We were confronted by a disheveled white guy. He came over and sat down and started talking with us. He discovered that we both were professors and seemed interested in us being American, but only long enough to allow him to start off on a tirade about liberal Americans not getting the realities of the role of Communism in the ANC. He was getting increasingly riled up and increasingly incoherent. But he was name-dropping Stephen Ellis, the veteran scholar of African history and politics, and insisted that Ellis’ book would rip the roof off of the cover up of Communism in the ANC, and especially Nelson Mandela’s Communism.

The man, I later realized, was Rian Malan, the scion of the Apartheid elite who rose to fame for his apostasies against the legacy of white supremacy to which he was the rightful inheritor. His book, My Traitor’s Heart, was a bestseller, and branded Malan as a courageous figure who turned his back on a world in which he could have risen rapidly.

Yet in recent years, Malan, for reasons I cannot divine, has become increasingly obsessed with the idea that Communists deeply pervaded the ANC, and in particular Nelson Mandela. This is a peculiar obsession in no small part because it is not particularly accurate, and whatever accuracy there might be to the case is not especially compelling.

It is worth pointing out briefly the historical salience of rabid anticommunism in South Africa. Throughout the entirety of the apartheid era, the ruling National Party attributed nearly all opposition to its rigidly racist policies to an encroaching Communist menace. The Nats used absurd rhetoric and draconian policies not only to keep black nationalist opposition (such as the ANC, but also the Pan African Congress and other organizations) at bay, but also to prevent the United States and Great Britain, themselves besotted with anticommunist furor, from taking a stand against their white South African Cold War allies. This gambit was born of both cynicism and self-preservation. And it worked.

Earlier in the year, I was reminded of my unpleasant encounter with an aggressive, bombastic, boorish Malan when, as celebrations of Mandela’s life were still pouring in after his death, a voice emerged out of the wilderness of the overheated right wing bunkers. In a January 2014 PJ Media article, Ron Radosh, who has made his own lucrative career at the nexus of scholarship and journalism by finding Commies under every bed and in every faculty club, played up the Mandela-as-Communist trope. And naturally he invokes Rian Malan. Who invokes Stephen Ellis (whom Radosh also invokes).

Reading the piece brought me back to the conversation with Malan, and in both cases my thoughts were: There is not much there there. Radosh and Malan have created an echo chamber that is deeply reliant on Ellis’ scholarly imprimatur. It pretends that it is somehow revelatory that Communists and the ANC worked together even though that was never a secret. And crucially, it makes all sorts of arguments based on a shockingly thin evidentiary base. I’ve linked to the article above and won’t do much to rehash what Radosh has to say – it is the usual strident Red Baiting coupled with more than a little race baiting.

But let’s go straight to Ellis, the alleged source for this new Red Scare. First, in some of his writing Ellis has shown himself to be a bit of a fellow traveler with Radosh and Malan, but he is also undoubtedly a far more serious and prolific scholar. Ellis’s book, which was supposed to provide the big reveal that Malan warned me about in Melville, External Mission: The ANC in Exile 1960-1990, is presented as a trump card. However, it’s telling that Radosh and Malan don’t really cite the book. External Mission is a fine work of scholarship. But let’s just say that if it provides the foundation for the Mandela-as-Commie-radical meme, that foundation has a lot of cracks.

According to Radosh and Malan, Ellis purports to reveal that far from having dabbled in Communism, Mandela was instead a Party Member and a high-ranking one at that. His evidence is pretty shallow – a handful of interviews from people testifying to Mandela’s membership in the party decades after the fact are about the extent of it. Not a single document. Not a single testimony from the time. Not a whole lot at all. And he presents even less to indicate anything other than perfunctory involvement, even if, of course, Mandela had access to numerous higher-ups in the SACP hierarchy, given how much it was intertwined with the ANC’s leadership.

And yet, Radosh and Malan, so reliant upon Ellis to bolster their claims of Mandela as an untrustworthy Commie Radical, must not have read as far as pages 33 and 34, where Ellis writes, “Despite” [South African Communist Joe] “Slovo’s disappointment at the cooling of Mandela’s communist sympathies, it is evident that Mandela’s brief membership of the Party was motivated by pragmatism rather than ideological commitment, that his opinions on communism had a strongly Christian tint, and that his primary allegiance was to Africa.” In essence, it is tough to take seriously Radosh’s dismissal of the allegedly leftist claim that Mandela’s alliance with the SACP was brief, utilitarian, and subsumed to larger ideals in light of the fact that the man he cites as demolishing that allegedly leftist myth is pretty clear that Mandela’s alliance with the SACP was brief, utilitarian, and subsumed to larger ideals.

But if we even grant that there is a scintilla of an argument that Nelson Mandela was indeed more deeply involved than is commonly believed with Communism for a few months (at most) in the early 1960s, when a radical response to Apartheid seemed like just about the only sensible response– so o what? Why does it matter? What does it all mean now, and how does any of it have anything to do with who Mandela was and what he meant and what he accomplished?

Mandela had a brief alliance with Communism and clearly grew disenchanted; this is not only my interpretation, this is Stephen Ellis’ in the very book that Malan and Radosh use to try to build a Communist mountain out of a molehill of an alliance. However, this should not come as a surprise. Communists were, after all, right on the Apartheid question, which is to say the question that was at the heart of Mandela’s struggle, his existential struggle and his fight for freedom. And in South Africa, the various strands of Communism, even the most doctrinaire, yielded the class struggle to the struggle against white supremacy, though many hoped to see the two yoked together.

So many of those who opposed Mandela, the ANC, the anti-apartheid opposition especially in the fraught post-Soweto era, now want to point out Mandela’s communism. They were wrong then and now they are trying to validate where they stood as history played out by invoking the Communist bogeyman still lurking in the fever dreams and dark corners of a certain kind of conservative and neoconservative in the US, Great Britain, and even South Africa.

It is perhaps also worth noting that Mandela’s flirtation with Soviet Communism, with what amounted to an alliance of those who opposed National Party white supremacy, took place just a decade and a half after the United States, Great Britain and other allies – including, it must be noted, the white segregationist government of South Africa (an alliance that admittedly created divisions that sowed the seeds for the National Party takeover in 1948) – had allied with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. And the red baiters are usually the first to acknowledge Stalin as an apodictic form of evil. But why is it that FDR and Truman, Churchill and Atlee, and even Smuts were able to ally with Stalin to fight the “Good War,” but Mandela and Mbeki, Tambo and Sisulu, were not able to join with a particularly South African and decidedly non-Stalinist version of Communism for their own existential struggle in which they were on the side of right?

And it is not as if the pragmatic alliance with evil in World War II marks a particular exception in American history. The United States – Ron Radosh’s United States, the United States of Ronald Reagan – has forged myriad alliances that toss cold water on a whole lot of freedom-loving ideals, and oftentimes in the very name of combating the Communist evil they have allied with their own devils. One can imagine that justifying selling arms to Iranian jihadists in order to support nun-raping, child-murdering anti-Communists in Latin America, supporting the Mujahedeen in order to combat Soviet incursions into Afghanistan, supporting Saddam Hussein against that very same Iran, and support for Mobutu Sese Seku (just to name four) might give some Americans pause when it comes to condemning even the strangest bedfellows of others. Ron Radosh, alas, does not have a history of being particularly self-reflective as he plows forward with his moral verities.

Finally, if Mandela was a Communist, he was, in the words of the friend with whom I spent that evening in Melville, “The Worst Communist Ever.” It was Mandela’s government that set the New South Africa on the path of what some of its critics have loudly and often declared to be the path to neo-liberalism. Mandela’s South Africa has become many things. A Socialist paradise or Communist idyll is not among them.

Nelson Mandela may or may not have briefly been a Communist. But if he was, that membership was done long before he went to trial in 1964, spent 27 years in prison, negotiated with the National Party (alongside Joe Slovo, the Communist, who also was central in the CODESA negotiations), governed as a center-left pro-market neoliberal, and worked to reconcile a country torn apart because of an apartheid regime that the most ardently anti-Communist nations buttressed. That particular strain of anti-Communism was wrong and dangerous when it was applied to South Africa then. It is wrong, anachronistic, and frankly, just kind of sad now.

By Derek Charles Catsam | The post Red Baiting Mandela appeared first on The Public Sphere.

“Ask your doctor if medical advice from a television commercial is right for you.”
—Bumper sticker slogan ((www.northernsun.com))

At a the annual conference for the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality last year, I heard a researcher describe how the pharmaceutical industry “jukes the stats”—that is, crunches numbers creatively in order to persuade the public that their products actually accomplish their stated tasks.  This researcher, Dr. Duryea, offered a succinct finding: Antidepressant manufacturers go to great lengths to disguise the fact that people kill themselves during the “wash out” phase of antidepressants.  Once participants stopped taking certain antidepressants (and, in clinical trials, before they resumed taking them again), those taking the antidepressants had an increased risk of suicide compared to their pre-drug state.  Of course, since these users were not technically ingesting the drug during this “wash out” phase, the pharmaceutical industry convinced the FDA that antidepressants did not increase the risk of suicide—a creative interpretation with a potentially fatal cost to those who blindly take these drugs. ((Duryea, E. J. (2008, April). What every sexuality specialist should know about ‘sexual numeracy’: How we present quantitative information is important. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, Western Region, San Diego, CA.))

I bring up this anecdote because it is one of many in a long list of such problems that occur in the U.S. today surrounding the issue of “lifestyle drugs”—drugs one takes not just for a temporary cure to an ailment (in the way Penicillin kills bacterial infections), but rather, as a response to lifelong, forever ailments (e.g., depression, anxiety, high cholesterol, acid reflux, impotence, and so on).  As anyone who has watched television commercials in the last decade can imagine, the pharmaceutical industry expends enormous sums of money to encourage consumers to “ask their doctor” about a host of drugs, nearly all of which advertise “lifestyle” remedies.  Get erections that last for days!  No more burping up acid after eating mountains of salty, fatty, chemical-laden food!  Stop feeling anxious despite chronic sleeplessness and slaving away at your vacationless McJob!  And, like all advertising ploys—particularly ones where astronomical sums of money are expended—it works.  Not only do people in the U.S. tolerate direct-to-consumer advertising (note that, within the Western world, the U.S. is alone in such a practice), but we indeed do consume more and more lifestyle drugs each year, making us the most medicated, and pharmaceutically-profitable, society around.

So how do we explain this phenomenon?  What about the U.S. lends itself to this perfect synthesis of self-medication, corporate greed, and pharmaceutical horsepower?  I propose that to tackle such a question, we must consider three separate entities: first, the invention of sickness, whereby normal aspects of daily life get branded as illness, like inventing female Viagra because women may not always desire sex; second, our refusal to live with the most basic elements of the human condition, as evidenced by the multi-billion dollar antidepressant industry; and third, our nearly reckless disregard for common sense, as evidenced by a host of lifestyle drugs, particularly Viagra for men.  It is not just that those in the U.S. have been duped, or that the pharmaceutical industry wields uncanny powers, or that we largely cannot decipher the difference between self-generated needs and manufactured needs (all true); additionally, at its most basic level, people in the U.S. have embraced a new wave of pharmaceutical personality sculpting, ((This phrase was first used in Zita, J. (1998). Prozac feminism. Body talk: Philosophical Reflections on sex and gender. New York: Columbia University Press.)) a philosophy arguing that pharmaceuticals can compensate for our unfulfilled desires and needs.

Let’s begin with the case of female Viagra.  Six years ago, pharmaceutical efforts to repackage the success of Viagra into a female-friendly version began in earnest.  First, Pfizer attempted to replicate the powerhouse success of male Viagra with a simple goal: create physiological arousal in women, simulate lubrication and swelling responses, and (voila!) women would achieve orgasm in unprecedented numbers, thereby ending their relatively higher rates of “sexual dysfunction.”  Unfortunately, this did not come to pass as expected.  The big problem?  Women who became aroused physiologically still did not choose to initiate or submit to sex with their (male) partners.  Unlike male Viagra—where physiological arousal and desire for sex allegedly worked more in tandem—female Viagra successfully achieved physiological arousal but failed to generate mental arousal or motive for sex.  Women with aroused vaginas still said no.  This frustrated Pfizer to the point where, during one interview with the New York Times, researchers declared, “Although Viagra can indeed create the outward signs of arousal in many women, this seems to have little effect on a woman’s willingness, or desire, to have sex…Getting a woman to connect arousal and desire…requires exquisite timing on a man’s part and a fair amount of coaxing.  ‘What we need to do is find a pill for engendering the perception of intimacy.’” ((Harris, G. (2004, February 28). Pfizer gives up testing Viagra on women. The New York Times, C-1.))

Perhaps said in jest, this statement nevertheless perfectly illuminates the first of three problems that contribute to the age of pharmaceutical personality sculpting: illnesses are invented, often for profit, by industries that have a serious investment in making people believe they are sick when they are not.  In a for-profit healthcare industry where sickness is money, invented sickness makes even more money.  Case in point, a recent psychological study by Jan Shifren and her colleagues found that, though 43.1% of women reported feeling that they had some form of sexual dysfunction, less than half felt troubled by this fact. ((Shifren, J. L., Monz, B. U., Russo, P. A., Segreti, A., & Johannes, C. B. (2008). Sexual problems and distress in United States women: Prevalence and correlates. Obstetrics & Gynecology, 112(5), 970-978.)) Rather than rely upon women’s self-description, the pharmaceutical industry instead convinces women through conversation and commercials that their inconsistent sexual desire is a defect, and that their bodies are imperfect and in need of drug treatments to “repair” their “dysfunctional” libidos.  We live in an age where illness makes profit, and where the invention of “disorders” improves the economic bottom-line of the health care industry. Such profit-driven health care requires the consumer to imagine these invented illnesses as real. Unless people learn to call out and resist such inventions, pharmaceutical personality sculpting will become the mainstay of the industry.

Step two in the process of selling people on lifestyle drugs involves an almost laughably ill-advised premise: convince people that the human condition no longer entails sadness, anxiety, depression, loneliness, social unease, lost erections, ups and downs in libido, and grief.  Indeed, the antidepressant industry has swooped in during a time when we have a lot to be unhappy about: unprecedented class warfare (the top 1% of U.S. earners now make more than the bottom 95% combined!), new and insidious forms of sexism (women’s desires usurped by the whims of patriarchy, ongoing failure of the Equal Rights Amendment, increasing reports of eating disorders and body dysmorphia, alarmingly high rates of women faking orgasm, national failure to recognize working mothers’ needs, and so on), rampant and shameless forms of racism (states retaining rights to block interracial marriages, anti-Obama rhetoric latching onto anti-socialist rhetoric throughout the nation, erosion of communities of color, overrepresentation of men of color sent to Iraq, etc.), and, in essence, a whole lot of things to be anxious, depressed, and un-aroused about!

Again, denying the difficulties of human existence seems to be a peculiarly U.S. phenomenon.  Along with their ironic taste for high cholesterol foods, plentiful red wine, and good health, the French (yes, the French!) construct tragedy as an unavoidable process of the human existence.  It is entirely remarkable that people in the U.S. want to manufacture an existence without such tragedy, yet this is exactly what antidepressant manufacturers count on.  They make a bargain, albeit without full consent: Take these drugs and you’ll feel less—both positive and negative.  Those on antidepressants report exactly this: they feel less sadness, they can get out of bed in the morning, and they can go to work and walk their dogs and enjoy modest pleasures.  However, they no longer feel the same happiness they once felt either.  They are dampened down, as the clinical literatures say.  The antidepressant industry wants to trick us out of experiencing ourselves as fully human, as fully engaged in the process of being alive.  How bad for business if we accepted that, when people die, grief is a horrendous, sometimes long, and certainly painful process, but one that we need to experience in order to process death. What a blow to their bottom line if people in this country started considering what their anxiety at work meant about their job satisfaction?  What a downer to the share holders’ stock portfolios if we stopped to consider that feeling bad might propel us to take action in order to feel better?  After all, aren’t we at least a little bit suspicious that Prozac and Zoloft and Wellbutrin create obedient, gracious, mellow, toned-down citizens, ready for the work of tolerating gender inequities, pay inequities, class inequities, and race inequities?  What if people instead confronted their reasons for being upset, depressed, and anxious?

Which brings us to the third point: The pharmaceutical industry relies upon our most basic denial of common sense, intuitive wisdom, and self-affirmation.  Consider the recent discussions about the paradoxes of the modern food industry.  As Michael Pollan has pointed out, we have lost touch with common sense about eating because the food industry has systematically done three things.  First, the food industry has asserted a singular, authoritative knowledge of what kinds of food make us healthy.  Second, it has extracted, via “nutritionism,” the elements of food that yield health without considering the interplay between enzymes and vitamins within a whole piece of food (e.g., Eat Omega-3s! ((Pollan, M. (2009). In defense of food: An eater’s manifesto. New York: Penguin.)) Don’t worry if it comes from actual salmon or fish oil tablets!  It’s all the same!).  Third, the food industry has assaulted our common sense by forcing us to rely upon their definitions of “healthy food” at the expense of what our grandmothers and great-grandmothers already knew to be true (e.g., we eat processed boxes of chemical goo that claim to be “low fat” and “enriched with vitamins” rather than simply eating an apple or a carrot or a head of lettuce in the produce aisle).  The same process has occurred with other elements of health, particularly mental health.  Rather than considering the ways that our unhappiness, anxiety, and grief stem from elements in our lives that deserve our attention, “experts” feed us insights about how pill-popping and pharmaceutical personality sculpting will come to the rescue.

Case in point: A friend of mine once dated a man who had erectile dysfunction with onset in his early 20s.  All physiological tests came out normal, indicating that doctors could find no physiological reason why he had erectile dysfunction.  He tried Viagra for four or five years, with decreasingly successful outcomes.  He had a more and more difficult time becoming erect, and often could not get an erection even in the most stimulating of circumstances.  Viagra eventually stopped working entirely (as it often does).  The man sought out psychological therapy to discuss his distress about his seemingly inexplicable erectile dysfunction.  Frustrated by his lack of success at relying upon Viagra, he eventually discovered, during the course of a multi-year therapy, that his lifelong incestuous relationship with a family member—one in which he consistently became aroused in situations of potential punishment and shame—had contributed greatly to his current erectile dysfunction.  Indeed, all of the signs pointed to his traumatic sexual history as a culprit to his current dysfunction.  He had begun to masturbate at work, and could get aroused only right before his boss walked in on him.  He had asked his partner to have sex in crowded movie theaters, subway cars, and park benches.  He could never become aroused while at home in bed with her.  During this course of treatment, he began a slow and difficult recovery, disentangling his associations with shameful early life experiences and replacing them with healthier models of consensual, non-punitive sex.  I tell this story because it represents, most basically, a truth that should seem obvious to most people if they consider common sense: erectile dysfunction, like most “illnesses” treated by lifestyle drugs, is rooted in a person’s reality, and without addressing that reality, the drugs simply mask the underlying issues.

Yet, we in the U.S. continue to perfect our skills at denying common sense to the point of rapidly dismissing the real rootedness of our psychological problems in the reality of our existences. We do this with food and we do this with mental health.  We eat fewer and fewer apples because food-industry consultants have told us to eat fiber-enhanced apple-flavored fruit-roll-ups.  We deal less and less with the complexities of our psychological lives because “scientists” have told us that a pill will solve the problems of our brain chemistry and will repair our wounded histories.  We rarely stop to consider why unhappiness pervades our culture because the “experts” have told us that it not only is possible to medicate this away, but is in fact medically sound to do so!  This all comes at a great cost, personally, socially, and culturally.  A generation raised on Lean Cuisine and Paxil has learned to condition away the intuition of mind and body.  As a consequence, we do not recognize what tastes good any longer because experts have successfully tricked our taste buds into believing we are eating “butter” when we aren’t.  We do not recognize that unhappiness can have positive, affirming, enriching results on our lives (as in, motivation toward something else—a new partner, a new job, activism on behalf of oppressed groups, and so on) because we have become susceptible to marketing campaigns selling us on the fundamental lie that life is pleasant.  We have already begun selling women on the promise of pharmaceutically terminating menstruation for “convenience” and trimming their labias in order to generate better orgasms, despite known tissue damage and reduced sensation from such surgeries.  Just last week, advertisements promoted a new “mint” that will disguise the vagina’s natural smell.  We sculpt and trim, tweak and prune.  This comes at a considerable cost, as individuals, as a society, and as a potentially toxic contagion within the global community.  Until we seriously challenge the impact and reach of the pharmaceutical industry, these assaults on our most basic ways of being human will continue in earnest.

By Breanne Fahs | The post Lifestyle drugs and the new wave of pharmaceutical personality sculpting appeared first on The Public Sphere.

The space program is largely mediated in the cultural imaginary, from news coverage of tickertape parades in celebration of successful space flights to Life magazine’s oversize, color portraits of the everyday lives of astronauts and their wives. With the exception of those who venture to the Kennedy Space Center for a shuttle launch or partake in the tourism offerings at Kennedy, Johnson, or the Space and Rocket Center, we know NASA primarily as a televisual spectacle. Anniversaries of historical events evince the relationship between media and cultural memory: how an event is framed by the media shapes the way audiences come to know history. Revisiting and reframing a particular historical event can change the way it is recalled in cultural memory.

The lunar landing was an extraordinary television event, witnessed live by millions around the world. Yet for those too young to recall the Apollo 11 mission, the image of the space program just as likely to come to mind is the explosion of Challenger shortly after takeoff in 1986. The image of the Challenger disaster is so vivid in cultural memory not just because of its horror, but because television viewers were subjected to replaying of the same sequence of events, as if caught in a catastrophic loop.

There are certainly space enthusiasts among Generation X, yet for most of those born between 1964 and 1980, men walking on the moon was taken for granted: most GenXers could not remember a time before, when it was not so. Nor did they have the lived experience of the Apollo program and the intense drama of the early years of the Space Race. In the cultural narrative GenXers grew up with, the lunar landing is tied not only to the Cold War but also to Kennedy’s call for a man on the moon. Like the Civil Rights Act, one giant leap is part of Kennedy’s legacy. GenXers have certainly had ample opportunities to see moon walk footage, but the blending of personal memory and cultural memory makes the Challenger footage more salient.

The cultural gap between Generation X and the Millennial generation plays out in perspectives on the space program. Millennials, after all, are a post-Cold War, post-Challenger generation. Not only is the space race a historical notion for them, they also have as much exposure to NASA’s tragedies as its triumphs. The dream of becoming an astronaut, while still somewhat common among GenX kids, is less likely to rank high for Millennials. In a media landscape deeply saturated by celebrity, young people are given cultural clues to bank their dreams on being professional athletes or pop stars before considering the space program as a site of unparalleled acclaim and financial success.

On the morning of February 1, 2003, residents in Deep East Texas were jarred by something similar to a sonic boom, as the shards of space shuttle Columbia fell to earth around them. For many, the event was a devastating national-and international-tragedy. Running alongside their sense of mourning was a feeling of privilege, or belonging, as their circumstantial participation in the shuttle disaster stitched them in to cultural history. As federal agencies and local volunteers began recovery efforts, a handful of East-Texas Millennials, seeing the event as more akin to a scavenger hunt than a tragedy for the space program, set out in search of souvenirs. This reaction can be read through different lenses. We can critique the souvenir hunters as lacking reverence for the space program and disregarding both the tragedy of Columbia and the federal laws that prohibit keeping any shuttle debris. Or, we can see the desire to have a piece of the shuttle as a desire to own a significant piece of the past, the same sensibility that inspires us to save baseball cards, wedding invitations, and commemorative issues of magazines focused on significant cultural events. The lunar landing is likely one of those events, as the hundreds of Apollo 11 collectibles up for sale on eBay suggest.

Across generations, we see a shift in the idea of astronauts having “the right stuff.” Tom Wolfe’s notion of the right stuff is the capacity to overcome death-defying odds without flinching, making it look easy. For Wolfe, courage in the face of death, on behalf of national honor, made the astronauts heroes. That sense of reverence for the astronauts diminished as space travel became routine. In the aftermath of September 11, we’ve experienced a sea change with regard to heroism, and it is difficult to think of astronauts as heroes. The astronauts of the 1960s were vested with ideological symbolism. The astronauts of today are scientists who, if they are lucky, get to go up into space. Space travel is still a risky endeavor, but with national pride detached from the undertaking, NASA’s symbolic power is minimal.

With federal funding always in flux, NASA strives to be popular, to win the hearts and minds of the public as well as the Congressional funding required for its costly programs. The shuttle program is winding to a close, and President Obama was slow in appointing a new NASA administrator, leading many to speculate that the space program may not be a priority for the White House.

Marking the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing grants NASA the opportunity to reframe, reconsider, and reconstitute the past for purposes in the present that aim toward the future. NASA can take advantage of cable programming devoted to science and technology, and they can offer documentary retrospectives on the space program. Such documentaries could act as a counter to those programs that argue the lunar landing is a hoax, staged by NASA on a Hollywood soundstage. Changing the minds of conspiracy theorists may be impossible, but changing the perspective of a tech savvy generation seems a worthy effort. The lunar landing is a momentous narrative, and one that is tainted by association with cultural contexts and tragedies. Reframing the moon landing can restore its place in cultural memory, reminding new generations of a valuable past that can have technological benefits for the future.

By Linda Levitt | The post Leveraging Cultural Memory: Can NASA Use the Past to Shape Its Future? appeared first on The Public Sphere.

If they wish to survive, the Republicans must confront five major issues: (1) they must re-think religion as it relates to politics and the social sphere; (2) they must re-think race and ethnicity in the context of traditional conservatism; (3) they must broaden the term “life,” as in pro-life, so that “life” is not reduced to an ideological debate concerning only conception and fetuses; (4) they must come to grips with the fact that gay people are not a threat to their lives; and (5) they must see that guns, in fact, are a threat to their lives (this is, ironically, the easiest claim for a liberal to make, and the hardest for a conservative to accept). If they could do these things, while staying true to the ideals of individualism and fiscal conservatism, they may be able to avoid being subsumed into the Libertarian party, or, possibly, becoming extinct altogether.

The first problem with Republicans is that they are confused about Christianity, or at least what to say about Christianity. They are first and foremost a Protestant Christian Party with a strong Evangelical voice. The problem with this “Christian” proclamation is that it is exclusive of, and, therefore, necessarily off-putting to, religious minorities in the United States. The first thing Republicans would have to do is admit, whole-heartedly and without shame or guilt, that they are, primarily, a Christian party. This would be an honest claim and it would be the first step to winning back the center. Then (and this is the hard part) they would have to say they are absolutely, positively committed to religious inclusion. Christianity can be one significant point of power within the Republican Party, but multiple spaces, which are inclusive of varieties of religious experience, must also be respected. For example, a concerted effort must be made to build alliances with Muslim religious communities. Subsequently, any person who believes in the “American Dream” of individualistic achievement through hard work could, in the context of her or his own personal faith, take his or her place alongside the good Christians of this glorious nation. This would be the first step in bringing a dead party back to life.

The next problem is race and ethnicity. The November 2008 election showed, beyond reasonable doubt, that minorities are moving further and further away from the GOP. In terms of social inclusion, this problem with American conservatism runs parallel to its problem with Christianity, though it may be a bit harder for a right-winger to admit that (I’ll give Bob credit score check for faithfully presenting David’s arguments as a unified whole). their party is, racially, a white (of [Western] European descent) party. After all, it is not as bad to be called a “religionist” (if there is such a word) than it is to be called a “racist.” Nevertheless, Republicans must come clean and admit that they are presently a white-centric party. This of course, is a naming of white privilege, and so more rethinking must be undertaken past this admission. As would be the case with Christianity, multiple points of racial power would have to be posited. Everyone can “come to the table,” no matter their race or ethnicity, as long as they believe in individualism and fiscal conservatism. There is a bit of a paradox here: members of all races are welcome, but they might want to check their race at the door before they sit at the table as autonomous individuals. In this case, a “default” setting of whiteness (and, for that matter, Christianity) may kick into gear, and force all people to assimilate into a monolithic edifice of conservatism – the same problem that got the Republicans into their current mess. Such a Compatibility horoscopes Sagittarius doesn?t see the development of the relationship in the long run. shift to a multiracial party will require considerable work from Republican strategists. There must be a concerted effort, then, to engage in an honest dialogue about the complexities of race, while maintaining an ideological and practical commitment to individualism. As such, the aforementioned paradox might be negotiated without reverting to the either/or extremes of either a racial identity or a completely privatized individualism.

Next, the Republicans must confront the “wedge” issue of abortion and life. The wording of this previous sentence is precisely the problem for Republicans: a false dichotomy is set up between “abortion” and “life.” What does it mean to be “pro-life?” Some Americans think that Republicans care very much about conception, embryos, fetuses, and trimesters, but they do not care very much about the actual persons that are brought into this world. They may be pro-life, but do they genuinely care about the well-being of a life? One can preach “compassionate conservatism” until one is blue, but at some point the rhetoric will have to be put into practice. And if Republicans are truly going to be pro-life, then they have to completely change the party line on the death penalty. How is it that a life must be brought into this world under any and all circumstances, but this same life can be taken away if it sins or commits a crime? Conservatives believe that they must never go “soft on crime” and they must never become “pro-choice.” Of course criminals should be punished for their individual transgressions, but they must be allowed to rehabilitate themselves, and they must be permitted to atone for any sins that they might commit.  But if Republicans are going to care for life, then this may be an area in which some “message consistency”– life must be cared for under all circumstances — may serve to bolster the claims of “compassionate conservatives.”

As for gay people, Republicans must move toward secularism on this issue, even if they cling to the notion that Christianity is a powerful force within the party (and this assumes that true Christianity is anti-gay, which may not be the only “Christian” perspective). Gay people should be treated as individuals. Individualism is the very pillar of U.S. conservatism. If a particular church or temple will not allow for same-sex couples to marry, this is fine. But church and state must remain separate. Under the law, governed by reason and rationality, any two people must be allowed to enter into the institution of marriage, and they should be afforded the same rights as any other married couple. There is no slippery slope here, no imminent danger of a person marrying a sibling, or an animal, or a lamp. This should just be a simple issue of two people wanting to enter into a life partnership, and the state should have a limited control over the policing of individual civil rights. The Republican Party can cling to its Christian roots, but just as there are to be multiple centers of religious power, there must also be multiple interpretations of “love” and “partnership” between two people.

Guns. Getting through this issue is like trying to break through a steel wall that is ten feet thick. The NRA has a quasi-transcendent power in the United States. And certain people in the U.S. love their guns. They may appeal to the Second Amendment, but the deeper psycho-social issue at play is the deeply ingrained feeling of paranoia and alienation among some U.S. citizens. The problem of alienation is a by-product of the modern institutionalization of everyday life brought on by the dynamics of advanced capitalism, but these issues are beyond the scope of this essay. For now, suffice to say that those who are pro-life and pro-gun, believe that the best way to protect a life is to shoot anyone who threatens, or is perceived to threaten, a life. But police officers will tell you that they are being out-gunned by assault weapons in the streets of our cities. Does the NRA care about this? Do you really need an automatic weapon to defend yourself or shoot for sport? Of course not. Like all the other issues I have mentioned in this essay, this is a contentious point, and if the GOP can confront it, they will have to negotiate difficult solutions. I am simply throwing out some ideas. It is the job of the experts to put together a platform. I wish them luck.

photo credit: auburnxc

By Nikhil Thakur | The post Five Republican Problems: Some Friendly Advice for the G.O.P. appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Indeed, Dylan went on record making several claims that would typically fit with a classic sex-positive, feminist model of sexuality: she wanted to associate the personal with the political, in that selling her virginity would enhance her thesis research on the value of virginity. She believed that selling her body would lead to self-determination in the face of a culture that strips women of their bodily power, and she learned to “think differently” in her women’s studies education about the master narratives of purity, chastity, and virginity. She said, “College taught me that this [idealization of virginity] is just a tool to keep the status quo intact. Deflowering is historically oppressive—early European marriages began with a dowry, in which a father would sell his virginal daughter to the man whose family could offer the most agricultural wealth. Dads were basically their daughters’ pimps. When I learned this, it became apparent to me that idealized virginity is just a tool to keep women in their place. But then I realized something else: if virginity is considered that valuable, what’s to stop me from benefitting from that? It is mine, after all.”

These complexities raise two questions for me, questions with which this essay wrestles: First, what does it mean that the news media refused to take seriously Dylan’s reading of this event as a feminist act? Second, what else is at stake here? Focusing on this first question, my inquiry grates against obvious limitations about the relationship between women and the media. When looking at this relationship, a more obvious set of limitations about the interplay between gender politics and media coverage become apparent. Mainstream news media typically has nothing but contempt for feminism as a concept, ideology, practice, or identity; those who espouse feminist views—particularly if they actually use the “f-word”—typically end up ghettoized by the media as outdated (e.g., “those silly peace protesters from the 60s”), hypocritical (e.g., the frenzy about Gloria Steinem getting married after claiming that marriage oppressed women), a celebrity fad (e.g., Ashley Judd and Susan Sarandon as spokeswomen for a cause waning in its trendiness), or downright scary (e.g., the vilification of sex-negative thinkers like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin within academic and media circles).

Further, the media’s reluctance to accept Dylan’s reading of this event as a feminist act reveals that our media rarely considers the social context of sexual acts, preferring instead to argue for biological essentialism and the “naturalness” of heterosexuality. It seems impossible for the news media to take seriously any claims about the social context in which vanilla sex occurs, let alone the social context that enables prostitution or sex work. I raise this issue because, embedded within these frenzied discussions about Natalie Dylan are the deep-seated cultural anxieties we have about imagining sex as a social act, including the social aspects of virginity, what “counts” as sex, or what is at stake (emotionally, physically, etc.) in (first) sexual exchanges. Case in point: we still believe that erectile dysfunction is primarily related to physiological problems; the popularity of Viagra attests to our blocks about seeing erections within their social context as related to, say, partner communication, relationship issues, crises of masculinity, fatigue, abuse, fear, stress, etc.

So, in addition to the vilification of feminism and the reluctance to see sex in its social context, we also have the problem of the news media believing, particularly for young women, that sexual scripts are fixed, determined by men, and non-negotiable in their social meaning. In other words, we believe that Dylan should value her virginity because it has inherent value, rather than seeing virginity as something constructed in light of our obsession with women as the “purer” sex. We are outraged that Dylan is selling her virginity because it evokes our fear that men will lose control of the sexual economy (e.g., men trade women amongst each other—via marriage and legal arrangements—and not the other way around). In short, the primary objections to Dylan’s actions include the following two things: first, virginity matters; second, men should rule the sexual economy. In this light, the media must belittle, make fun of, ridicule, and shoot down Dylan’s own narrative of selling her virginity as a feminist act. For example, one recent blogger responded to Dylan’s statements by snarkily saying, “Sounds like someone took a couple of philosophy classes, too, and paid really close attention when moral relativism was described (but not critiqued).” If we could move past such belittling statements, we might enable a discussion about that most frightening of realities: the fact that the social world is a flexible, ever-changing universe, wedded not to the inevitability of stagnancy, but to the certainty of change.

This brings me to the second, and arguably more interesting, question I posed: What else is at stake here for social justice, particularly from a feminist lens? I ask this question not in spite of, but in light of, the problems set forth above (namely, that mainstream American news media have a vested interest in reducing the complexity of this situation, dismissing Dylan’s own claims about selling her virginity, and insisting upon a worldview that denies social context and cultural ambiguity). If selling one’s virginity now represents, for Dylan anyway, a feminist act, what do we as feminists do with this assertion? What do we stand to gain from agreeing with her, and what do we stand to lose by disagreeing with her?

Here’s what I like about Dylan’s labeling of selling her virginity as a feminist act: it takes our culture’s normal to its logical extreme. Much feminist research has sought to show how that which is on the fringe actually informs, comments upon, and alters that which is in the middle. For example, Susan Bordo has long argued that the anorexic body, rather than being an aberration, mental illness, or a symbol of the non-normative, actually most fully represents the normal. ((Susan Bordo, “Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the crystallization of culture,” Philosophical Forum 17 (Winter 1986): 73-103.)) In other words, the anorexic body shows us what we value in women: passivity, weakness, thinness, conformity to patriarchal norms, lack of nourishment, pre-pubescent and therefore non-threatening bodies, and so on. In showing us these facts, the anorexic body simultaneously takes on a kind of empowerment, saying to the world, “You want thin? Well, this is thin. Now what?” Similarly, Dylan’s approach takes on a similar logic: “You want to overvalue virginity and give it all kinds of powerful social meanings that it probably doesn’t deserve? Well, how about just making it an explicit bidding war!” In doing so, she reveals to us our cultural pathologies about virginity in the very extremity of this act. We do overvalue virginity. We do sell and trade women’s bodies in a discursive sense. We do teach women to be the gatekeepers of sex and to ward off men’s sexual advances. We do have serious cultural hang-ups about keeping women pure and fetishizing processes that deflower them. Remember: in the world of plastic surgery, hymen reconstruction surgeries are on the rise, primarily in response to the demand for women to prove their virginity (or worth) to new prospective mates. The selling of virginity makes fun of, benefits from, and plays around with these realities. Dylan takes these hang-ups to the logical extreme, and this course of action might actually be useful, ideologically and otherwise, to a feminist politics.

That said, Dylan’s approach skirts one of the most severe problems within the feminist movement: we as feminists do not feel enabled—in part because of the heavy social penalties within the movement, and because our politics rely so intensely upon social constructionism, postmodernism, and relativity—to draw lines in the sand about what we will and will not tolerate in a political sense. Let us ask ourselves: Are we really okay with feminist prostitution? Do we really find it compelling to imagine that sexual liberation emerges from playing around with extreme cooptation, exploitation, and the treatment of sex as a form of labor? Might it be deeply problematic that we still construct men as the “buyers” of virginity/sex while women remain objects to be sold, bartered, and traded in a literal sense? Doesn’t it matter that, even in this discussion, we focus only on Dylan rather than on the men who want to buy her virginity? Must we learn to accept and tolerate extremity in the name of sex positivity?

What irks me most about the selling of virginity in general—whether labeled as feminist or not—is that it further entrenches us into a politics that despises pleasure, values commodification of bodies and sexualities, links capitalism with sexual power, and undermines the relational power of the erotic. As such, despite the rather insightful reading that Dylan has about the feminist implications of selling her virginity—and despite the way that it plays with the relationship between women (especially feminists) and the media—calling the selling of virginity a feminist act seems false. I say this with a full awareness of the hazards of drawing such a line in the sand. Yes, women’s desires are constructed by patriarchy and are therefore suspect. Yes, women have limited options with regard to how they enact resistance to social norms; we all, in a sense, struggle to find ways to reconcile the demands of patriarchy, racism, classism, heterosexism (etc.) with our political and social idealism. Yes, it is dangerous to assert that sex in the context of love and emotional relatedness is an ideal form of eroticism, for it sets up hierarchies between “good” and “bad” sex, “normal” and “abnormal” sex. Yes, the potential for resistance to patriarchy and power appears in all sorts of unexpected ways, and as such, we must take care not to obscure our own hypocrisies or exclude others from joining the cause. Still, mustn’t we at least attempt to articulate a worldview that moves in the direction of these most basic principles of social justice—equality, respect, love, solidarity, kindness, freedom from exploitation, creativity, shared power? Can’t we at least imagine a road to sexual empowerment for women that is not paved with the gritty, grungy, raunchy, hypercommodified realities of stripper poles, bunny ranches, online bidding wars, and girls going wild?

By Breanne Fahs | The post Is the Selling of Virginity a Feminist Act? appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Something happened in the first week of November this year that surprised me immensely. As we all know, the people of this nation turned out in unheard-of numbers and voted, thereby making their opinions known and actively taking part in the working of our government. While this fact is an encouraging one in itself, what shocked me is the number of people who used this precious opportunity deliberately to take certain rights away from their fellow citizens. Is that really what the democratic system is for?

Illustration by Loretta Lopez.

At the end of October, I went to San Francisco to attend a friend’s wedding. Despite some unwelcome rain, it was a lovely celebration and a fun weekend. But one thing stood out. All over the city, there were signs urging people to “Vote no on Prop 8.” Having no idea what “Prop 8” was at the time, I asked some local friends. They shook their heads and rolled their eyes and told me that it was a proposition to change the state constitution in order to make gay marriage illegal. My immediate response was to declare Californians as a whole insane. At the same time, I couldn’t believe that the measure would actually be passed. Not in California, where people are supposed to be so mellow and enlightened and, well, liberal. When, on November 4, California voters approved that proposition, even by a relatively narrow margin, they instead confirmed my initial reaction. They actually voted to strip equal rights from specific members of their own communities. I don’t understand how rational people in a country that is supposedly based on freedom would do such a thing.

Since this is a somewhat complex issue, I’ll break it down, as I understand it. Earlier this year, the California Supreme Court voted that to ban gay marriage would be unconstitutional because it would violate state constitutional provisions protecting equality and fundamental rights. The right to marry and form a family is generally considered a fundamental right. As a result of that decision, many thousands of same-sex couples in California went out and got married. Another result of that decision was that political action groups organized to create an amendment to the state constitution that would specifically define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. It went to ballot. Many millions of dollars were raised by organizations on both sides of the issue and ultimately, the proposition was approved. For a brief moment, full equality existed under the law, and then the people of California took it back.

Unfortunately, it’s not the first time an entire state has voted against equal rights for a group of its citizens. In 2004, several states did pretty much the same thing to greater and lesser extents. I’m not even going to get into the history of legislation in favor of racial and gender discrimination over the decades. The bigger question for me right now is why it happened. Why is it so important for people to interfere in the rights of others? Why are people so afraid to recognize the legitimacy of homosexual relationships? And why do they believe so strongly that it will have any sort of impact on their own lives?

The answer, usually, has something to do with marriage being a sacred institution, sanctioned by God and Church, an institution whose very definition is “a union between a man and a woman.” People talk about how same-sex marriage would undermine the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. Considering the divorce rate has been hovering between 40 and 50% for the past few decades, I would say heterosexuals are undermining it all on their own. And how arrogant are these people to claim that marriage is one sacred, universal and inflexible tradition? Marriage has taken shape in so many ways over the course of human history that it can’t even be fully documented. The church has only been involved for the past two or three hundred years. In some parts of the world, the couple doesn’t even meet before their families decide to unite them. Some cultures still sanction polygamy. In Las Vegas, a couple can be legally united by someone pretending to be a long dead pop icon, provided said officiant has the appropriate license. Throughout history, marriage has been a contract between two people entered into for a variety of economic, social, or romantic reasons, whether or not both parties were willing. That’s all it is. It’s an agreement to be recognized as a couple and to form a family unit.

And yet, so many people are convinced that if the right to marry is extended to members of a group who are different from themselves, it will mean the end of family as we know it. It’s the same belief that kept interracial marriage illegal in many states until the 1960s. In fact, the United States Supreme Court didn’t rule on interracial marriage until 1967. As far as I know, that ruling has had no effect on the stability of the family unit. So, what makes people believe that same-sex marriage would have a negative effect? How does someone’s marriage have any impact on a family living in the next subdivision? Or the next block, or even next door? Outside of the couple and their immediate family and friends, how is any aspect of a marriage anyone else’s business? You can’t walk up to a traditional heterosexual family home, knock on the door and criticize their child-rearing methods–well, not unless you’re a Supernanny or reality show crew of some kind. So, why is it acceptable to tell two consenting adults that they cannot be married? As far as the law is concerned, same-sex marriage has no impact at all on anyone who is not gay and wishing to be married. There is no quota in the nation’s city halls that limits the number of weddings per year. There are plenty of limo services to go around, plenty of florists and tuxedo rental places. The only thing that legalizing same-sex marriage will do is provide full rights under the law to committed gay couples.

Another argument people bring up is how gay marriage will adversely affect education. At first, I wondered if this meant people didn’t want their children to be taught tolerance. After all, isn’t tolerance the ultimate corruption? It leads to all sorts of dangerous things like making friends with people from different backgrounds and being kind to the less fortunate and understanding that not everyone shares the same beliefs and traditions. Some people prefer to shelter their children from such radical ideas. But apparently, this argument actually has something to do with the separation of church and state. It comes from the segment of the population that believes separation of church and state means that if something goes against their religious doctrine, public school children should not be made aware that it exists. However, since homosexuality has not been proven to be contagious, my guess is that merely hearing about its existence will not have a strong impact on children in general. In fact, I remember hearing of homosexuality as a small child, not grasping the concept, dismissing it as a grown-up thing, and continuing to play with my Barbies.

So, the general arguments against same-sex marriage are that it’s a violation of tradition, it will lead to the dissolution of family, it will corrupt children, and it goes against Church Doctrine. Well, I can’t argue with Church Doctrine. I can only point out that it has also had a hand in things like the Spanish Inquisition, the burning of witches, and the subjugation of indigenous cultures. But the rest of it sounds to me like simple fear; fear of change, fear of difference, fear of loss. They are all irrational fears, of course, but we cling to them as tightly as anything. Yet we also praise people who have the courage to break free from oppressive laws and practices. We admire people who set new precedents. I understand that certain changes can’t happen overnight. People need time to adjust to new ideas. They need time to see that there is nothing to fear. They need someone to set the example. This year, California had the opportunity to be that example. A huge, diverse and (relatively) progressive state, it would have been an ideal setting in which people could learn not to be so afraid of change. Unfortunately, that also made it a battlefield for people so afraid of change that they were compelled to rally people in neighboring states to raise money and campaign against it. In an election year during which so much emphasis was placed on the need for change, California could have set a new precedent. Instead, the people of California gave in to fear.

By Paloma Ramirez | The post I Am Indignant! Prop. 8 Proves California To Be Even Crazier Than I Thought appeared first on The Public Sphere.

“The goal or object of practice is pleasure.”
(The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (Columbia University Press, 1990), 272.)  Gilles Deleuze

Permaculture farm

The majority of the citizens of the industrialized world and even a large number of inhabitants of the United States have come to recognize global warming as a significant problem posed to the continued existence of the species homo sapiens. However, a tremendous political and social inertia remains regarding just what needs to be done about this problem and how to do it. In other words, there is a clear disconnect between our cognitive understanding of the dilemmas posed by global warming and our apparent inability to address those dilemmas practically. This gap between what we know about global warming and what we are actually doing about it can be read as a sign that there is something about our framing of the issue that is itself a part of the problem.

Finding a “solution” to global warming is not just a matter of developing new technologies and the political mandate to implement them. If we are to address the issue seriously, then what needs to be fundamentally reconceived is nothing else and nothing less than the entire relationship between our species and the natural environment. At the heart of the relationship between organism and environment is the experience of pleasure as it arises in co-determining action. In nature, there is nothing more absolutely necessary than the superfluous (e.g., the feathers on a peacock, the spots on a bird, the vibrant colors of a flower, etc.). The activity of pleasure is the exclusive means by which all forms of biological life reproduce themselves. Accordingly, from the properly biological perspective, to say that humanity is in danger of ceasing to exist is really to say that humans are forgetting how to have pleasure.

In order to further examine the practicality and necessity of pleasure for the present moment, I would like to compare two recent approaches taken to the problem of global warming. One finds an interesting juxtaposition between the respective ways in which Al Gore and Michael Pollan address the problem in their lectures posted on the TED website. According to their website, “TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds.” Now it stands as a place on the Internet where ideas are spread through posted recorded talks.   Though these lectures appeared in the same forum, Pollan”s simple perspectival-practice approach contrasts starkly with Gore”s hero-citizen-market approach. Examining the contrast between these strategies allows us to appreciate how the very approach to a problem is itself a part of the problem. This examination also extends our notion of the problem of global warming into the realms of practice, play, and pleasure.

Al Gore”s New Thinking on the Climate Crisis portrays the problem of global warming as a problem of political will. According to Gore, the fact that the media are not adequately conveying the seriousness of the problem stands as a major barrier to action. In particular, political candidates need to be confronted with respect to what they are doing or not doing about the issue. As a response to the mainstream media”s inattentiveness, Gore advocates public organizing efforts to raise awareness in support of policies such as renewable energy, conservation efficiency, and a global transition to a low-carbon economy. Gore”s solutions are political and economic. His approach implies that, while it was our technology that helped to create the problem of global warming, we can take steps to reverse that problem by using technology in a politically and socially unified way.

As a rhetorical supplement to this political strategy, Gore conjures the creation of another hero generation.   According to Gore, we must recognize that with the problem of global warming, “history has presented us with a choice-a planet emergency, a generational mission.” Developing this theme, Gore evokes a series of images: World War II, the end of slavery, women”s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and landing a man on the moon. He says we should receive our opportunity to respond to global warming with profound joy and gratitude-it is an opportunity for us to rise to the challenge, to fight a war… to be heroes. In addition, if we succeed, then “we are the generation about which philharmonic orchestras, and poets and singers, will celebrate by saying they were the ones that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and to lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future.” Gore concludes: “We need a higher level of consciousness… and that is coming.”

In contrast to Gore”s approach, Pollan advocates a shift in human thinking about the evolutionary location of the species; for Pollan, consciousness is just another tool used for getting along within co-evolutionary species systems. Pollan develops this point by beginning with a “simple” story about the practice of gardening:  

What did the bumble bee and I (as gardener) have in common… both of us were disseminating the genes of one species and not another… and both of us-if I can imagine the bee”s point of view-probably thought we were calling the shots… I had decided what potato I wanted to plant… I had picked my Yukon Gold or Yellow Fin or whatever it was… and that bee no doubt, assumed that it had decided I am going for that apple tree, I am going for that blossom…We have a grammar that suggests that”s who we are-we are sovereign subjects in nature, the bee as well as me… I plant… I weed… but what if that grammar is nothing more than a self-serving conceit? … The bee thinks he or she is in charge but we know better… The bee has been manipulated by that flower-I mean in the Darwinian sense… it (the flower) has evolved a very specific set of traits-color, scent-that has lured that bee in…The bee has been cleverly fooled into taking the nectar, getting some powder on his legs and then off to the next blossom… The bee is not calling the shots…   I realized then that I was not either… I have been seduced by that potato and not another into spreading its genes… what if we looked at us from this point of view… these other species that are working on us… agriculture appeared to me not as an invention, not as a technology but as a co-evolutionary development…

He goes on to add that viewing us and the world from the plants” and animals” points of view:  

…helps us to understand this weird anomaly:
We had this Darwinian revolution: we are just one species among many… evolution is just working on us the same way its working on all the others, we are acted upon as well as acting, we are really in the fabric of life… the weird thing is we have not absorbed this lesson 150 years later-none of us really believes this… we are still Cartesians… We are the children of Descartes, who believe that subjectivity, consciousness sets us apart-that the world is divided into subjects and objects.

Pollan then describes the practice of permaculture at the Polyface Farm in Virginia. Permaculture uses polyculture, the cultivation of multiple species in the same space, in reproduction of the diversity of natural ecosystems. There is a web of intricate connections that allow a diverse population of plant life and animals to survive by giving them food and protection. This practice understands the physiology of species, and by playing into the demands and desires of plants and animals, an abundance of food is created, while healing the earth at the same time. With little more than the technology of fences and the perspectival shift of “looking at us and the world from the plants” or the animals” point of view,” Pollan points to a practice (one of many approaches) that actually heals the earth and creates food by animating nature through playing into the pleasures of species. In Marxist terms, this is a practice to repair “the metabolic rift.” ((Capitalist production collects the population together in great centres, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance¦ disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil¦” Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin, 1992), 637-638.))

In his talk, Gore attempts to use rhetoric to manipulate his audience, and thereby to inspire them into action. He presents an unfinished series of heroic images, and he puts the audience in the position of completing that series. Gore wants the present generation to write another chapter in so-called “culture” by fighting and winning another war. Should this combat succeed, the rewards will be more cultural products-such as hero worship in the form of philharmonic symphonies. By contrast, Pollan conceives of ecological practice as being a simple shift in perspective. Pollan proposes that we simply feel the insights of Darwin in a direct and sensual way and thereby come to understand the earth as it can be animated with little or no technology. This conception of practice does nothing more than reconcile what we say and what we do-in the practice, play, and pleasure of physics, ethics, and hedonism.

Gore is simply reanimating Cartesian thinking, while Pollan is pleading with us to understand desire as a productive force within a symbiotic relationship. There is, quite simply, a fundamental dissimilarity in these approaches that hinges upon the question of how we relate to nature. Are we the self-important species, or do we instead consider our implicit place within diverse ecological systems? ((See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 10, “¦the aparallel evolution of heterogeneous species or transcoding in the becoming wasp of the orchid and the becoming orchid of the wasp.” “¦each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritoralization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further.)) How can we use notions of pleasure in recognizing the difference between necessity and ambition? Nature is a violent, imbalanced, and opportunistic connection of eco-systems, but where in nature do we find avarice? Is it desire that seduces us, that moves us to follow pleasure unique to humans? Is desire part of the “evolutionary manipulation” that we should accept? What does our relation to nature say about subjectivity? Pollan is quite clear here-his aim is to cure humans of the disease of self-importance and to appreciate desire as ecologically productive. ((See Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Columbia University Press, 2007), 93 “No more subjects, but dynamic individuations without subjects, which constitute collective assemblages.))

In order to understand the implications of this shift in our perspective concerning our relationship to nature, it is helpful to recall some of the concepts of Epicurean philosophy. For Epicurus, time seems to be integral to his notion of pleasure-the ability to sustain life without anxiety.   The philosopher offers two types of pleasure: kinetic and katastematic. ((Don Fowler and Peta Fowler, “Introduction,” Lucretius: On the Nature of the Universe, Oxford”s World Classics (Oxford University Press, 1999), xxii.))   Katastematic pleasure is sustainable, pleasure at rest. Kinetic pleasure is the movement of fulfilling a desire. Epicurus advocates the katastematic pleasure of equilibrium-enjoyed when desire is satisfied and pain is absent- over the kinetic pleasure of a stimulus. Thus, pleasure is involved in moving from the sensible to the thinkable in the briefest manner of time. This aesthetics moves away from the judgment of good or bad and towards the valuation of intensities. The goal of this practice is the animation of life, the animation of pleasure for the satisfying of desire. Pleasure is not a gratuitous stopgap measure of the fulfilling of lack, but the counter actualization of mixtures and movements of sense and thought that resist myth and moral code. ((See Appendix, The Logic of Sense, “Lucretius and the Simulacrum,” an article by Gilles Deleuze originally titled “Lucretius and Naturalism” and published in 1960, eight years prior to Logic of Sense.))

It is also worth recalling that Lucretius, the later Epicurean, makes no distinction between living things in his discussions of will. Voluntas (will) for Lucretius is the freedom of all living beings to follow where pleasure leads. ((On the Nature of the Nature of Things,” lines 251-292, trans. Don Fowler in Don Fowler, Lucretius On Atomic Motion: A Commentary on De Rerum Natura Book II Lines 1-332 (Oxford University Press, 2002).)) For humanity to enter into these systems at the same level of all living beings, humanity will have to accept consciousness in the Pollanian sense, as a co-evolutionary tool. To understand things from, not only the bee”s point of view, but the apple tree”s as well.

What are the implications of declaring the pleasure of a sustainable state superior to that of the pleasure of a stimulus? We arrive at an awareness of natural motion and the cycle of deviation-which is connected to an Epicurean ethical theory-in that human beings see that they themselves are a part of this motion. Human pleasure is then no longer thought to require being apart from nature, but only acting in, through, and as nature. The Epicureans went the furthest in exposing false infinities as myth, to posit a cleavage in the cause/effect relation and to expound on these notions as naturalism. The Epicurean thinking of plurality arranges Epicurus” absence of pain as pleasure-not asceticism but an active production of the absence of pain. How does this Epicurean concept of pleasure relate to current approaches toward the ecological crisis?

At first glance, permaculture and symbiotic farming seem to be limitations upon what we conventionally think of as the pursuit of pleasure, because these systems of farming are based upon the idea that animals are hardwired to follow their pleasure. This dimension of necessity in the following of pleasure has no place within the post-Cartesian, subjective understanding of the word. However, the Epicurean conception of pleasure values chiefly a resistance to over-pleasure or the voluntary action not to move. Lucretius implies that nine times out of ten, a living being will act according to the living being that he is-but that tenth instance is the voluntary action not to move. ((Fowler, Lucretius On Atomic Motion, 418-419.)) Thus, in Epicurean philosophy, the necessary and the voluntary are not opposed but are simply different aspects of the same movement. If the ecological crisis is one of behavior, then the very inertia of humanity that we bemoan with respect to our inability to confront the ecological crisis should instead be reconceived as a form of resistance to the destructive practices that created the crisis in the first place. This inertia presents us with the possibility for a pause-a hesitation-in our action. Such a pause in action might very well be the most immediately practical thing that we can do.

To enact such a pause in our actions would be to use human consciousness as Pollan suggests-in a manner entirely similar to the way the lima bean releases bio-chemicals to summon other mites to defend against spider mites. In this view, a plant”s biochemistry and human consciousness are both posited as co-evolutionary tools and neither is superior to the other.

Pollan claims that his goal is to tell stories that help us to feel Darwin”s insights viscerally. Pollan recognizes the troublesome nature of the separation of sensible pleasure from political discourse. By pausing to pursue (or not pursue) our natural desires, we simultaneously move away from the largely ineffectual political practice of merely repeating what everyone already knows. The Epicurean notion of the pause helps us to understand that actions should not be opposed to politics-growing a garden becomes just as important as starting a blog.  

In an editorial for The New York Times, Michael Pollan has provocatively asked “Why Bother” addressing global warming? In response to this question, he writes, “But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen.” ((Michael Pollan, “Why Bother?” The New York Times Magazine, April 20, 2008; Michael Pollan, “Why Bother?” Internet; available from http://www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=92; accessed 10 September, 2008.)) Pollan”s approach to global warming is that of reconciling gardening, physics, and ethics within an apolitical practice of sustainable hedonism.

By John Cochran | The post Sustainable Hedonism appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Now that tax season is well behind us, I was wondering what had become of a certain messianic stimulus package. Its mysterious disappearance from collective memory may be due to more than the nation’s short attention span. Our failure to analyze its impact, in fact, may merely reveal a hesitance behind our transition to a “newer” standard of national excellence. Setting aside cultural achievement, for instance, we apparently strive for nothing beyond the growth of the Market.

Historian Robert H. Zieger describes the effects of Cold War paranoia at mid-century: an overriding U.S. concern that those brainy Soviets would out-culture us, make us look stupid, and, well, blow us up. Amidst “an orgy of self-doubt and internal agonizing,” Zieger states, Americans wondered if their lives of plenty were causing them to suffer from “popular complacency and self-indulgence,” while the Commies soared to world dominance on Sputnik’s antennae. ((Robert H. Zieger, “Uncle Sam Wants You… to Go Shopping,” Canadian Review of American Studies 34 (2004), 92.)) With such scenes before their eyes, many a public figure demanded that the nation shake itself out of its prosperous ease and focus on education and self-restraint. “Economic abundance, charged [John F.] Kennedy, had “˜so undermined our strength of character that we are now unprepared to deal with the problems that face us… Disaster is our destiny. Unless we reinstall the toughness, the moral idealism which has guided this nation during its history.'” ((Zieger, 94.)) Policies emerging before and after Kennedy’s tenure, such as 1958’s National Defense Education Act and 1964’s Civil Rights Act, says Zieger, “indicated a broad pattern of public support for active government,” ((Zieger, 97.)) even if it meddled with the financially robust status quo.

I’m not sanctioning much of the John-Waynesian ideology inherent in such “toughness,” and I don’t want to portray the Kennedy administration, so steeped in its own inimitable gaffes, as the height of governmental nobility. After all, much of Kennedy’s own New Frontier was aimed at staving off the Soviets-not at national self-actualization. The attitudes that Zieger describes, however, contrast conspicuously with our current beliefs about the market, and the individual’s place within it.

Facing its own crisis, the Bush administration had a unique plan for meeting the new century’s challenges. Shore up our educational institutions? Encourage public service? Nope. The best way to help our ailing States, apparently, was to shop. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the president “insisted that “˜Americans must get back to work, to go shopping, going to the theatre [sic], to help get the country back on a sounder financial footing.'” ((Zieger, 94.)) The nation would not stand or fall on the strength of its people or its government-but on the resilience of its markets. Under such an assumption, closing our eyes and spending is just as upstanding as voting and volunteering for jury duty.

Obviously, our ability to feed, clothe, shelter ourselves, and so on, is linked to the health of the economy. But its continual growth? The perpetual increase of production and consumption, an ever-greater deluge of toys and toasters and Toyotas? As Barbara Ehrenreich asks,

What is this fixation on growth anyway? … the “cult of  growth” has led to global warming, ghastly levels of  pollution, and diminishing resources. Tumors grow, at  least until they kill their hosts; economies ought to be  sustainable. ((Barbara Ehrenreich, “RecessionWho Cares?” The Huffington Post; Internet; available from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-ehrenreich/recession-who-cares_b_80748.html; accessed 6 August 2008.))

This rampant growth means, among other things, that we’re drowning in our own mass-produced waste, even as our perceived need to consume it becomes ever more ravenous and increasingly difficult to satisfy.

Think about this addiction-and note how the stimulus package feeds it. The handout was, remember, going to shake us out of our appalling newfangled failure to shop 24/7, for all kinds of necessities such as Webkinz, the latest iPhone, or that second DVD player for both cars. This care package was to have been a beneficent boost for a nation suddenly unable to support its habit of turning frills into essentials. (Life without cable? Unthinkable.)

This plan may have contained a sliver of sense- at least to those for whom six hundred dollars might really have constituted the final bit of cash necessary to buy a little something special. Not only alleviating the pangs of our dispirited economy, these lucky few would attain temporary release from the drudgery of increasingly lengthy work hours and commutes, the frustration of microwaved lunches, and the disappointing reality of a weirdly-lit cubicle.

Whether or not such purchases really propel anyone into a happier or less stressful life, this much-touted blessing turned out to be an insultingly empty symbol, a reminder of what we could accomplish if our priorities lay elsewhere. For instance, in forcing American-style democracy upon others, we’re frittering away a sum strikingly close to that of the stimulus package. The Nation estimates that war spending this year “will easily top $160 billion” ((Editors of The Nation. “It’s the War Economy, Stupid!” in The Nation; Internet; available from http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080331/editors; accessed 6 August 2008.)) -a little over 95% of the total taken from government coffers in order to maintain our shopping habits. ((Mark Silva, “Bush signs tax rebates, modest economic boost,” in The Swamp; Internet; available from http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/02/bush_signs_tax_rebates_modest.html; accessed 6 August 2008. The stimulus package totaled $168 billion.)) If we weren’t throwing down this bundle on the war, we might not be in a situation that some feel requires a stimulus. Again, The Nation:  “Redirecting Iraq War funds to education, healthcare, renewable energy and infrastructure would create up to twice as many jobs [as military spending does.]” ((War Economy.))  If you feel like depressing and amazing yourself with the contrast between Is and Could Be, you can easily extend this thought experiment.

I’ll return to reality, though, and reveal the striking impact that the stimulus had on this writer’s life. Declining the instantly gratifying purchase of a flat-screen TV, I guiltily, grudgingly-and after an angry glare at the envelope that contained a fraction of governmental folly-deposited my bribe in the bank. Not destined for any special purpose, it essentially shored up that poor little account with a fleeting bit of reserve. Sure, I undermined the administration’s big plan, but how could I set aside reality and treat a few friends to dinner? See, I’ll need to have some cash in hand when my next health care premium comes due. Given, my check won’t cover that expense, or take a minimal crack at the bills that my insurers won’t reimburse, since I sneezed once in the “˜80s and ended up with a pre-existing condition.

But even when it is time to shell out for my useless health care plan, that government assistance will already have disappeared, because I will in the interim have had to buy groceries, pay rent, and keep the electricity flowing, all before my farcical insurers have determined that forking out for an exam would only encourage me in selfish profligacy. Indulge in a spree at the mall? I chuckle at the suggestion.

Poor as I am, though, in the grand scheme of things, I never really would have missed that government handout. Being one of the more fortunate members of the lower income brackets, I realize that, if my financial situation were to become even more of a joke, I could cut out visits to the coffee shop or disconnect Internet access. Of course, I’m also aware that this sort of economizing isn’t possible for everyone; the more than 36 million Americans who lurk beneath the poverty line, after all, would love to be able to buy a cup of tea every day from the nice people down the street. ((The CIA’s World Factbook estimates that twelve percent of the U.S. populationwhich totaled over 303 million in 2007falls beneath the poverty line. See Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, Internet; available from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html# People; accessed 6 August 2008. This number, of course, fails to represent those who earn enough to find a place somewhere “above” this categorybut who also don’t have incomes great enough to grant them access to the realm of financial security, much less existence within the middle class.))

Even $600, though, won’t heal financially dire circumstances. If, on the other hand, the total of the government’s gift packages were used to provide everyone with health care worth its name, functional public transportation, or affordable and safe housing for citizens of every income level, most people’s lives would certainly take a turn for the better. By “better” I mean increased ease in managing our daily lives. “Better,” though, also refers to the state of living more responsibly, an example of which our leaders are not providing us.

Ignoring their own cries for balanced budgets and fiscal accountability, our lawmakers have bestowed upon taxpayers, not only the cash equivalent of a Greyhound ticket, but counsel to run, not walk-or think before rushing out-to spend it. In other words, our leaders would have us go out and shop, even if we can’t really afford to do it. In taking their advice, we might end up with a few neat toys-but still won’t consider what our actions say about our place in and responsibility to the world.

There are, of course, different opinions regarding what social wellbeing means, and the ways in which we best achieve it. Near-exclusive focus on individual material comfort, however, distracts us from considering such questions, from understanding the implications of individual lifestyles upon the whole. Encased in our comfortable domestic cocoons, we fail to look critically at the wide world out there-and by this sin of omission, often wind up harming it. We go on, unthinkingly guzzling about 23% of global resources, even though we only comprise 5% of world population. ((World Population Balance, “Population and Energy Consumption,” Internet; available from http://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/pop/energy/; accessed 6 August 2008. The U.S. “consumes far more energy than any other country¦ the combined energy consumption of the other five largest added together doesn’t match U.S. energy consumption! In other words, the 5% of the world’s population that lives in the U.S. has more environmental impact than the 51% that live in the other five largest countries.)) We gobble up clothes and iPods, refusing to recognize how such consumption supports growing landfills and poor working conditions for sweatshop workers and underpaid cashiers.

And what real good, after all, will our baubles do us? Even if this stimulus works, and we all end up with new TV’s and a resilient economy, what, to be irritatingly “moral,” will such developments mean for our character? What sort of person is our government attempting to create with so much “free” cash? I would love to see the administration square its encouragement of a national shopping spree with the biblical principles it so often claims to espouse. How, for instance, would Free Market Jesus proclaim, “For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their soul?” ((Matthew 8:36.))

Clearly, I’d like the government to rethink its slavish devotion to the growth of the market. But then the question becomes: What is the role of government? Merely to keep us from killing each other, in which case it constitutes nothing more than a police force? To provide an arena in which all can realize “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as our own Declaration of Independence suggests?

Lately, the role of government seems merely to involve protection of the market, or really, of its biggest players (think oil, defense contractors, and telecoms, for example). Safeguarding its citizens-from each other, from “terrorists”-may also come into play, as long as this task doesn’t interfere with the first responsibility. So, big spenders such as Blackwater can ignore allegations of criminal activity at home and abroad; Chevron can apparently destroy entire chunks of Ecuador and expect the government to stand up for it. ((See, for example, P.W. Singer, “The Dark Truth About Blackwater,” Salon.com, Internet; available from http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/02/blackwater/index.html; accessed 6 August 2008. See also Democracy Now!, “Chevron Lobbies White House to Pressure Ecuador to Stop $12 Billion Amazon Pollution Lawsuit; Internet; available from http://www.democracynow.org/2008/8/5/chevron_lobbies_white_house_to_pressure; accessed 6 August 2008. Considering, too, negative perceptions of the United States, it would appear that the government is doing more to endanger its citizens than to protect them, where foreign hostility is concerned.)) Etcetera and etcetera. The administration limits itself these days to fund manager (for itself and its friends) and constable (to keep everyone else docile). Its aspirations for the general public become restricted to turning out good deaf-mutes, while guaranteeing civil liberties and exemplary education for each citizen remains unimportant. Of course, to grant such provisions-the tools necessary to live that life of liberty in pursuit of happiness-would be extremely dangerous, lest a vigorous, critically conscious, and articulate horde realize its own power and decide to live as if it resided in a democracy.

I’ll leave you, finally, with a question: Why not abandon this faith in the ultimate value of economic growth? Before encouraging everyone to go buy another TV, we should revamp and recreate those institutions that help those people least able to participate fully in public-and private-life to get back on their feet. If we allow these services to be successful, this demographic will probably cease to need them-and end up serving the economy even   better than before! And with a healthier, more critically aware nation, we would not only be more   “competitive”-if we insist upon using that characteristic as a measure of vigor-we might also be more interesting.

In the unlikely event that we could return our checks and make it happen, we would have gotten away with a pretty good deal-even if it deprived the kids of that second pair of Nikes. Let’s roll, then, if roll we must-but down a different road, towards a new destination.

photo credit: iChaz

By Katy Scrogin | The post Shopping and Stimuli: On Economic Citizenship appeared first on The Public Sphere.

April 4th marked the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. While we should avail ourselves of this moment to reflect on King’s life and legacy, should we not also reflect upon how we remember that life and legacy? These acts of memory overwhelmingly fall into two categories (with a preponderance of cases under the first): 1) what Cornel West has felicitously called the “Santa Clausification” of King and 2) what I would call King’s Christification. The former involves the purification and distillation of King’s memory down to a single image of vague benevolence. The latter involves the nearly literal retelling of the Christ story with King as the protagonist. Both of these temptations of remembrance entail a gross perversion of what King’s message actually was and, perhaps more importantly, they present King in a way that hinders the use of his example as a basis for activism in our own time.

Reflecting on our collective memorialization of King, Michael Eric Dyson‘s recent book, April 4th, 1968, asks whether the assassination of King made him the figure of public memory. Dyson contends that we would hardly remember Martin at all, let alone remember him to the extent that we do, if not for his assassination. Considering how many public figures outlive their own legacies, it’s hard to argue with this conclusion. For example, imagine how differently we would think of Jesse Jackson today if he were killed during his 1988 presidential run. In light of Obama-mania, it’s amazing how little attention has been paid to what Jackson was able to accomplish twenty years ago. As we know, he didn’t take the nomination. But he was for a time the front-runner, and he did manage to gather 6.9 million votes and win 11 primaries and caucuses. Surely the fact that Jackson is still alive and has lived through a number of public humiliationsin addition to the public’s simply losing their fascination with himhas diminished the possibility of his accomplishments being remembered. So King’s early death (not to mention the circumstances surrounding his death) may simply have provided the basis for both his Santa Clausification as well as his Christification.

West’s comparison between the time-honored mythic functions of Santa Claus and the larger-than-life status that King has attained in the popular imaginary is a very apt metaphor here as well. Every year around the time of his holiday, school children around the country are made to produce countless reports, dioramas, and drawings of King. When the calendar turns to March and Black History Month is over, all of the posters and displays are at once put away only to be brought out again next year as soon as the Christmas decorations are put away. What do the children actually learn about King in the midst of this seasonal celebration? That it was he that made it possible for all people to be equal, so that no matter what color you are you can do and be anything you want! If you really believe in yourself and you work really really hard, maybe you can even grow up to be President someday! How did King accomplish this? By giving his “I Have a Dream Speech.” Before King gave the speech, many people were racist and treated people differently if they didn’t look like them, but when King gave his speech he showed all of those people that they were wrong. In that very moment, King ended racism and we could all live happily ever after. We celebrate his holiday every year so that we can give thanks and remember that King did this for us. Thankfully, King is not around to remind us that the whole thing wasn’t quite that simple.

Now, there certainly are worse stories that we could be telling our kids. And nothing is inherently wrong with story-telling and/or myth-creating practices themselves. Santa Claus, Thanksgiving, The Declaration of Independence, The Emancipation Proclamation, King: all of these things give us a shared sense of identity as citizens of the United States of America, a body of images and deeds to draw from in communicating with one another and understanding our place in the world. We can’t put away childish things if we don’t try them out in the first place. Also as adults, we can ill afford the assumption that we ever come to a point where the “childish” has definitively left us never to return. Even if these particular myths came to be naturalized and/or de-mythologized, as perhaps they should, they would likely be replaced by yet another set of equally vague and oversimplified myths. The value of a story is not to be found in its thoroughness as a description of complex socio-historical processes but rather in what Dr. Stephen T. Colbert has called its “truthiness.” Stories are worthwhile insofar as they help us to see the world around us as subject to perpetual revision on the basis of our participation. In other words, our concern with the King myth should not merely focus upon the perversions to the historical record implied therein, but rather with the much more significant fact that the familiar telling of the story may inhibit our ability to participate in social change.

So what is the social function of Santa Claus? (Spoiler alert: those of you who still don’t want to know certain facts concerning Santa should skip this paragraph). We tell children the Santa Claus myth in order to control behavior with a mechanism whose apparent authority is infinitely more just and benevolent than their actual parent(s). Acceptance of this mechanism is in many cases proportional to the degree to which children accurately perceive the flaws, humanity, and limitations of those actual parent(s). There must be someone else out there who’s got more sense than these fools, children who turn to Claus rightfully think.

Nevertheless, only in very rare cases does this hypothesis (sensible in its own right) survive the onset of puberty. In any event, sooner or later, Santa will be unveiled as little more than a trick that mommy and/or daddy played upon us. This is one of the first steps on the difficult road to adulthood. Above all, it entails the realization that all of the kindness, negligence, and even cruelty that one finds in the world exist not as a result of amorphous metaphysical forces but rather as the consequences of concrete choices made by other people who are just as confused and misguided as oneself. Therefore, the only intellectually defensible reason for perpetuating the Santa Claus myth is the fact that the revelation of Santa Claus’ non-existence is the first of a long line of dearly held beliefs that will subsequently be exposed as fraudulent. The appropriate lesson of Santa Claus is Charles Sanders Peirce’s fundamental pragmatic principle: given that any of our beliefs may very well be wrong, all other things being equal, we should believe whatever doctrine or viewpoint is the easiest to revise, amend, and/or reject.

Understanding the social utility of Santa Claus in this manner helps us to see the similar role that is played by the Santa Clausification of King. Are not children told the King myth precisely for the sake of instilling a similar mechanism of behavior control? While this mechanism likely does inhibit the performance of racist behavior to some degree, this is far from its only effect. According to the consolidation of his legacy as it is is disseminated through the media and the schools, King’s achievementswhich is really to say the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement as a wholeare depicted as having been accomplished: 1) single-handedly, 2) in a single messianic moment, and 3) by an agent who was not himself confused, misguided, and at times, wrong. In other words, in the same instant in which children are taught of King’s supernatural greatness, they are simultaneously taught that great deeds lie outside of the scope of everydayand especially their ownexperience. There could be few lessons more contrary to the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement, which, lest we forget, received many of its most profound and enduring contributions from ordinary people who endeavored to reinvent the norms and conventions surrounding the most banal and trivial of daily activities: riding on the bus, eating at a restaurant, going to school, walking down the street, etc.

The other somewhat troubling temptation of remembrance with respect to King is his Christification. In fact, those, including the redoubtable Prof. West, who commit King’s Christification are often rightfully dissatisfied with the simplicity and political correctness of the image of King’s Santa Clausification. This Christification usually starts something like this: King was a radical. Contrary to what most of us learn in school, his career and life didn’t simply come to a stop after the “I Have a Dream” speech. As the 1960s went on, he spoke out directly against American imperialism in general and the Vietnam War in particularin the process rendering himself persona non grata to Lyndon Johnson whom he had previously worked with on the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Furthermore, King condemned the decadence and affluence of American society not just for ignoring poverty and hunger in many parts of the United States and around the world but for actually profiting from that suffering. To the power elite of American society, these positions, articulated during the height of the Cold War, sounded like those of a domestic Marxist terrorist using his media platform to brainwash the American people into adopting the views of the Enemy. It was primarily for these actionsfor telling us the truth about ourselves whether we wanted to hear it or notthat King was rewarded with assassination.

Clearly, this is a much more accurate and much more enduringly interesting story concerning King than the one that is offered by Santa Clausification. Yet, the culmination of this particular way of telling the story is, as the name Christification suggests, a meditation upon King’s willingness to commit the ultimate sacrifice. In short: Martin died for our sins. Now, I can see the theological utility of this narrative in that it concretizes and exemplifies the Gospel as an event taking place not outside of, but indeed, within (recent) human history. Indeed, who doesn’t get chills down their spine when listening to King’s remarks of April 3rd, 1968? However, we should also see that this metaphysical victory comes at a naturalistic price. As a figure of revelation who freely gave his mortal life in order to achieve immortality, the prophetic King is different from Santa Claus only by virtue of a different sort of cosmology, one that is far less susceptible to revision. Thrust into the place of Christ, Martin is made into the omega, the last in his line. The Door has been closed. While it may perhaps someday open again, there is no telling when or even if that day will come. Moreover, such an occurrence cannot be provoked or predicted by human effort but only by submission to the divine will. “The Messiah will come one day after he [sic] has come,” writes Walter Benjamin. For the time being, our God has abandoned us mortalsall we have is our all too human selves. Indeed, who among us has one iota of the courage, dignity, and grace that Martin had? Who among us will willingly and deliberately submit to the ultimate sacrifice? The only problem with these questions is that they are not meant to be answered.

This narrative of deification clashes with King’s message of everyone’s universal personal responsibility to undo whatever injustice we see in the world: a thesis which patently implies that you don’t have to be God to do exactly that. Again, nothing is inherently wrong with this particular myth as a way of telling King’s story. The problem is that when we tell ourselves stories about King, whether of the Claus or Christ variety, too often we lack the ability to see what is outside these stories. A myth becomes pernicious only when we hold it too dear.

The true utility of these sorts of stories, as the Santa Claus reference suggests, is often to be found not in what the world looks like when we are enraptured believers therein, but rather in what we learn about ourselves from the process of coming to revise and/or withdraw our beliefs about these stories. When we allow ourselves not to hold King too dearand thereby to come to the realization that he was neither Claus nor Christthen we glimpse something of what Martin wanted to show us in the first place. The evil that exists in the world doesn’t simply go on “out there,” but rather dwells in the habitual actions we each performed unquestioningly in the course of our daily lives. We take the first step toward ameliorating that violence when we take account of, come to terms with, and hold ourselves responsible for our own complicity in the heinous yet largely invisible violence of the status quo. Some of the judgment that is today routinely levied upon President George W. Bush for initiating the Iraq war should also apply to middle class tax-payers (such as myself) who have enabled the war. That such an argument is an oversimplification does not make it any less true.

Change should be neither an object of nostalgia nor one of expectation; the only tense it knows is the present and its only time is now. Since Martin is not the Messiah who will return to save us no matter how many idols or temples we build in his name, we might as well consider the possibility of using that energy for saving ourselves. And that isn’t such a bad story after all.

By Marc Lombardo | The post Christifying Martin Luther King, Jr. appeared first on The Public Sphere.

As the 2008 Democratic primary season ends with Barack Obama as the presumptive nominee, I want to reflect back on some of the political themes, realities, and pundit theories that have shaped and invigorated the United States of America over the last year. Some could say citizens of this nation faced three major questions leading to the Democratic nomination. Americans faced the heart of blackness in Senator Obama, a strong and politically shrewd woman in Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the love and hate relationship with her husband, the former United States President Bill Clinton.  Between these two talented senators, Americans also had to face the question of religion in the antics of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Thus, Americans have had to ask themselves serious questions about their attachments to race, religion, and what the Oval Office should stand for in a time of economic and environmental crisis as well as an unpopular war.

Commentators of all stripes have heralded this Democratic Primary as the fulfillment of democracy’s promise. The primary has claimed a new generation of youth, especially white students from the halls of Columbia to the spacious green grounds of the Claremont Colleges, who have grown weary of their hollow privilege, power, and racial divisions. Perhaps more impressive is the sudden maturity and awareness black America is displaying in weighing in on issues important to their community and to the country. The academically inclined would ponder the possibility that the US is finally ready, after 232 years, to be the light of democracy it has claimed it would be since 1776. As much as I would love to join the “Yes We Can” bandwagon, I suggest that commentators, students, and black Americans take a step back and truly assess the political realities flowing from Senators, US Representatives, and even some Republicans regarding Barack Obama. Admittedly, I have seen people of all races, ages, and class groups speak earnestly about what Senator Obama as president could possibly represent. People have voiced such excitement about the senator even when he asks Americans to do the one thing that the sixties and the rise of Republicans has reminded all citizens that America has a hard time doing: change.

The word change reminds me of an important twentieth-century black novelist and essayist James Baldwin in The Evidence of Things Unseen (1985). Laws can be changed and treaties can be signed, but can US citizens really put in the necessary work required to really change? Baldwin concluded that, except for the few, the evidence of change is not visible. Senator Obama’s bid to be the president of the United States has caught Americans in a perfect storm of post-racial aspirations and public sphere inertia. Americans seemed to be unable to speak and act truthfully within one American public without the residue that still exists in the old American divisive republicthe ever-present racial divide between black and white. It appears that the roots of a 262 year old racialized society still run too deep. We must remember that black Americans fought and celebrated along with white citizens in the Revolutionary War and Civil War and, yet, freedom did not ring true for all. Another example is the incredible coalition of black, Jewish, and white Americans in the Civil Rights Movement. When the laws were changed, American citizens slipped back into the comforts of their homes, suburbs, jobs, schools, and clubs and the U.S.A. became two nations again splintered not only by race, but racial class groups as well.

The evidence of the racial past reviving itself is revealed in how the democratic primary competition has ended. More and more, what seemed to have been a cohesive union of black people, white intellectuals, the working poor, college students, and people fed up with the Bush administration slowly revealed the U.S.A.’s inescapable racial divide. Consider for a moment the differences between caucus voting patterns and poll booth voting patterns. In caucuses people voted openly, and Senator Obama generally came out ahead. Perhaps in a caucus room, Senator Obama pulls at the souls of Americans who are publicly forced to reckon with history denied and commonly unspoken in the public arena of presidential politics. In a caucus, people must make a public profession and hope that GOD does not confront them with questions about blackness when they reach the pearly gates of heaven. Imagine going to hell because of one’s treatment of or for looking silently away from the treatment of black people. I am talking about the treatment of people who brought so much comfort as slaves and served as scapegoats in bad times after integration. I am writing of the same people who were crucified by Affirmative Action except for the careers it built for men such as Ward Connerly and Shelby Steele. Perhaps, one would answer GOD by saying they were allowed to sing, dance, and contribute spirituals, blues, rock, soul, jazz, pop music, and hip hop?

What the Democratic primary revealed instead was that there is still a major divide between private and public. Unlike the caucuses, in the primaries, people retreat to the privacy of the voting booth. In that voting booth Americans start to waiver, and differences, such as race, religion, and class, still matter in the U.S.A. The race-baiting tactics of the Clinton campaign revealed a voting booth contrast. President Clinton’s rhetoric in the South Carolina Primary parted the thin cohesive sheen of the Democratic Party when he reminded the country that Obama would win South Carolina mainly because he was black and not on his impressive credentials. Surely, Senator Obama had an upper hand in the state but he still had to win black and white voters who were just getting to know him. Moreover, the problem with the former President’s statement was that he was reminding white voters around the country to be aware of those black people. It has never failed in the U.S.A. that when masses of black people start getting energized about something, other people assume it means something is being taking away from white America. Like clockwork after South Carolina, it seems most white people started pursuing the more familiar and more comfortable racial path regardless of the cost to the country, American youth, and the world. The U.S.A. is starting to resemble the world that Andrew Hacker’s Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (1992) and John Hope Franklin’s The Color Line: Legacy for the Twenty-First Century (1993) warned against in the last decade.

Americans have been given a great opportunity in the nomination of Senator Obama. He has managed something unique, promising, and infrequently remarked upon. He broke the coalition of elder black politicians and pariahs who have fed the flames of race baiting and hatred over the last century. Let me be clear on this point: I understand that many black elders lived through some of the worst aspects of a racist system, like being called a nigger and being treated as second-class citizens with second-class toys and parks because a segment of their own country felt and voiced that they were somehow less than human. When US Representative John Lewis, a major figure in the Civil Rights Movement, looked into his heart and saw that the people he represented supported Senator Obama with excitement and record numbers of votes, Rep. Lewis switched his support from Senator Clinton. From city to city and state to state, politicians started listening to their constituents. The promises made by black politicians who were looking for gains under the Clinton regime gave way. Black Americans and Senator Obama broke the black politics of the past and showed that they would stand up to the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons.

Black America gave the U.S.A. an opportunity to move beyond race. However, Senator Clinton’s campaign, after a succession of losses in the South, decided that their best chance was to play the race card. The Clintons, who were the pearls of black Americans’ hearts, asked the pivotal question. Can Americans seriously be considering a black man over the storied house of Clinton? Suddenly, pundits, youth, black and white Americans started to rehash the stories of yesterday. Racial divisions and classism returned. And, of course, one can purchase the new book by Shelby Steele, titled A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win (2008), fresh off the press as he continues to profit on the racial divide.

Regardless of what the November elections will teach Americans about themselves, Senator Obama’s triumph as the presumptive nominee is incredible. But, my heart tells me that that the evidence of change is still hidden behind the voting booth. Will the United States finally live up to its founding creed of liberty for all? White Americans hold the answer, but they will only reveal it behind the closed door of the voting booth. In the U.S.A. and around the world, people seem to feel as if something amazing is happening in America. I stand firm on James Baldwin’s sentiment of the evidence of things unseen. There will be no post-racial America and people will continue to say the right thing in public and do the race thing in private. I just hope that white America does something good for itself and not for black Americans. Exorcising the ghosts of the past might improve the US economy, education, and foreign relations. We, the people of the Unites States of America, run our own government and if Senator Obama cannot deliver the changes the country desperately needs after the Bush Administration then we can always change again. Yes we can!

By Edward Robinson, Jr. | The post Evidence of Things Hidden Behind the Voting Booth appeared first on The Public Sphere.