Friday, June 24, 2005
(8:31 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Afternoon Confessional
I confess that my unemployment is over for now and seems poised to be over for at least the rest of the summer. I've gone from trying and failing to get another student loan to probably being in a position to retire a pretty significant chunk of my credit card debt this summer. Plus, I'm working from home. So basically, I'm looking at fewer panics and breakdowns for the rest of the summer, which is good for everyone.
I confess that I don't know what "controversial" means anymore. Does it refer to something where, if you say it, obnoxious right-wing hacks will flock to it like maggots to the rotting corpse of constitutional government? Does it mean anything that challenges the status quo from a leftward direction? And why does it seem to be the designator for things that should not be uttered in polite company (for instance, on the pages of the New York Times)?
I confess that I don't know if it's even possible to be "subversive" anymore. All the possibilities for subversion seem to be taken up in advance, and they're always attached to issues other than economics -- unless we count "home economics." You know what would be really subversive? Admitting that homeless people exist. That would be pretty fucking subversive. Or it would be subversive to call people racist when they don't want to drive through a "bad neighborhood" in Chicago or when they comment that it's a bad idea to get off at a certan El stop. (Just to get a feel for what makes a "bad neighborhood" -- I've seen polling data wherein even black people themselves regard the mere presence of black people in a neighborhood as a sign of its "badness," so deeply rooted are our racial stereotypes.) So admitting that racism still exists, and then holding oneself and one's friends accountable for its manifestations (rather than, say, the Republicans, as though being a devout liberal means you can't be racist by definition), would be subversive in my opinion. But no one talks about this stuff, ever. Can you guys think of a single blog (including this one) that makes more than passing glances at homelessness or racism (excluding accusations that Republicans are racist)? I can't. Not one of the mainstream blogs on the supposed left of the blogosphere talks about that stuff, ever. I say, shame on all of us.
I confess that it is shameful that I took Spanish for four years, was a brilliant student, still remember most of it, and feel really intimidated to so much as try to speak Spanish to the people who live in my actual neighborhood. When I go to the Mexican bakery, which is increasingly often, the transaction usually proceeds in silence. I do know enough Spanish to buy a donut, or a torta, or to say thank you to the clerk at the grocery store. I just don't want to look like an idiot or like I'm trying to be what I'm not -- or, since we're in a confessional mood, maybe I'm a fucking snob who thinks that Spanish is the language of poor laborers and I really don't want to make an effort to speak it, because I've got more important languages to learn.
I confess that when I hear these liberals critiquing evangelical Christians, or critiquing Republicanism, or critiquing narrow-minded conservatism, I think -- Who are you, that you know about this? Didn't you grow up in New York, or Philadelphia, or California? When have you ever met these people? What do you know about them aside from what you read in the occasional anthropological piece in The New Yorker? And all your psychologizing of these people ("They don't like uncertainty") -- what do you know? Seriously, what do you know, about any of this stuff? Nothing, absolutely nothing. But you pretend that you know more about Christianity than any Christian possibly ever could. And you psychologize and psychologize and psychologize until someone's feeling of sexual repression caused the Iraq War. And if anyone comes out of that evangelical scene with a view other than "religion is evil" or "the true Christianity is identical with mainstream liberal ideals," then you don't have anything to say to that person.
The entire public sphere of this country is determined by the right, and by the right's identification of the "liberal" as its abject other -- and I mean the entire public sphere, including the "liberal" one. All the time, we "admit" that whatever the right is doing "works," and then try to copy it -- the surest example that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. There are differences between the liberals and the conservatives, the Democrats and the Republicans, but they're relatively small and growing smaller. The Democrats seem obsessed with creating a Coke vs. Pepsi politics in this country, because they're trying to be nice, because they're trying to play fair, because they're trying not to be controversial, because they're observing the rules that you just can't talk about class or homelessness or racism or the role of the public sphere or why maybe taxation isn't evil in principle or why maybe the wealthy and the corporations don't need help from the government -- all of that is out of bounds, and Democrats are really good at playing by the rules and playing with the hand they're dealt, and it's going to be the death of all of us.
So that is what I confess today.
