Keep your head up.

I haven't had time to contribute as much as I'd like, and I'd ideally like to be posting something everyday. But in keeping with a theme running through my May 19 and May 27 posts, it's worth noting that Tupac Shakur would be forty years old were he alive today.

Tupac! Would be forty!

Time does fly, doesn't it?

I can't help but wonder what the cultural and even political landscape would be like had he survived the stupidity that got him killed. Maybe had he lived the world wouldn't have learned its lesson, so it was inevitable that he had to be sacrificed, Jesus-like, for the rest of us to grow up. I personally hate the everything-happens-for-a-reason, let's-reduce-a-person's-death-to-our-own-life-lesson approach, but I suppose it's one way to make sense of senselessness.

It's hard not to dreamily guess at what a Tupac would have to say about these times in which we live. The man was so full of contradictions. For every Hit 'em Up there was a Keep Ya Head Up. For every spittle-hurling vitriolic battle interview a thoughtful expression of compassion and complexity.

I guess those of a mind to believe that there's a point to all this say things like "Everything happens for a reason" to avoid joining the rest of us who can do nothing but shake our heads and sigh.

Fuck the world indeed.

Gil Scott-Heron. April 1, 1949 - May 27, 2011.

Gil Scott-Heron died today. I don't know yet what was the cause of death, but that's another truth-teller in the grave too soon. At sixty-two years of age, forty-one years after the release of Small Talk at 125th and Lenox and forty after the groundbreaking Pieces of a Man, his words are still all too relevant and--as a nation in general--we have yet to listen. The Godfather of Rap, an unflinchingly prophetic critic of national entropy and persistent injustice, tragicomic to the bitter end. Listen to Gil Scott-Heron. I mean, listen to Gil Scott-Heron. May he rest in peace.

Trump, Black King, Poker Face: The Anatomy of A Political Takedown.

Much has been made in recent days of President Obama’s roast of Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and rightfully so. It was brutally funny. Or was it hilariously brutal? In any case, it’s safe to say that anyone still supporting The Donald’s potential bid for the White House does so quietly and with some embarrassment. As host Seth Meyers noted at the dinner, Trump’s candidacy was—or is it still?—a joke. And although I’m not usually a vindictive person who relishes the humiliation of another human being, I can’t honestly say that I was anything but delighted to watch the smile fade from Trump’s face as he watched his grandiose political aspirations slip away in a hail of roaring laughter at his bombastic stupidity.

Then on Sunday an extra dimension was retroactively added to that verbal trouncing, as YouTubers everywhere returned to the video to re-watch it in light of current events. What one sees in that clip pre-May 1 is an intelligent politician delivering razor sharp punch lines with the cool assurance of a skilled orator holding the higher moral ground in an absurd situation. Post-May 1, it’s an intelligent politician delivering razor sharp punch lines with the cool assurance of a head-of-state staring down his detractors after secretly giving the order to eliminate the nation’s—perhaps the world’s—most vilified foe. Bloggers especially latched onto one clip of Obama laughing heartily at a quip by Seth Meyers about Osama bin Laden’s elusiveness, and the president was roundly applauded for maintaining his “poker face.” I’m not sure what else he was supposed to do, but it was really intriguing to watch amid the collective national fist-pumping over bin Laden’s death.

But why is this so satisfying to me? Am I relishing the fact that our awesome president finally has some points on the Republicans? Am I just really super excited that a terrible dude trained in the midst of a terrible idea died a terrible death during a terrible war, thus proving how fucking awesome America is and allowing me to finally be proud to be an Obama supporter because all this time I’ve felt effete and weak by not being able to express how badass a patriotic red-blooded American I can really be?

Well, no.

It can’t be a vindication of Obama’s policies that makes me smile, because I’ve been generally pretty dissatisfied—if not disgusted outright—with those. Corporate bailouts, our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gitmo, Race to the Top, the severely compromised health care plan, and a host of other letdowns have left me pretty disillusioned with an administration whose campaign stickers I still have by the stack somewhere in my apartment.

And it’s not because Osama bin Laden’s dead. I mean, I’m glad that a planner of and inspiration to mass murder is off the grid, and sure I take some pleasure in the fact that the guy was capped on a non-Republican’s watch.  But the Democrats don’t have—will never have—clean hands either, and I’m not about to engage in all this bloodthirsty fist-pumping about how great violence and death are when they’re justified (quick side note about that: what the fuck are you doing, American liberals? Have you only opposed violent rhetoric and stupid jingoism up until now because it wasn’t your team carrying it out? ).

No, what turned my frown upside down was something different, something most Americans would (wrongly) consider a separate issue. What I’ve relished in viewing upon viewing of this smackdown is the complete disregard it shows for the “race card” taboo in American politics. Of course, it wasn’t (couldn’t) be framed that way explicitly, but it was there—it couldn’t not be there, focused as it was on the Birther issue. The Birther movement is a racist movement, regardless of whatever else they try to say and how gingerly the media tries to dance around that fact when they give it airtime. It’s not a coincidence that “Birther” is one letter away from “Bircher”—these are xenophobic nativists and nothing more. President Obama will never be an American to them, just as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were treated as buffoons—African-Americans are not Americans to these folks, and non-Americans are hardly even people.

But you can’t say that. To point that out would be to “play the race card.” Because the racists are not playing the race card, they’re being “patriots” and “realists,” they’re being vigilant about the Constitution or looking out for American jobs. So the rest of us are supposed to keep our mouths shut. We’re supposed to grind our teeth in silence at Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens, Jesse Helms’s hands, National Security PAC’s Willie Horton ad, John McCain’s Messiah commercials—but to point out the racist implications of each is going too far. That’s playing the “race card.”

So, to get this definition straight: playing on racial tensions and xenophobic fears, enacting racially discriminatory policies, employing racist rhetoric to appeal to a base of disgruntled sheeple is fair game. Pointing out these strategies and calling them for what they are: playing the race card.

It’s a clever metaphor, simultaneously implying a knockout quality and an unfair, forbidden advantage. So it’s both a trump card in the political game and a form of cheating. It’s as though, despite its power to win everything, it’s actually not part of this game, making it shameful to put it on the table. Of course, that’s bullshit. First, it’s incredibly rare that the perceived “race card” actually wins anything. Second, race is always already on the table—it’s only when we identify it that it becomes an issue.

What’s most troubling about this for me is that liberals play along. I think some of this is pure political pragmatism, but there’s something else going on: liberals (actually neoliberals, but let’s call them what they call themselves) relish their little victories. We really wanted to think we’d fixed racism when Obama won the election. We really like the idea that Brown v. Board of Education and the Voters’ Rights Act healed all those old wounds. Explain to a room full of white liberals how crack proliferated in American ghettos, why incarceration rates reveal a new form of Jim Crow, and watch how many squirm uncomfortably if not challenge you outright.

So the race card doesn’t get played not because it’s politically inexpedient. It’s politically inexpedient because half of the “left” in America is drinking the right’s Kool-Aid and allowing itself to be shamed into submission.

And that’s what made me love Obama’s roast of Donald Trump. He didn’t pull any punches and he didn’t leave the race card off the table. He slammed Trump, he mocked Michelle Bachmann for being an abject liar, he slammed FOX News for its idiotic coverage of every sensational tidbit they could scavenge from right wing hacks, and he didn’t let up until he’d essentially destroyed their ability to ever speak again on this issue. It was more than a series of political jokes, it was a rhetorical submission hold.

My reading is certainly open to disagreement, but I would direct detractors’ attention to the Lion King bit and ask that you consider all the implications of calling that the president’s birth video. In one crushing blow (and using a beloved Disney clip!) Obama brutally mocks rumors of his African birth, criticisms of his campaign’s messianic undertones, and questions of his leadership. It’s cocksure, brazen, and—to me, at least—glorious.

As far as I’m concerned, all of this turns on race—John McCain’s “The One” ad, which mocked Obama’s “messiah” status, was little more than a thinly veiled critique of an “uppity” negro. Questions of the president’s leadership are certainly merited, but much of that discourse has adopted the assumptions and rhetorical strategies of the Birther movement, which is pure xenophobia, and a huge segment of our population ate it up.

It’s that segment of the population that Obama’s speech really nailed. If anything, Trump was cancelled out and shown to be a political zero, FOX and Bachmann were called out for the stupidity we knew about all along—those are easy. But without Trump or Bachmann the idiots in our nation will carry on. They’ll find new leaders to spit vitriol and preach hate in the name of Christian love, so who cares about Trump and Bachmann.

What this speech really accomplished was a takedown of a form of political discourse, exposing a powerful ideology as nothing but stupid bigotry. Obama stood before the nation, looked half of it in the eye, and issued a smiling but serious “Fuck you.”

Does that mean they’ll go away? No. But at least I know that, for all the other shit he does wrong, this president can take a stand in the culture wars and be on the right side of history. Whether he’ll continue to do that remains to be seen, but for about five minutes, as the Black King trumped the Trump with a race card, it felt pretty good.

Shit matters.

"See, I put it this way: for me, philosophy is fundamentally about our finite situation. We can define that in terms of--we're beings toward death. We're featherless, two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose bodies will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That's us. We're beings toward death. At the same time, we have desire, while we are organisms in space and time; and so it's desire in the face of death. And then of course you've got dogmatism, various attempts to hold onto certainty, various forms of idolatry. And you've got dialog in the face of dogmatism, and then of course structurally and institutionally you have domination and you have democracy. You have attempts of people trying to render accountable elites: kings, queens, suzerains, corporate elites, politicians--try to make these elites accountable to everyday people. So philosophy itself becomes a critical disposition of wrestling with desire in the face of death, wrestling with dialog in the face of dogmatism, and wrestling with democracy--trying to keep alive very fragile democratic experiments--in the face of structures of domination."

Cornel West, interviewed in the film Examined Life

Methuselah killed Social Security.

There's a lot going on in this article, much of which is unsettling despite its ultimate optimism: people are living longer and eating up resources without contributing to society; part of the proposed solution is to delay retirement age to account for increased life expectancy and combat ageism that keeps the old out of the workplace. Right enough, I think, except that one of the current issues making it difficult for young people to get work is that retirement-aged folks are staying in or returning to the workforce. But these are issues for people with more capacious brains than mine. What really got me was this:

"Of all the people in human history who ever reached the age of 65, half are alive now."

Shit.

How to say "fuck you" in Puritan

"Is this the Worst thy terrors then canst, why
Then should this grimace me terrify?
Why cam'st thou then so slowly? Mend thy pace.
Thy Slowness me detains from Christ's bright face.
Although thy terrors rise to th'highst degree,
I still am where I was. A Fig for thee."

- Edward Taylor, "A Fig for thee Oh! Death"

When nothing is everything.

Starting with a discussion of night and darkness, Emmanuel Levinas in “There is: Existence without Existents” gives us Being as a negative presence, not simply an absence but a phenomenon in itself—just as night is not merely the absence of day, but is itself a phenomenon with its own attributes and its own transformative power on the entities that still exist in space. And yet this is still inadequate, since it implies the necessity of entities (existents) for this being (the there is) to exist. In fact the there is—this Being of emptiness—is not an absence of entities, but something like a presence constituted by pure absence, and this pure absence comes to envelop everything, even if there is nothing to be enveloped.

[deep breath.]

In The Idol and the Distance Jean-Luc Marion gives a similar description, but in his version the disappearance occurs as a result of the all-consuming light of a transcendental noonday sun that blots out all shadows. Thus the subject-object distinction dissolves either in inky darkness or blinding light:

In the night, where we are riven to it, we are not dealing with anything. But this nothing is not that of pure nothingness. There is no longer this or that; there is not ‘something’. But this universal absence is in its turn a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence. (Levinas 30)

This unavoidable presence shows itself as far more than a mere nothingness by becoming an all-consuming, even sublime, “insecurity” and “horror”. It’s not just “nothing,” but takes on a material aspect—it actually is there (hence the there is).

It’s interesting that Levinas mentions this materiality as an overwhelming characteristic of Naturalism, since as I read it I had been thinking of his negative presence in terms of American Naturalism. Frank Norris’s McTeague, for example, is filled with descriptions of oppressive nothingness. It ends in Death Valley, a sort of ultimate negative space. Norris’s descriptions of the absolute silence and emptiness of Death Valley are reminiscent of Levinas’s characterization of the presence of there is in the darkness of night:

The last echo died away. The smoke vanished, the vast silence closed upon the passing echoes of the rifle as the ocean closes upon a ship’s wake. Nothing moved…League upon league the infinite reaches of dazzling white alkali laid themselves out like an immeasurable scroll unrolled from horizon to horizon; not a bush, not a twig relieved that horrible monotony. (Norris 423-25)

In Norris, this presence is the oppressive fear of death, the potentiality of dying against which the individual attempts to rebel or assert himself. But Levinas wants something more, and asks what exactly that thing is against which we rebel when we fear and attempt to escape death. It is one thing to fight for one’s life, but what is the entity which triggers that fear, and what is the entity against which one fights?

By exploring this sort of question, I think Levinas actually inches closer to Herman Melville’s legendary chapter from Moby Dick, “The Whiteness of the Whale”:

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? (Melville 165)

Melville gets at the heart of what Levinas discusses in his chapter on the there is, and the way in which it links back to—and supplements—Heidegger’s insights: the “rustling of the there is” is the horrific echo of infinite possibility. That is, where there is nothing there is also always the possibility of anything and everything. Death is included in this, but certain death in the form of a terminal illness doesn’t have the sublime power of an image of impending death by wandering through an open, empty desert. If Heidegger offers us the insight that possibility always precedes actuality, Levinas adds the observation that pure possibility is a terrifying emptiness (and vice versa):

…this silence, this tranquility, this void of sensations constitutes a mute, absolutely indeterminate menace. The indeterminateness constitutes its acuteness. There is no determined being, anything can count for anything else. (31)

And when “anything can count for anything else,” the subject disappears into his own inescapable uncertainty, drowns in the overbearing presence of this palpable nothing:

In horror a subject is stripped of his subjectivity, of his power to have private existence. The subject is depersonalized…It is a participation in the there is, in the there is which returns in the heart of every negation, in the there is that has ‘no exits’. It is, if we may say so, the impossibility of death, the universality of existence even in its annihilation. (Levinas 33)

This is not to say that fear of death is excluded, but that the certainty of death doesn’t close off this fear—it has no closure, it’s infinite. This is the “presence of absence,” the “density” of nothing, and the sense in which “being has no outlets.” (Levinas 35) It’s the crushing weight of an uncertain but predestined fate that hangs over the protagonists of Naturalist novels, or the sublime mystery evoked by the elusive white whale. Ultimate, absolute, and all-consuming, it’s also present in one of Melville’s great inspirations (and probably my favorite example of exactly the sort of imagery discussed here), Milton’s description of Hell:

A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all, but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed
With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed.
(italics mine; Paradise Lost, Bk. I, lines 60-68)

Thinking locally.

A seventeen year-old boy was shot and killed last week in north Artesia (also known by its gang territory eponym, "Chivas") riding his bike at 1 am under the 91 freeway overpass, a spot I've drunkenly stumbled through countless times on my way home from hotel parties. There's plenty of unsavory activity going on around there much of the time, but I've never actually had problems. Of course, it's rather obvious that I'm not in a gang. By all indications, this poor kid unfortunately had some gang associations even though he wasn't a member. He "looked like" a gangster, which is to say that he dressed the part. It seems he would probably have eventually outgrown that madness if he'd survived, but he rode his bike at the wrong time and was caught up in a rough spot when someone from somewhere else was on the prowl.

Just like that. Candles, crosses, flowers and metallic balloons in a morbid little bunch under the overpass, right under the spot where homeless people piss. A boy died there.

When we moved to Artesia (1988) a fifteen year-old was murdered in gang violence right around the corner from our house. Things like that happened pretty often for a few years, then it calmed down. Apparently it's picking up again (economic patterns neatly parallel the ebb and flow). Still, for the most part, Artesia's a really nice place to live. Even back when that fifteen year-old was shot, most parts of Artesia were perfectly safe to walk around in at night. They wouldn't usually bug you unless you were from another gang.

Yet to watch local news coverage right now is to think that Artesia is crawling with murderous thugs. North Artesia especially is a bloodbath. There's a subtext to every local TV station report that paints the people under and around the freeway as savages. This image really bothered a relative of mine, not for the sake of the north side but for the city's reputation as a whole. "They're making Artesia sound like some crazy, dangerous place," he complained. "Like it's Watts or something." I asked if it had ever occurred to him that maybe he only thinks of Watts that way because the news coverage of Watts has always been just like it is right now for Artesia. "Oh, well, yeah maybe," he replied, "but you know what I mean."

Yeah. I know what you mean. (...sigh...)