BroadSnark

I used to work for a hotel in Miami called the SeaView. It was owned by stockholders who had condos in the building. In a crunch, some of the condos were rented out. But generally only the parts of the building that were purely hotel rooms were for the public. The interesting part is who the stockholders were.

The penthouse was owned by Dwayne Andreas. At the time, Andreas was chairman of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). That would be the food, feed, and fuel company that The Informant worked for. It was Dwayne’s kid that was found guilty of price fixing. And it is ADM that that hears that ka-ching every time congress votes for more ethanol subsidies.

ADM got to price fix and collect all those subsidies because Andreas gave huge wads of cash and other nifty gifts (like cheap condos) to politicians (Democrats and Republicans alike). This bipartisanship was evident in the hotel. We had both Republicans and Democrats who were stockholders there. Bob Dole was one. Business and media were well represented among the owners too. David Brinkley had a pad. So did the Hoovers and the Duponts.

Some of the stockholders got occasional shit for being extra cozy with Andreas. New York Magazine wrote about Bob Dole’s Sugar Daddy. And Brinkley got heat for becoming an ADM pitchman. But mostly nobody really knew who Andreas was. Nobody ever called to inquire about the high profile visitors to the hotel. Nobody protested outside. We had no need for anything more than one very sleepy security guard at night. I watched Andreas, Dole, and Brinkley take off unmolested to go eat at The Palm and decide our fates.

And while the rich white dudes of business, government, and media were out schmoozing; the rest of us held down the fort at the hotel. The nicer jobs – management, office staff, front desk, supervisors – tended to be held by Asians, Light Latinos, and Europeans. The housekeepers were Haitian women. As a front desk person, I was allowed to walk in the front door. The Haitian housekeepers had to use a back door.

Dwayne Andreas had a private jet and his own personal pilot. There were cars and drivers, of course. Management and office staff drove to work. The cars ranged from Mercedes to clunkers. I took the bus, but since I lived on the beach it only took me 30 or 45 minutes to get home. The housekeepers I worked with at night also took the bus. But they had three buses and a sometimes two hour commute home. Bad enough on its own, but a lot worse when you consider that they had to have other jobs to barely get by.

What got me thinking about all of this was a post over at Eye of the Storm.  It describes how Chuck Schumer was overheard briefing all the other senators on what they should say when their media conference call started.  It was the commentary about these powerful people being told exactly what talking points they had to parrot out to the media that brought back the SeaView.

I was working there in 2000 when the election fiasco occurred. Gore’s people stayed there for a while. Then Bob Dole swooped in to do media while the Republicans arranged the election for Dubya. The party used to fax Dole’s talking points to our hotel office. I got a kick out of reading them. But I got an even bigger kick out of seeing how much control the party had over someone who was once a skip away from the presidency.

I always thought that hotel would make a great book or documentary. Every strata of society was represented. All the relationships and machinations were blatantly obvious. It is hard to hold the illusion that government, media, and corporations have separate interests when they just went out for steaks and share the same pool boy. You can’t really believe that Democrats and Republicans are much different when none had any qualms living in a place where the people who cleaned their shit couldn’t walk in the front door. And you can’t believe that elections mean much when someone as high up as Dole could basically be replaced by a very talented and congenial talking bird.

If I have to read one more article on how a group of people must somehow be damaged because they aren’t in a 1950s nuclear family, I am going to spit nails.

Kay S. Hymowitz has a piece in the Wall Street Journal where she complains that men in their twenties “hang out in…a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance.”  Poor Hymowitz and her fellow women can’t find a husband and breed.  All the guys are playing video games, fucking around in bands, smoking pot, or watching porn and comedy central.

Don’t feel too bad, dudes.  Tracy McMillan, has been married three times and so styles herself some sort of expert on what is wrong with those loser women who haven’t even managed to get married once.  According to her, women are shallow, selfish, slutty, lying bitches who don’t spend enough time acting like a doting mama to their men. And if you are a black woman who isn’t married, well then your lack of a mate is headline news and asshats like Steve Harvey make money telling you all the ways you should change yourself in order to attract a charmer such as himself. (I just threw up a little.)

Why is it that people are so fixated on marriage?  Why is it so fucking important to them that they will excoriate anyone who doesn’t hop right onto the marriage bandwagon? (Why the hell is our tax money going to try to make poor people get married?)

Usually, marriage pushers say some crap about marriage being the foundation of society. Horseshit. Marriage as a monogamous death pact has not been the foundation of society. The foundation of society has always been much bigger than the fragile nuclear family.  If marriage has historically been the foundation of anything, it is privilege, hierarchy, sexism, and the accumulation of property.  The kind of marriage we are familiar with is an ownership arrangement.*

If you really want to get to the heart of why people are so marriage obsessed, you must read the conservatives on the subject. Here I actually appreciate them. Most people pretend that they want you to change your entire self for your own good. They tell you it is what you really want. They tell you it is about love. At least some conservatives are honest.

Sam Schulman says that marriage is about controlling sexuality, especially women’s sexuality.  And we can’t possibly let the gays marry, cause gay marriage has nothing to do with controlling who people can fuck. It’s like telling everyone they can go out and fuck willy nilly.  We can’t have that. And my god, didn’t you realize that,

Even in modern romantic marriages, a groom becomes the hunting or business partner of his father-in-law and a member of his clubs; a bride becomes an ally of her mother-in-law in controlling her husband.

How the hell are two gays supposed to navigate those all important elite and gender specific roles? I mean all our parents hunt and belong to a club right? (Seriously, you should read his piece.  You can’t make that shit up.)

These people piss me off so much. They want you to revere an institution that gives them privileges. They want you to modify yourself to serve their needs. They want you to give up looking for something real so that you can be as miserable as they are. They want to stuff you into the same tiny box they have stuffed themselves into.  They want you to have the opposite of love.

Love is not about putting people into boxes, making them into something that suits you. As James Baldwin put so perfectly, “Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” These people are telling you to put on more masks, to be as phony and miserable and deluded as they are. And for what? So rich people can have a system for property inheritance? So selfish people can delineate which tiny group of people they have to care about in life? So men can delude themselves into thinking that there is some virginal housekeeper waiting to take care of him who will never, ever want to fuck anyone else?

To hell with that.

Guess what? Not every girl has that Disneyland princess fantasy that McMillan and the rest claim we do.  As Violet so eloquently put it, some women listen to all that crap and think “Yes, I’d like to put a ring on it. The kind attached to a ball gag.” And here is another crazy fact for you. Men are actually human beings with feelings and not just walking hornbots. No, it is true.  I swear. It is possible to be a man and actually want something more than sex or money from people. I know, I could hardly believe it either.

I have no intention of getting married. I knew that by about the age of fifteen. It doesn’t make me damaged. It makes me someone who actually thinks about things before doing them. I have no idea if my fourteen-plus year relationship will last another four years or fourteen years or forty years. I do know that I love my video game and guitar playing, pot smoking, porn and comedy central watching bfriend. And I have no intention of telling him to “grow up” and fit into some Ozzie and Harriet idea of what a man is supposed to be. And I know that he loves me, not despite the fact that I am angry and raunchy and thoroughly undomesticated, but because of it.

So to all you marriage pushers who want the rest of us to sacrifice our happiness on the alter of your delusion – I know you hate to see people be honest about who they are, despite the harsh social consequences people like you met out for not conforming.  It must remind you of your own phoniness, unhappiness and mediocrity. I kind of feel sorry for you, but mostly I just want to tell you to suck it.

____________________________________

*  If you have never read Stephanie Coontz’s book, Marriage A History: How Love Conquered Marriage, I would highly recommend it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how you determine whether or not something is worth saving/fixing/reforming – whatever.

What got me thinking about this was a book I read called A World Without Women. David Noble, the guy who wrote the book, wanted to examine why science was so inhospitable to women. What he found was that, contrary to our ideas about science and religion being in direct opposition to each other, science grew up within the Catholic Church. And science inherited the Church’s misogyny.

There is this idea that old institutions are simply a reflexion of old-fashioned values or of the culture of their time. Some institutions are just lagging behind a bit. But that idea is often false. Plenty of institutions get more unjust over time. More importantly, as in the case of the Catholic Church, some institutions created themselves in explicit opposition to more egalitarian organizations of their time.

Women were not barred from early Christianity. In fact, they had prominent roles in many of the early Christian sects. Early Christian services were frequently held in homes, where women had considerable influence. Clergy were typically married, their wives involved in the church. Wealthy women were church benefactors. And many early cloisters were double monasteries where men and women, sharing a belief that the soul has no gender, took vows of celibacy and studied together. These double monasteries were often led by an abbess.

The Catholic Church changed all of that. No longer were services held in homes, but the church became the house of god where elaborate, secretive, and exclusive displays of ceremony took place. The Church forbade clergy to marry in order to protect its property and to further distance the clergy from the lay people. Double monasteries were destroyed or emptied of women by Abbots, like Conrad of Marchtal, who made no secret of their contempt:

Recognizing that the wickedness of women is greater than all the other wickedness of the world, and that their is no anger like that of women, and that the poison of asps and dragons is more curable and less dangerous to men than the familiarity of women, [we] have unanimously decreed for the safety of our souls, no less than for that of our bodies and goods, that we will on no account receive any more sisters to the increase of our perdition, but will avoid them like poisonous animals.

Women were piece by piece removed from the life of the church until it became a completely male institution, modeled in large part on the Roman army. Church leaders began to impose hierarchies and rules. They invented and defined heresy.  And they defined heresy as woman.  Women, they claimed, were responsible for original sin.  Women were a corrupting influence.  Women were witches.  Religious men weren’t just ordered not to marry women.  They were ordered not to have any contact with them at all.

In his Institutes Cassian himself warned future monks that ‘where the Devil, with subtle cunning, has insinuated into our hearts the memory of a woman, beginning with our mother, our sisters, or certain pious women, we should as quickly as possible expel these memories for fear that, if we linger on them too long, the tempter may seize the opportunity to lead us unwittingly to think about other women.

So given all of that, given how the Catholic Church was born in hatred of women, how could any woman actually be a part of it? And how could women actually think that there is any possibility of reforming an institution where more than a quarter of the canons are expressly directed against women? It boggles my mind.

That is really the fundamental conservative vs. radical tension, is it not? Even “progressive” conservatives want to save the institution. They think reform can work, no matter how evil the institution, no matter what bloodbath it might have been formed in. But radicals are willing to dying to smash those institutions and start over.

Are all institutions worth saving? If not, how do we decide which ones are? Aren’t we kidding ourselves to think that an institution born to oppress a group of people can be saved? Wouldn’t that apply to genocidal countries as much as misogynist religious institutions?

Our book group just finished reading The Whites of Their Eyes by Jill Lepore. Lepore is a historian and spends a lot of time focusing on historical facts that contradict the tea party narrative. So the group spent some time discussing whether or not there is such a thing as verifiable fact, whether the truth is really knowable.

It is common in U.S. politics for the left to assert that they deal in fact, while the right deals in mythology. You can certainly make a case for that when it comes to, for example, sex education or evolution.  But when I got home from the book club, I started thinking about another, similar discussion I had about facts and truth.

Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia is the testimonio of an indigenous Guatemalan woman.  Menchú lived through Guatemala’s 36-year-long civil war, a war that resulted in an estimated 200,000 killed or disappeared and more than one million displaced. The book recounts the torture and murders of her family members and her journey from unknown indigenous woman to Nobel prize winner.

But the book caused controversy when anthropologist David Stoll started investigating some of the details.  He found, for example, that witnesses claimed Rigoberta’s brother was shot rather than burned to death.  He discovered that she had more education than claimed in the book.  And he brought out information about an intra-indigenous land dispute that was not mentioned in the story and which he thought pertinent.

People on the left rushed to Menchú’s defense.  They claimed that indigenous people had different senses of history and fact.  They said it was common in testimonio to mix together stories of what happened to you and what happened to others, that there was not the same sense of individuation that we have.  They claimed that whatever facts might be off, the overall story that she told is accurate.  Her book conveys how the war effected indigenous communities.

Although I was one of the few people in class who actually sympathized with some of Stoll’s arguments, I also had to admit that the facts in question didn’t really matter much to the overall truth of what she said.  As a writer, I know that there are some truths that I could probably only face in fiction.  And I suspect that Arundhati Roy, in the introduction to Field Notes on Democracy, is onto something when she says,

As a writer, a fiction writer, I have often wondered whether the attempt to always be precise, to try and get it all factually right somehow reduces the epic scale of what is really going on.  Does it eventually mask a larger truth?  I worry that I am allowing myself to be railroaded into offering prosaic, factual precision when maybe what we really need is a feral howl, or the transformative power and real precision of poetry.

I believe that.  I believe sometimes you can get mired in the details and lose site of what is important. And I believe that your belief system, your narrative, your ideology – they determine which facts you pursue.  So the motivation behind the pursuit is often more important than the facts themselves.

The reason that the left reacted so violently to Stoll is that they wondered what his motivation was in going after Rigoberta Menchú in the first place.  As I thought about that, I realized that one of the reasons I really disliked Lepore’s book was that I was suspicious about her motivations for writing it. And my suspicions were very soon confirmed by how she approached the issue.

She mocks the Tea Party.  It isn’t the kind of obvious mocking that you would get on The Daily Show. In fact, she makes herself seem like a very reasonable person who sat down and talked to them.  It is a subtle, intellectualized mocking where she points out all the facts they get wrong and glosses over or trivializes the things they get right.  Right at the beginning of the book she says,

But the Tea Party’s Revolution wasn’t just another generation’s story – it was more like a reenactment – and its complaint about taxation without representation followed the inauguration of a president who won the electoral vote 365 to 173 and earned 53 percent of the popular vote.  In an age of universal suffrage, the citizenry could hardly be said to lack representation. (emphasis mine)

Really?  I think there are about 5 million people in prison or felon disenfranchised who might disagree.  There are millions of undocumented immigrants who might disagree.  There are lots of young adults under 18 who might disagree.  And most of us eligible voters don’t feel represented by the customary choices of Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee.  That’s why we don’t usually bother to vote.  But thanks for dismissing us with one fell swoop of “facts.”

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know I have a somewhat different take on the Tea Party crowd.  I think the Tea party is right that they are not represented.  I think they have been hella slow figuring it out.  I don’t know how to reach some of those people, but I am certain that combing through their words to find every fact they have wrong is not the way to do it. Inconvenient facts are great for winning a debate, but not necessarily helpful for reaching an understanding.

I am not claiming that facts do not matter at all.  I won’t go so far as to say nothing is knowable.  But I do think that we select what facts to go after and what facts to use.  We can as easily use facts to obscure the truth as to uncover it.  Facts and truth have a more complicated relationship than might seem to be the case and sometimes you have to go beyond facts to get at truth.

We have had a couple good snows this winter.  That means that I’ve had to navigate snow and ice covered sidewalks without breaking my neck.  Bad enough for me, who is generally steady on her feet when sober, but others really just have to forget about going anywhere until the snow melts.

It is a contentious issue around here.  Shoveling the sidewalk is supposed to be the responsibility of the people in front of whose building the sidewalk is, or at least so says the city.  There are lots of people who just never do it.  I know exactly which buildings in my neighborhood will be impassable year after year.  Now a DC council member has introduced a bill to impose penalties on those people who don’t get their sidewalks cleared within eight hours.

The proposed bill kicked off a fierce debate.  Why should residents have to clear the sidewalks when they belong to the city?  What if someone is out of town? What about the elderly and disabled? Will fines be imposed on them?  If not, who decides who is disabled and so exempt? Do those sidewalks just go unshoveled?  Can we trust the enforcers to implement the law fairly?  They don’t have a very good track record.

Do you know how we could know who is out of town or elderly or disabled and needs a bit of help? We could know that if we actually talked to our neighbors.  Do you how we could ensure that the sidewalks are clear so that those elderly and disabled could get through? We could coordinate with our neighbors.  Do you know how we make sure some city bureaucracy doesn’t bury us in tickets and fines? We could dispense with the bureaucracy altogether.

Charles Eisenstein did a talk recently on the gift economy.  He explained how gift economies create ties and obligations between people.  Gift economies are about strengthening community.  Cash economies, in contrast, separate people.  You give me a service.  I pay you for it.  Now I owe you nothing.  I have no obligation to you.  Isn’t this really the same dynamic?  I paid my taxes and now have no obligation to know or help my neighbors.  The city will do it. If my neighbor acts like a douche, I can hide in my apartment and have somebody else confront them.  All of it is to avoid the human relationships and obligations that any just society would have to be based upon.

A few months ago, I attended the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition (RAT) conference in Baltimore. One of the sessions was called Beyond Street Protests.  We talked about different projects that people were working on or thinking about.  One of the people there was from Pittsburgh and talked about anarchists trying to build community by helping out their neighbors.  The subject of shoveling sidewalks came up.   There was a bit of joking around about brigades of anarchist sidewalk shovelers.  I mean it isn’t like you can change the world by shoveling your neighbor’s sidewalk.

Or is it?

Michael Lind recently put out a piece in Slate called Let’s Stop Pretending the Constitution is Sacred.  He won’t get any lip from me on that.  I don’t think anything is sacred.  But in making his argument, he ends up undermining one of the key understandings central to his argument.  And I’m not sure he even realizes it.

Lind writes about how certain people in the U.S. venerate the constitution and then he connects that veneration to southern slavery and Jim Crow.  He goes on to make a case for seeing constitutions as something in need of updating or even changing completely once in a while.  But here is where the irony comes in.  One of the things he uses to prop up his argument is the fact that the individual states do not treat their constitutions like sacred text. In fact, many states do exactly what he thinks should be done.

Most states in the Union have gone through several constitutions, with no apparent harm. Many of today’s state constitutions in the Northeast and West Coast date back only a few generations to the Progressive era, and show the influence of belief in apolitical, technocratic executives in the number of state officials appointed by a strong governor.

On the one hand, Lind adopts the very common belief that the ideas of states’ rights and limited federal government are only supported by backwards, hateful racists who wish they could still have slaves. And on the other hand, he shows how much more reasonable and progressive state politics can be.  Kinda makes you go hmmmm.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am not saying that Lind is wrong to make the connection.  The connection is there. Much of the time (most of the time) the people who talk about states’ rights are reactionary and, if not white supremacist, not exactly informed anti-racists either.  But what I have come to understand is that the automatic conflation of states’ rights with the KKK is equally as reactionary and does us all a huge disservice.

The drug war has been going strong for a century.  And in the last 30 or 40 years it really ramped itself up, with horrible consequences.  But lately there has been a lot of progress on changing drug policy in the U.S.  Much of that progress has come because drug law reformers took a states’ rights approach to reform.  They targeted certain states where there was decent support and started advocating for change, especially to medical marijuana laws.  The result has been a domino effect. They were able to do state by state what they could not do on a federal level.

I’m not trying to argue for state’s rights here.  I don’t give a crap about state’s rights.  I don’t give a crap about any arbitrary borders – country, state, or otherwise.  The only legitimate use for any kind of delineation is purely practical.  When we are figuring out how to deal with an issue, we should be looking at all possible ways to confront the issue and not just, for example, forfeiting the state by state option just because of how state’s rights has been used in the past.  It shouldn’t matter what boundaries we have used in the past at all. What is important is what boundaries are realistic considering the people effected by that issue and the number of people that can be coordinated without resorting to authoritarian structures and “representative” systems that don’t really represent anyone.

It is completely nonsensical to think that people in New York and people in Omaha would need exactly the same things.  It is also nonsensical that people in San Diego and people in Tijuana would not need to work together to deal with some issues.  Those simple facts seem to be really hard to grasp within our political context.  People either live in denial, thinking we can cut off our borders and not have to negotiate with people in other countries, or people think that we can have social welfare systems similar to Northern Europe without considering the massive difference between the size of Sweden and the size of the United States.

Many of the most seemingly intractable issues actually boil down to our inability to see them through a different lens. How different does an analysis of Afghanistan or Somalia look once you accept the fact that it makes no sense to see those disparate communities as countries at all?  The next time someone suggests that we should be emulating the social safety nets like those in the countries that continuously show up on indexes of the most peaceful, economically equal, and happy places on earth; point out to them that Denmark has 5 1/2 million people or so.  That is about 15% of the population of California.

The United States is huge.  It is almost impossible to get 300 million people, spread out over 3,536,294 square miles, to agree on anything.  The scale of the operation is enormous.  And the larger an organization is, the more difficult it is for the little people (that’s us) to have any real influence.  I have worked for both small organizations and large, bureaucratic ones.  You have a lot more influence when you can walk into your bosses office and talk to them (as opposed to the boss not even knowing your name).

Boundaries may be necessary, but they need to be fluid.  We need to recognize that boundaries are a means to an ends, not an end in and of itself.  We should be asking ourselves who is affected by the problem?  By the solution?  What is the smallest group that can deal with this issue?  The largest?  Is it a problem constrained by geography?  Or do geographical boundaries not apply at all?  And whatever boundaries we do use shouldn’t be written in stone.  They should always be up for changing once they stop serving our needs.  And it shouldn’t require a civil war to accomplish it.

I can’t believe the number of articles I have seen about the violent rhetoric of the right and how it is responsible for the Safeway shooting.  (I’m not going to call it the Gifford shooting, because a hell of a lot of people got shot that day and they count too.)   And now rumor has it that people are talking about criminalizing speech.

Because that is what we do when something horrible happens.  We immediately say, “somebody has got to do something.”  And that something always seems to be pass a new law.

Don’t get me wrong.  It isn’t that I disagree that words matter.  Language, culture, and social context effect our reality.  What we see as possible is shaped by all those things.  Who we pay attention to is shaped by those things.  Speech can incite people, especially people who are not completely in touch with reality.  But even if Sarah Palin’s target graphic is found to be hanging on Jared Lee Loughner’s bedroom wall, it would be a catastrophe to make that graphic criminal.

This week I happened to read The Dakar Declaration of the African Regional Preparatory Conference for the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance from January of 2001. One of the declarations recommendations was,

States should ensure the enactment of legislation declaring illegal and prohibiting all political platforms, organizations and propaganda activities which promote and incite racial discrimination and recognizing that participation in such organizations is an offense punishable by law.

I’m sympathetic.  I really am.  It is tempting to pass laws that would, theoretically, outlaw the KKK or the Nazi party.  This is not sympathy or self-righteousness talking.  It is self preservation.

But the next thing to think about, once you want to make something illegal, is how far you are going to go with the punishment.  Are we going to put people in prison for words?  For how long?  How about the death penalty?  Is that on the table too?

Even more troubling is that people who want to pass laws like that, out of genuine concern for social justice, don’t look at the current system and think about how those laws would be enforced.  There is virtually no difference in use rates for illegal drugs between white people and black people.  But black people are far more likely to be prosecuted and imprisoned for their use.

Does anybody think that enforcement of speech laws would be different? Do you think Sarah Palin would be more likely to go to prison for hate speech than Louis Farrakhan? Do you not realize what kinds of groups could be designated as “reverse racist,” criminalized, and prosecuted?  That is how laws work. They are used by the powerful against the powerless.  Always.

We cannot legislate our way out of our problems. We cannot criminalize all the loathsome people in the world.

The best we can do is to make speech by people like Sarah Palin irrelevant. And we do that by curing our discourse by proxy syndrome.  No more talking to each other through politicians and pundits.  We don’t need them.

If I say blue, are you confused?  But I might be thinking cobalt while you are thinking cornflower. Maybe the person next to you is colorblind and can’t tell blue from green. Maybe the person next to them is completely blind and can’t understand color.  Maybe we weren’t talking about color at all. Maybe we were talking about emotion.

Words are less precise than we think.

Am I a Jew?  I probably wasn’t born Jewish.  I was raised to be Jewish.  I have cultural experiences that are Jewish.  I identify with Jewish history.  I don’t subscribe to the religious beliefs.  I don’t practice Judaism.  There are people who will dislike me because of my Jewishness, regardless of how I feel about the religious beliefs.  If the question relates to religion, I am an atheist.  If I am accused of being Jewish, then I am a Jew.

Words are contextual.

Why do we call people Latino whose origins go back to long before Columbus stumbled upon the Americas?  What is “Latin” about Latin America?  Thousands of languages have been spoken in the Americas, yet we refer to people as Hispanic. Why should a Quechua speaker be called Hispanic?  Why should a Guarani whose second language is German be called Hispanic?  Why do we even call that language Spanish?  Lots of languages are spoken in Spain, Castilian is only one of them.

Words have history.  Words erase history.  Words categorize.

In the old movies I used to watch with my father, they used the word gay all the time. But I’m pretty sure The Gay Divorcee with Fred Astaire was not a coming out of the closet story. When the Flintstones told us to have a “gay old time” they probably weren’t suggesting we all go out and attend a pride parade.

A word’s meaning, use and significance changes over time.

Lots of people have defined themselves as libertarians.  Do Noam Chomsky and Ron Paul mean the same thing when they refer to themselves as libertarian?  No. Not exactly. Two people who know each other well may know exactly what kind of libertarian they mean and can use the word and continue on their merry way.  People who don’t know each other will have to clarify if they want to be sure they are talking about the same thing.

Words are shortcuts.  Sometimes a shortcut will get you there faster. Sometimes a shortcut will get you lost.

It may seem like we are just fighting over words.  But it isn’t because of words that we fight. Words are just the imperfect tools we have to express the conflicts that are an inherent part of being human.

As humans, we fight to self identify rather than having other people label us.  We want to have our histories included and not obfuscated by the narrative of the “winners.”   We struggle with our desire to be understood.  We feel connections with people who have similar experiences to us. We try to find ways to honor the things we value most in life. We struggle to differentiate ourselves from people who don’t seem to value the things we do, even though that struggle is often just a reflexion of our own self hatred and self doubt. We use words to imagine how things might be.

Some words are more loaded than others.  The more complex the meaning of a word, the more care we should take when using it.  But when even a word as simple as blue can be misunderstood, is it really possible not to use loaded language?  How long would every conversation be if we removed every word that represents years of history and philosophical discourse?

We can’t stop fighting over words.  All we can really do is keep questioning and clarifying, both our own thoughts and the thoughts of those around us. We can keep in mind that words are understood through the lens of our experiences.  We can respect the history of words.  We can respect other people by allowing them to define themselves in the way that feels right to them. We can remember that words are sometimes weapons. And we can wield them with care.

Is feminism the only banner under which people can fight patriarchy, or better yet, kyriarchy?*

Is any act performed with the goal of ending gender oppression automatically feminist? Even if the people doing it don’t identify with feminism?  Even if feminism has consistently slapped them in the face?

I’ve been asked to explain why I don’t identify as feminist and I think I need to start with trying to answer those questions.  Because it seems to me that many feminists think that feminism is the only path to confronting oppression. That belief (I would say arrogance) is one of the primary reasons that I do not identify as feminist.

If feminism is the only path to confronting oppression, then what about Womanism? Are we to erase the experiences of black women who have very consciously chosen not to identify with feminism?  What about other marginalized people who have, after much consideration, chosen not to use the feminist label?

Read Women and Social Movements in Latin America and you will find a very ambivalent relationship between women’s movements and feminism.  Sometimes women don’t call themselves feminists because they see it as a movement of privileged white women. Sometimes, like in the case of the Bentia Galeana Women’s Council in Mexico, they don’t adopt the term because they cant come to any consensus about what feminism means.

Who can blame them for not being able to figure out what it means?  Some people say feminism is just about equality between the sexes.  Others say that it is about crushing patriarchy. Still others say that it is about confronting all forms of oppression.  There is liberal feminism, eco-feminism, radical feminism, anarcha-feminism, black feminism, Marxist feminism, sex positive feminism, and even conservative feminism (a la Ms. Palin). And the fights between the different feminists – who all have ideas about what is essential to feminism – are as bad as the fights between Anarchists and Marxists.  Or Anarcho-capitalists and Anarcho-communists.  Or…  You get the picture.

Now if you believe, as I do, that there are ways to fight oppression outside of the feminist label then the question becomes, does that label provide any added value?  Is it meaningful to me?  When I asked that question, the answer I came up with was no.  On the contrary. I think that when you adopt a label or belief system, you have to be willing to own up to all the things done in the name of that label.  And I am not prepared to accept the baggage of feminism.  I’ve got my hands full with anarchism.  Thank you very much.

If you want to read about the baggage of feminism, there are plenty of people who have written about it.  Read Jessica Valenti on gender essentialism.  Read Kimberle Crenshaw and Eve Ensler on feminists who ignored Hilary Clinton’s politics and supported her simply because she didn’t have a penis.  Read Monica Roberts on the long history of feminist transphobia.  Read about the battles between feminists and womanists.  Read about the experiences of sex workers:

we’re having to deal with the tremendous harms and human rights violations that have been done in the name of “feminism,” perpetrated against us to prove some theoretical point. When I started to work on the street in Montreal in 2001, for example, a number of feminist groups decided that they were going to go on the anti-prostitution rampage, and allied with right-wing people and religious groups to do so, which is not a strange combination. We have seen it in the United States when the powerful alliance between right-wing Christian groups, religious fundamentalists, and a number of mainstream feminist groups [cooperated] to pass aid restrictions to limit HIV funding to sex workers groups, at a tremendous cost to sex workers lives all over the world.

Now I know that some of you are thinking – Sure feminism has problems, but you should get in there and help fix it.

Why should I?

Some time back, one of the people I follow on twitter made the following comment, “Answering a situation of male exclusivity with female exclusivity is almost like celebrating your marginalization instead of fighting it.”  I suspect that it may have been in response to my talking about a conference for anti-authoritarian women.  (The conference was inspired by the sausage fest of an event that Libertopia was clearly going to be).

I never actually responded, but if I had I would have said the same basic thing I say to people who think I should help fix feminism.  I would rather build something that reflects my values.  I don’t have any desire or obligation to spend my precious time fixing your shit.  I have other shit I’d rather be fixing.  What’s more, are we really going to ask the most marginalized people to go in and fix feminism?  Are you going to tell a trans woman, who is in the line of fire every time she steps out of her house, to get closer to the shooter?  Who the hell are any of us to ask that?

While we are on the subject of responses to my non-feminism, let me tackle a few more things that will inevitably come up.

No.  I have not been brainwashed by the anti-feminist culture.  In fact, it is quite the opposite.  I have been surrounded my whole life by feminists.  I once worked for the former president of the Florida chapter of the National Organization for Women.  I would get waaaaay less shit if I would just cave and call myself a feminist.  My opinions on feminism do not come from listening to its detractors, they come from witnessing the actions of its proponents.

Which brings me to a more valid criticism, that I am judging feminism by liberal feminists. Well, yes.  I am.  Most of the feminists I have known in my life are liberal feminists who do not question the power structure, but merely want more women at the top of it.  It is true that anarcha-feminists do not fall into the same traps as liberals, but most feminists are not anarchists.  The idea that I should judge feminism by the margins is absurd.  Usually, we talk about how movements shouldn’t be judged by the extremes, but with feminists I’m supposed to turn that on its head and not judge the movement by the mushy center?

Truth be told, I thought about identifying as anarcha-feminist for half a second.  But it just didn’t make any sense.  If feminism is defined as being against all forms of oppression, then adding feminist to anarchist just seems redundant.  If it is about being against patriarchy and gender oppression, then it would seem to preference one type of oppression over another.  Cindy Milstein, at a recent event in Baltimore, described it in less negative terms. She said that the anarcho-adjectives symbolized not preference, but passion.  That’s fine.  If you are extra passionate about injustice related to gender oppression, more power to you. But I am not.  I may identify more when I hear about the injustices and abuses faced by women, but I am not more passionate about doing something about those injustices than I am about injustices due to race or class or disability or anything else.

None of this means that I am anti-feminist.  I can appreciate the accomplishments of feminists without being a feminist.  Just like I can appreciate the accomplishments of the Southern Christian Leadership Council without being a Christian.  I can appreciate feminist writings, philosophy and discourse without being a feminist.  Just like I can appreciate the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh or John Paul Sartre without being a Buddhist or an existentialist.

I get that identifying as feminist is meaningful to many people.  And if you want to inundate me with suggested reading that you think will change my mind about the whole thing, knock yourself out.  I keep an open mind.  Just don’t be so arrogant as to think that, because it holds such meaning for you, the rest of us have to agree or we are BAD.  Don’t forget that the movement you are so attached to has shit on a lot of people along the way. And don’t continue that tradition by disrespecting all the amazing women out there who are confronting oppression without the feminist label.

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* Since I posted this I have been enlightened on some of the more troubling aspects of the term kyriarchy.  You can read a very good post about it here (HT @QueerCoup).  I’m usually more careful with my language.  Had I done more 101, I might not have used the term.

That said, I don’t think it effects the crux of my arguments and I still stand by all the rest of it.

So I got into a little twitter spat a few weeks ago.  One of the people I follow made the following statement:

Some bloggers feel it’s better to be principled than in power.

Naturally, I objected. The conversation turned into one of those us v. them tropes.  Us, in the case of this twitterer, being  progressives.  Whatever that means.

We have to stop the conservatives.  We have to choose between “2 years of investigations about birth certificates, or trying to inch forward with our agenda.”  (I’m not sure what “our” agenda is.  Mine doesn’t include assassinations, American citizens or not, or massive bailouts to hedge funds.)

More importantly, it’s a false choice.  You don’t have to compromise your principles to have power.  You only have to compromise them to have the kind of corrupt, coercive power that has gotten us into this craphole.  Didn’t Martin Luther King have both power and principle?  How about Gandhi?  Emma Goldman?  James Baldwin?

The people whose power lasts are those whose power comes from their principles, not from selling their principles out.  It’s not naive to think that people shouldn’t sell their principles to power.  It’s naive to think that someone in power who has sold their principles can do us any good.

And now the progressives/democrats/liberals/whatever are out bemoaning their loss of congressional seats.  And they wonder why.  Hello out there!  People know when you are willing to sell out your principles and they generally don’t like it.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the actually tweet that started this all was referring to the five bloggers that Peter Daou thinks are “bringing down the Obama presidency.”  I thought I must have somehow made a mistake, that I was misunderstanding.  I mean surely it was not being suggested that the media should become a cheerleader for the democrats.  Guess it was my turn to be naive.  The twitter convo is below.   A third party jumped in.  He actually quoted Macchiavelli – - fucking Macchiavelli.  I kid you not.

And these people wonder why they keep losing.

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Me: I don’t understand.  You think Greenwald et al shouldn’t write about those things?

Shoq: I think they can be constructive critics without threatening to tear down any progress we’ve made against a rabid right.  In fact, it’s helping to drive us farther off a cliff.

Me: They aren’t working for the democratic party.  That’s not their job.

Shoq: I don’t work for them either.

Then this guy jumps in:

JeffersonObama: Greenwald, Olbermann should help the Dems by posting voting info and supporting all Americans opposed to Teabag sycophants

Me:  Journalists/Bloggers jobs are to tell it like they see it, to give people info to make informed choices…Despite what Fox may have people believe, it is not their job to be partisan hacks

JeffersonObama: Fox News is the reason their voters are organized to vote on election day..they have maps, sites & work with 501s, 527s & GOP

Me: So just our side and their side, leave your principles or honesty at the door.  Win, win, win..no thought to what you win?

JeffersonObama: Our bloggers tell our voters to hate Obama, our values and then fold up and run. Bloggers are Cowards. Some of us are fighting

Me: I’ve never heard Greenwald say people should hate Obama.  Being in lockstep with dems when they are wrong is not brave.

JeffersonObama: Simply, as Machiavelli writes, “The answer … it is far safer to be feared than loved if you cannot be both.” Stand up & fight

Me: LOL.  The only thing people seem afraid of is being principled even when it means giving up their “we’re the good guys” bs

JeffersonObama: Bloggers like you hate our party more than GOP. That’s fine, but at least don’t discourage our fighters to take on GOP-Teabags

Me: You miss the point.  I don’t hate.  And I definitely don’t make life out to be a football game btwn 2 teams of 9 yr olds

JeffersonObama: I’m not talking Football. I’m noyt talking low brow slogans..I’m talking about winning in politics..not meant for some obviously

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Headdesk.

P.S.  In case you missed it, Glenn Greenwald took Daou and the rest down.