I have not yet openly defied liberalism, but I have been objective and fair, so by now the whole room knows there’s something wrong with me.
Oy. The kids are on Spring Break, but am I? Nooooo. They’re young, so I don’t expect them to fully grasp the concept of respecting my need to get some schoolwork done. Still, I have only myself to blame for letting them talk me into picking up the keg.
It is an interesting time at school, as things develop in my sole on-campus class. The two online classes are largely a matter of reading things and doing assignments, dismembered and ethereal, with a very small amount of chat-room type discussion. “Interesting take on Robespierre’s justification for terror.” “The American Revolution was successful because it’s goals were relatively simple, the colonies were already practiced in self-governance, and Donald Trump is a racist asshole.”
Hang on…
The virtue signaling is intense. Very few people – and I speak primarily of my on-campus English class – very few people pass up the opportunity for announcing their Trump hate. It’s the unsecret handshake of the accepted classes. We were given a series of campaign speech videos to watch and analyze in terms of nationalism. Trump was one of them, and I had a hard time deciding whether I should choose it. It’s a near guarantee that I would be the only voice in the room capable of assessing his speech with any honesty and clarity of judgment, but in the end I foresaw myself growing weary of saying “it’s not a defense, it’s an analysis.” There are 3 or 4 people who chose his speech, and I can’t wait to read all the hate-that-is-not-hate-because-I-can’t-hate that comes from it. Diversity.
I have not yet openly defied liberalism, but I have been objective and fair, so by now the whole room knows there’s something wrong with me. I have pointed out where the merit exists in a Trump statement, and also where racism does not exist in a Trump statement. But what gets missed is what I said above: to this audience there is no such thing as analysis, there is only support or condemnation. So I’m sure many of them have me pegged as a Trump vote. But if somehow they’ve maintained intellectual honesty to this point, yesterday may have been all the confirmation they need to throw it away. Because as a Bernie-worship session tailed off, I actually had to say out loud, and without humor:
“I do. I care very much what happens to white males.” There were a couple of chuckles, but mostly the room felt like a passel of quivering electrons stacked up behind an open switch. “The old white guy in front is gonna flip that switch, isn’t he?” I am, and it’s gonna get bright in there. It is without a single jot of facetiousness that I say that I don’t think many of the people in the room had ever had that thought occur to them.
Q: “What about the white males?”
A: “Black Lives Matter.”
Q: “What about the white males?”
A: “Not all Muslims are terrorists.”
Q: “What about the white males?”
A: “Seventy cents for every dollar.”
Q: “What about the white males?”
A: “Voter ID laws.”
Q: “What about the white males?”
A: “Clump of cells.”
Q: “What about the white males?”
A: “Police brutality.”
I digress, but validly. No matter what evil you can identify or fabricate in today’s culture and society, the only guilty party is the white male. The insignificance of the fate of any number of white males, from one to all of us, is a simple given. The most begged question there ever was, the answer decided upon and tucked away, never to be fussed over again: It. Doesn’t. Matter.
Well, change doesn’t happen overnight, as they say, so I’m not rolling into class every day loaded for bear. That’s not a helpful strategy. I work the slow propaganda of virtue and reason, and will be doing a small bit of gauntlet throwing when I turn in today’s discussion post with this level-headed analysis:
Bernie Sanders does considerable work reinforcing the imaginary, immaterial, and paradoxical nature of Anderson’s nationalism. Most notably its “political power” vs its “philosophical poverty.” His speech is an exercising of the imaginary bonds between a selected and differentiated portion of the nation, a stirring of their emotional motivations in order to increase their sovereignty over the unreconciled bourgeoisie. Connections will be made, votes will be had, and politics will have their power, but all in the philosophical vacuum left behind by almost exclusively divisive rhetoric.
I have a fair read on my teacher, I think, so I’m pretty sure there is no danger of me being kicked out of class just yet.
Andy Havens 