Labels are for Pickle Jars
Well that wasn’t bad at all. Quite fun in fact. And I wasn’t even awake all night.
I did love the comment ‘You must have pissed yourselves laughing, you two, while you were working on this.’ So exactly right. That’s pretty much all we ever do, really.
Now, enough of that; on to more impersonal subjects. I was listening to the World Service on the radio this morning or rather in the middle of the night, and one repeated story was of the Los Angeles mayoral election. It was extraordinary – all the reports said was that the apparent winner (now the winner) was a Hispanic, and the first Hispanic to be mayor of LA in X number of years – and variations on that theme. Period. Not one thing else. Nothing about – you know – his politics? His policies? Substance? What he plans to do? Just pure unadulterated perfectly vacuous demographics. It was both surprising and, frankly, disgusting. (I’m not blaming the BBC particularly; I’m sure other coverage was similar. I’m blaming the mindset, or the fashion, or whatever this is.) The Beeb has an article that does exactly the same thing. Hispanic blah blah Latino blah blah demographics blah blah. Um – hello? What party is he? Does he have any politics at all or is he just a mannequin with an ethnic label?
It’s exactly like what Jeremy Paxman said to Galloway – are you proud of defeating the only black woman blah blah blah. As if that were the whole point of Oona King! Or anyone! I realize where this stuff comes from, and I’m not free of it myself. I admit it, I’m pleased – even as George Bush is pleased, alas – that we have a black woman Secretary of State. I was pleased about the Attorney General in the Clinton administration. And so on. But – but just because I have the silliness too doesn’t mean it’s not silliness. And when it takes over to such an extent that it’s all that’s mentioned then something is off.
Oona King said as much on ‘Today’ a few days after the election. She said that was the one thing she agreed with Galloway on: that Paxman’s question was absurd.
Communalism is not a brilliant idea, and it would be nice if people would start to catch on to that. Here’s Todd Gitlin on the subject, from The Twilight of Common Dreams:
The Enlightenment erected great structures of thought but also manufactured the acid to dissolve them. It was self-reinforcing and self-devouring. It was a philosophy for leaving home, not least one’s ideological home, wherever that was. To hate absolutism was also to hate the absolutist claims of one’s nation, tribe, family. For precisely that reason, the Enlightenment is not to be disposed of with a wave of the moment’s identity cards.
He goes on to describe Richard Rorty as claiming that people act in the name of their particular tribes, and that when they act altruistically they usually give parochial reasons for doing so – that the rescued Jew was a fellow Milanese or a fellow bocce player or the like. He then cites our friend Norm to the contrary.
But the political theorist Norman Geras examined some eighty accounts of Gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust. Only one failed to mention universal moral obligations.
It can be a mistake to overestimate human goodness and altruism and the like, but it’s also a mistake to underestimate it. Parochialism and communalism are underestimates.
Your “reasonable” comment is exactly the sort of thing I would expect from a white person. You can’t pretend to be unaware of the privilege encoded at the molecular level within your unpigmented skin. Alternately, I’m shocked that a woman, who is by nature a caring, nurturing being and innately given to holistic understanding, would resort to these totalizing Enlightenment Project categories when discoursing (or should I say hegemonizing?) on such matters. Shame on you!
Naughty, Karl!
It is causing me to laugh without being entirely able to stop, however.
Er, the surname, Irigaray-Halasz… is that your married name or did you have a parent from each side? Might be useful to know, for whenever I next run into a shrink.
Why, I married my parents on each side, Stewart. Tell that to your shrink.
Thanks for the background, John. But that’s exactly what was missing from many of the shallow fluffy news reports about the LA mayoral election. And that’s exactly what Ophelia was complaining about: the shallow fluffy media coverage of the LA mayoral election.
P.S. John, don’t think that Hispanics/Latinos make up some monolithic voting bloc. Remember that about 40% of H/L voters voted for Bush in 2004. Suburban H/L’s (and there are a lot more of those than you seem to think) tend to vote a lot more conservatively than urban H/L’s. Much more complicated than the black voting blocs.
I suppose it all comes down to what one notices. That splinter in one’s eye can cause one to look several different ways at things, not all of which are directed at the motes in others’ eyes. But political good news is so rare in the U.S.A. nowadays, and the gathering storm-clouds so ominous, that looking for motes would seem the least of priorities and concerns. Who cares what people in London think about the matter, though, rumor has it, that their media is a good deal less fluffy than ours? (By the way, didja watch “Gorgeous George” stick it to “Norm” Coleman?) But thanks for re-enforcing the party-line, Karl, since it is of the utmost importance that we all think self-identical thoughts.
“I suppose it all comes down to what one notices.”
Indeed, John. And apparently you haven’t noticed that Ophelia’s project is to promote a return to Enlightenment values on the left and pour scorn on things like identity politics. (Or perhaps you have noticed but hope nevertheless to save Ophelia from her own bad ideas through your obsessive-compulsive posting. Don’t give up, me boyo. One day you’ll win her over. You’ll see.)
“But thanks for re-enforcing the party-line, Karl…”
That’s what I’m here for: to be Ophelia’s bulldog.
Karl:
1) “Hispanics” is an Anglo category; actually, they are an ethnically and historically diverse group. But perhaps you were just lamenting the relative paucity of Afro-American suburbanites.
2) “Bulldog” is hardly a flattering metaphor, all round, but why do I feel like the mailman? There is no effort on my part to “win over”, rather than to introduce complications and question presuppositions. Thanks for the amateur psychoanalysis though, even if such a notion is strictly taboo at this site. (True story: I awoke from a dream a few days back, in which I was being f*cked from behind by an elephant. There was no penetration and it was surprisingly affectless, but I just ended up being soaked. I was apparently at some sort of county fair/shopping mall and scheduled to ride the elephant in a race, when the bull passed before a rodeo pen containing a cow, and I was grabbed up by the trunk. Now, that’s worth spending 150 bucks to anal-ize, except for the logarithmic or exponential or some-such curve that applies.)
3) So B&W is dedicated to the renewal of Enlightenment “values”? (Why bother, since we’re all just computational mechanisms programmed by genes?) I always thought, silly me, that the self-critical moment of Enlightenment was what is worth conserving, in terms of the “definition” of rationality, however “elitist” that might be. And, unregenerate atheist though I am, I mistook such a notion as having something to do with a legacy of “Judeo-Christian values”, which are currently and rampantly being mis-applied. But “Enlightenment values”, em… how can I say this politely, have “evolved”, such that there is no singular line of such “values”. After all, even Jacques Derrida, assuming “Jacques” was his given name, proclaimed himself a partisan of the “Enlightenment project”, however much that might provoke coughing, spasms of coughing. But really, OB, has been trying to shake me for about a year now. If she were really smart, more smart than she thinks, then she would use her formidable internet skills, infinitely greater than mine, to recommend sites of serious political/philosophical/sociological/scientific interest, other than this one. But, as it is, I’m fate to disrupt this circle jerk of athiests, like a cult of Wiggans.
John – “But, as it is, I’m fate to disrupt this circle jerk of athiests, like a cult of Wiggans”
– for a year ?! Bud, really, why not start your own thing, and spare these people the mosquito-like droning ? Do you not, e.g. – work – for a living ? Are you fabulously wealthy, and yet, unable to go outside ? Or are you indeed fitfully ‘posting’ from a tent in an Adirondack Summer Camp ? You are so knowledgable – in an Ivy way – and certainly have the smug approach. A Neocon ? So curious… no really… zzz, zzzz etc
…assuming “Jacques” was his given name…
I need some Enlightenment here. How does the possibility it wasn’t relate to the rest of the argument? According to the obits, it “evolved” (surely that wasn’t the relevance) from the given name “Jackie” (after child star Jackie Cooper, says one source; is there a particular screen role of Cooper’s that is the key to understanding this?).
“Not only is Villaraigosa a thoroughly good egg, former labor activist, multi-racial coalition-builder, every inch the completely progressive politician”
John, that’s exactly my point. The BBC didn’t say that, and it doesn’t just come with the territory, after all. ‘Hispanic’ can, for instance, include intensely reactionary Miami Cubans, so just saying ‘Hispanic’ and nothing else at all is unhelpful and uninformative as well as, frankly, kind of insulting and patronizing and belittling and, not to put too fine a point on it, stupid.
I focus on the World Service because 1. it’s what I heard and 2. it’s heard by quite a few people, around the, you know, world, so it does matter.
By the way – my attention was belatedly snagged by this –
“I always thought, silly me, that the self-critical moment of Enlightenment was what is worth conserving, in terms of the “definition” of rationality, however “elitist” that might be.”
Did you read the Gitlin quotation? Did you not understand it? The bit about acid? The bit about self-devouring? So – don’t teach your granny to suck eggs, as the saying goes.