The Wily Filipino

Unconstructive Dialogue.

(Man. I'm going to get into trouble for this. Some prospective editor or person on a grant review board will google my name and find this. But I won't edit it: consider it the work of someone very pissed off, and who should know better -- we anthropologists, after all, have to be a little more... nuanced in our analysis, shall we say, and this is fairly off-the-cuff. But at least I've removed most of the expletives.)

Maybe the problem is that class is indeed dead -- moribund in terms of an organizing principle, as a framework for understanding the social world around you. Perhaps it has to do with the overwhelming, unquestioned victory of the capitalist system and the similarly unquestioned inequalities it perpertuates. To successfully persuade people to vote for tax breaks for billionaires, as the Republican Party did, implies a couple of things: that people willingly accept their lot as economic destiny, or that they cling stubbornly to a trickle-down theory from heaven. Or that Cheney's profits from Halliburton floats all boats somehow. Or that the immense power of the credit card to function as surrogate domestic partner renders one's class status insignificant.

In contrast, gender and racial difference is perhaps a lot more stunning in its clarity in people's everyday lives. I teach Gerald Berreman's essay on caste, class and race every semester and that's a lot easier to understand. But in general I don't think the American middle class can see themselves as belonging to a mobilizable group with a common cause -- perhaps the middle class exists simply because they are neither dirt poor nor filthy rich. What most concretely distinguishes classes from one another isn't the amount of labor or who controls the means of production, but consumption. And since credit theoretically allows the middle class to consume their way "into the elite" (though of course the levels of distinction will always be maintained), class becomes irrelevant.

But class, I suppose, wasn't the point. We're told anyway that Bush supporters didn't come out to vote because of the economy, or because of the war, but because of "moral values." (As if the war on Iraq wasn't a moral issue.)

This, at least for me, is what has made mourning such a protracted process. We are told that Kerry was never really an advocate for gays in the first place; we are told that the left neglected the liberal Christians among them; we are told that Democrats should start thinking about faith-based initiatives now; we are told that Gavin Newsom single-handedly created a moral panic and practically handed the presidency to Bush. These should feed into tactical considerations, sure, but please, please don't call what happened in San Francisco "too much too fast" -- about time, I'd say.

Similarly, we are told that mourning is over, and it is time to get to work. Roll up your sleeves, they say. Or, worst of all, repeated ad nauseam: "Don't mourn; organize."

But it hasn't gotten any easier. I'd roll up my sleeves, sure... in order to take a swing at some Republican twit. (Those who know me personally would know this is a little ludicrous, as I'm a total physical coward.)* Don't mourn -- confront some Republican jerk, I'd say. Make the Christians ashamed of what they did.

We are told that we should not be angry, that this is a time for healing, that this is a time for building bridges. But these truisms are uttered without recognizing a simple, brutal truth: they hate us. They hate what we've "done to their country." They hate how feminists have contributed to the degeneracy of the American way of life -- after all, the reason 9/11 happened, according to Jerry Falwell. They "hate the sin but love the sinner," in all the convoluted doublespeak that entails.

The problem is that it really has been a war for quite some time now, with battle lines drawn between God and Satan, and the Christian right took this very seriously. I'm afraid the Democrats didn't. Ellen DeGeneres somehow constituted a greater threat to the American way of life, which says everything about the depths of homophobia in American society.

The 1100 American soldiers-and-counting killed in Iraq died because of Bush's lies, and all these morons can do... Well, god knows what they're thinking. They probably think the military occupation of Iraq means "freedom." Or that Saddam Hussein flew the planes into the WTC himself.

You're probably thinking, well, this is the result of a horribly misinformed electorate -- "dumb," as the Daily Mirror famously wrote -- and we should do what we can to educate them. You're right, but misinformation, in many ways, is the least of our worries.

The fact that these Bush-ites would rather piss and moan about stem cells than the deaths of 100,000 Iraqi men, women and children means one simple thing: that they are heartless racists. The only logical explanation for the resolution of this cognitive dissonance is that Iraqi lives simply don't count as being human.

No, really: go confront one and ask them if Jesus would go and bomb little Iraqi kids. For people whose mantra is "What Would Jesus Do?", this hypocrisy is staggering. (See, that's the worst part: they still think that they, and their President, are blessed by God, that they're compassionate, freedom-loving people, that they're following Jesus's example. I must have missed the part in the New Testament where Jesus straps on an AK-47 and blows some Iraqi kid's head to bits. Which epistle was that now?)

You're probably thinking: doesn't this just smack of the kind of intellectual snobbery supposed to be dished out by the liberal elite? Whatever -- but remember: it was anti-intellectualism that led Bush to be elected.

You're also probably thinking: isn't this just stooping down to their level? That I demean myself by participating in hateful name-calling? Whatever -- but remember: they hate you already.

This brings me to my point: right now, I cannot build bridges with these people. Plans are being made to create a "culture of life" (i.e., to ban abortion) as we speak, just as Falluja, where Satan lives**, is being bombed all to hell -- laid to waste by a Christian god.

I do not see the hope for any "constructive dialogue" for people who think that unwed mothers can't become teachers, for people that think they would go to hell if they vote for Kerry, for people who think that it is somehow acceptable to kill people because their god is different from theirs. They obviously cannot be reached. They are obviously beyond any reasoning. Keep me away from them. I'll bite my tongue if I have to, but if they get me started...

A vote for Bush was a vote for empire, racism, homophobia, misogyny and hatred. Really -- you'll feel a little better just admitting that. And then, perhaps, you can begin to move on.

*DISCLAIMER (and I write this in capital letters): as should be clear, I would never advocate physical violence in any form, and I would be the first person to run away from a fight.

**In case this part wasn't clear, scroll to the bottom of the article and read the quotation from a Lieutenant-Colonel Gareth Brandl, the commander of the 1st battalion of the 8th Marine Regiment:

But the enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He lives in Falluja. And we're going to destroy him.

Posted by the wily filipino at November 8, 2004 12:34 AM