting something important about a democracy: they aren’t going away, and sometimes they will win. And if they do win, I will want to be respected and included and listened to.

Democracies all over the world have elected demagogues and dictators who refused to give up power. Democracies have succumbed to revolutions or been undermined by insurgencies by those who have lost at the voting booth. It rarely ends well. It is hard enough to bring people together after an election in which everybody is invested in making it work. When we lose that, when we stop trusting the agreements that are inherent in our Constitution, we risk our democracy, our culture, our national identity, and our safety.

I am confident, as I said, that we will be looking at a President Hillary Clinton tomorrow, so let me address those who will vote for her. Use this as an opportunity to look inward. You believe, perhaps, that the Trump campaign has validated LGBTQ bigotry, sexism, xenophobia, jingoistic nationalism, racism, religious intolerance, and extremism of all kinds: and you are probably right. But please take time now to look inward. These are aspects of our culture that have infected us all. They are both symptom and cause. How have you worked to mitigate or eliminate their influence on your own life? How can you begin to work now to understand the fears and injuries that keep them in place for others. How can we address them in ways that recognize and validate those fears and injuries without validating the bigotry, or participating in the violence?

There is clearly a lot of work to be done in this country to move our culture away from the entrenched privilege of wealth, whiteness, and the masculine; there is a need to work toward the elimination of all kinds of bigotry and toward a diverse and vibrant and just society. None of that will be fully accomplished in the next four years or the next eight. It won’t proceed uninterrupted or unchallenged. There are powerful forces arrayed against it. But unless we recognize the need to engage with, include, try to understand, and address the needs of all our citizens, even the ones whose ideas we find hateful, it won’t happen at all.

If we want to succeed, we need to lead. If we want things to change we have start with ourselves, if we want to end the divisiveness we need to stop dividing. If we want elections that aren’t predicated on hate, anger, fear-mongering, misinformation and disinformation, gossip and innuendo, then we have to stop buying into them.

In a democracy, voting isn’t the end, it’s the beginning. It’s not just whether you voted or how you voted, it’s what you do after the voting is over that really counts.

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