A few days ago, while doing a walking meditation, I reflected on what I remembered of a recent discussion of a Zen koan – What’s the sound outside? It’s the sound of raindrops?[i] The discussion I heard was about inside and outside, emptiness and sound, sound and sound, listening and listening for. My memory of that discussion, while walking, slid into a trite, but ever-enchanting, thought about the fleck of my life in the universe, and I had a sensation of being matter inside and out, dust and dust, indistinguishable in that moment of space and continuous on the axes of time. Except, right in that thought or right alongside it, this dust contained desire inside and commitments outside, listening inside and raindrops outside. And I was exhilarated by both dust and desire. That memory and rather ecstatic moment took me to the old spiritual question – how do you reconcile the objective inertness of dust with the desire and activity of sentience? Here I use some language from the practice and writings of Zen Buddhism, but similar questions are raised throughout Buddhist and Daoist traditions and have analogs widely in other religious and philosophical traditions.
But this blog post is less a spiritual or philosophical inquiry and more a place to initiate and document the transformation of failure into joy of living in a universal sense and a kick in the pants in the short run. Failure is the dark side of desire. To be is dust, to live is to desire, and to desire is to fail. So, then, where is the joy? In that walking meditation, I felt, which here is the same as I thought, that being-as-dust not only does not exclude living with desire (temporality, corporeality, love of self, love of others, fear, and anger,) but fully permits desire. I can only live now, and living means living with desire. This is true even when living fully is simple and meditative, even when listening within is harmonic with raindrops outside. Desire most commonly means “I want.” While ‘desire’ often has a negative tinge to it and in contemporary discourse seems to be morally superseded by passion, I am using it in the general and value-neutral sense of an inexorable pressing within oneself towards or against something outside onseself. This pressing is by itself living, whatever its value according to this or that criterion, and whatever its success, however success is defined. Which brings me to failure. Success in living – whether being loved, winning something, or sensing the sublime in music, or food, or the greenness of a hill or something else – is easily linked to joy. Some variation of pleasure or satisfaction runs through the body. It is failure which is more difficult to link with joy, especially failure in the form of stasis or self-doubt. It is hard to see or feel joy when one desires something beyond one’s current state but there is no change, when one works in whatever way one can, when one searches here and there, and when one feels trapped, whether because of non-response from a world just carrying on or because of self-doubt that becomes a questioning of one’s desire or a palliative redirection towards apathetic gratitude for what one already has. But, I know from my ecstatic moment and my thinking since, that so long as one does not wallow in the apathetic gratitude – recognizing that what one is grateful for is precisely the foundation and fuel for desire – and so long as the questioning of one’s desire is honest and active, this is living! Actually, it’s living even if there is apathetic gratitude and dishonesty. Constraints and social valuation of what a person desires may change the direction and forms of her desire, but, if she’s living, what’s inside her will press out. This could be the heartbreaking, fatigued pressing-out of survival. Or it could be a well-fed, aggressive pressing out of a will to power. Or it could be any number of other expressions of desire. How do I say it without distracting tautology? That the pressing out is the joy of living. It is not about happiness or pleasure. It’s about being alive, with desire. As a side-note, this is fundamentally an amoral definition of the joy of living. What I desire and do in my joy of living may be shaped and countered by moral (and legal) perspectives that are larger than me, but my joy of living is an existential phenomenon in itself. So where does this take me? To the kick in the pants! Let dust be dust, let failure flourish, and let me get on with the activity of living. [i] Case 46 Kyosei's "Voice of the Raindrops" Main Subject: Kyosei asked a monk, "What is the noise outside?" The monk said, "That is the voice of the raindrops." Kyosei said, "Men's thinking is topsy-turvy. Deluded by their own selves, they pursue things." The monk asked, "What about yourself?" Kyosei said, "I was near it, but I am not deluded." The monk asked, "What do you mean by 'near it but not deluded'?" Kyosei said, "To say it in the sphere of realization may be easy, but to say it in the sphere of transcendence is difficult." Setcho's Verse: The empty hall resounds with the voice of the raindrops. Even a master fails to answer. If you say you have turned the current, You have no true understanding. Understanding? No understanding? Misty with rain, the northern and southern mountains. from The Blue Cliff Record, translated by Sekida (I took this from https://clearmindzen.blogspot.com/2009/06/koan.html)
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The US media has had an exciting year. They got to cover one of the most polarized, intoxicating, and prurient of Presidential elections ever. Everyone weighed in, all the mushrooming online outlets, the traditional paper press turned online, and television. They had a photogenic – albeit mostly in a funny way – candidate and a candidate whose stolidity, some surmised, could only hide layers of Machiavellian ambition. With very high stakes and appalling new twists every few days, the relevance of and popular addiction to news spiked. As boundaries between commentary and reporting blurred, readers and watchers often found opinion crowding out information.
Already in the months before the November election, the press started getting criticism, from across the political spectrum, for editorial bias, too much false equivalency, focusing too much on relatively trivial issues, and too little on important issues of policy; for simplistically reflecting and stoking drama, mudslinging, and divisiveness; and, yes, for offering entertainment and opinion more than analysis with enough of the data and logical structure revealed to allow the reader, or watcher, to explore the plausibility of conclusions other than that of the writer or speaker. After the election, the criticisms continued, with the added critique that the mainstream press was too slow to recognize and counter the spread and effects of “false news.” The press has engaged with some of the wide-ranging critique, most often acknowledging that there were important trends that they missed, but also defending their editorial choices, including the choice to prioritize opinion even in “news” articles. On December 8, 2016, the New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet was interviewed on National Public Radio. Terry Gross, the interviewer, read a letter to the NYT by a David Langford, who expressed dismay at the “continuing blurring between editorial commentary and news coverage. In another age, the word ‘baseless’ in your front-page headline would have been reserved for the editorial page where it belongs. The Times and other news organizations should resist the temptation to… drop their conclusion into news stories. Please allow me, the reader, to draw a conclusion for myself.” In his response, Baquet chose to defend the use of “powerful language,” side-stepping the larger question of opinion dominating information in news stories. As Baquet acknowledged – “I’ve said this to a lot of readers,” he said in the opening sentence of his response – there are a lot of people out there who are frustrated about opinion-creep in the US news media, and not just in the NYT. The media are not helped by the President-elect’s orientation to information. Mr. Trump blurs information, probability, investigation, wishful thinking, and certainty in idiosyncratic and alarming ways. A case in point is the current issue of the degree and intentionality of Russian hacking and influence in the recent Presidential election. On October 7, James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence who leads the 17 US intelligence agencies and Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson issued a joint statement that the US intelligence community “is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations…. [And,] based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.” The Trump campaign dismissed that statement. More recently, the CIA has offered the stronger view that the Russian government aimed to promote the election of Mr. Trump. Mr. Obama has instituted a deeper investigation, in which he is supported by various Democratic lawmakers as well as a few Republican lawmakers, most notably John McCain and Lindsay Graham both on the Senate Armed Services Committee. In a small side-twist, the FBI, while not denying that the hacking was directed from Russia, is hesitant to attribute intention to favor Mr. Trump. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has rejected the conclusions of the intelligence agencies he will lead as President of the United States and on December 11, 2016, in a Fox News interview, Mr. Trump said about the intelligence reports on Russian hacking that “It’s ridiculous…. I don’t believe it.” This is not, “I have questions, it is under investigation, we still need more evidence,” or anything like that, it is bluntly, “I don’t believe it.” So in an environment in which the media are already tending towards information-light and opinion-heavy reporting, the press is charged with covering a President-elect who has taken the prioritizing of opinion, in this case his own, to a whole new level. If information and logic are minimized to “I don’t believe it,” and “wrong” by the highest executive authority in the country, it leaves the press running behind, trying to substantiate, confirm, and correct as necessary. If in that effort to play its role of “watchdog of democracy,” the press counters OPINION with opinions, it will leave us in the electorate less and less informed and thus render our democracy more fragile. Over the last two decades, the press has had to adjust to the speed of aggregation, low barriers to spin-off articles, and overall pressure to update news rapidly, while revenues have fallen, resources and time for fact-checking, writing and editing have become tighter, and there is always someone ready to draw away your readers and audience with something – usually opinion, preferably polemical and polarizing – that is more entertaining. On October 14, 2016, Matt Taibbi, a superb writer for RollingStone, wrote a very clever and opinionated article on “The Fury and Failure of Donald Trump” in which he pointed out that the Presidential election campaigns were being run and presented as a “Campaign Reality Show” and the effect was “to reduce political thought to a simple binary choice.” When asked on Twitter what the role of the press has been and can be in relation to this “Campaign Reality Show,” he responded, “ It’s hard. The reality show format is too profitable for MSM [the mainstream media] to give up. The actors are not only unpaid, they pay us (in ads)!” The US media must do better than that. See my piece in The Asian Age (and Deccan Chronicle).
http://www.asianage.com/opinion/oped/071216/in-us-jewish-muslim-solidarity.html Note: My rumination on whiteness and the emergence of a post-white world is not an attack on specific people, nor on “white people” in general. Nor is it intended to reify color as denoting essential characteristics; rather, I am using “whiteness” and “non-whiteness” to denote a mix of cultural, political and economic positions that are loosely aligned with skin color and color identifications. Starting around the 16th century, economic-technological and geo-political shifts were accompanied by cultural and epistemological shifts that both fed the political and economic power of European (and then US settler white) nations and drew funding and legitimacy from that power. It should go without saying that “whiteness” is not intrinsically bad, but not only does “power corrupt,”* but the standard set by hegemonic elites prioritizes both the epistemological frameworks AND the security of those identify as and with those elites.
Today, with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as symptomatic events, we are seeing, in slow motion, an epochal, epistemological shift from whiteness as the standard of power and cognition to… well, we don’t know yet. This is a long process that started a few centuries ago as a resistance to colonialism which was the outward face of the setting in of whiteness as the ground from which knowledge is generated and assessed, as well as the ground from which power, in increasingly global terms, is asserted both beneficently and exploitatively. Globalism and globalization started with colonialism. Technological advances allowed for great increases in international trade and cultural exchanges, as well as more travel and migration. Resistance to the oppressive and patronizing aspects of colonial rule grew. And over the last five decades the decolonized increasingly claimed authority by owning and adapting the discourses and technologies of modernity. Globalism and globalization ballooned, with both white and non-white winners and losers. Interestingly but not surprisingly, the non-white winners were mostly aligned with what I am loosely summarizing as “white epistemology,” which has led to some symmetry between the nativism of non-white losers in majority non-white countries and the nativism of white losers in still-majority-white-but-likely-to-change countries. The process, indeed progress, of white nativism was heralded by Martin Heidegger, among others. Reading through the late October 2016 issue of the London Review of Books (LRB), I found Heidegger quoted in Malcolm Bull’s intensely pertinent review of his Black Notebooks:** "Our historical Dasein experiences with increasing distress and clarity that its future is equivalent to the naked either/or of saving Europe or its destruction. The possibility of saving, however, demands something double: (1) the protection of the European Vőlker from the Asiatic; (2) the overcoming of their own uprootedness and splintering." (from Heidegger’s 1936 ‘Europe and German Philosophy’) What Bull’s review does is link this early harking of the white (European/US) angst we are seeing in full flower almost a hundred years later to both a fascinating perspective on the necessary transformation of contemporary democracy proposed by the Russian political theorist, and Trump supporter, Alexander Dugin, and a pragmatic view of location-based rentiers (who accrue financial benefits simply by being citizens of economically and politically dominant countries) as proposed in Branko Milanovic’s analysis of inequality at the global scale. Bull tells us that Dugin draws on Heidegger to develop a “Fourth Political Theory” to replace the failed politics of liberalism, Marxism, and fascism, and explains: “Dugin takes Heidegger’s claim that the consummation of the essence of power can be seen in ‘planetarism’ as a reference to contemporary globalization – a moment when, as Heidegger prophetically described it, ‘the furthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically.’ In this context, the Fourth Political Theory offers the only viable alternative for all those who, like the Russians, ‘suffer their integration into global society as a loss of their own identity.’” In Bull’s recounting of the Heideggerian trajectory which Dugin adopts, “the plight of the abandonment of being” is the necessary condition for another beginning, a greatness that “can only be realized by ‘a seizing of, and persevering in the innermost and outermost mission of what is German [MC note – or “German” is generalizable to nativist for a particular national context].” Bull’s review gets really interesting and pertinent when he moves on from relatively familiar Heideggerian territory to Branko Milanovic’s work on inequality, twisting it cleverly into the trope of birth(erism) and thence into a plausible synthesis, “For anyone living in the West who is not in the highest 1 percent of global income, there is an economic incentive to think in Heideggerian terms: to stand firm on native soil and claim citizenship rent.” Bull’s path to this synthesis bears quoting here: “…As the economist Branko Milanovic has shown, the best predictor of your income is not your race or class but your birthplace…. …what Milanovic calls ‘citizenship rent’ (the increased income you get from doing the same job in one country rather than another)…. This helps explain why citizenship has suddenly gained more salience than class [MC note: not sure I agree with this]…. In a world where geographical location is the best predictor of economic outcomes, being indigenous counts for a lot, and the natural born citizen clause attached to the presidency of the US provides a model. If the presidency is not open to immigrants, why should other jobs be? Of course, the new nativism feeds off ingrained forms of racial prejudice. But it is conceptually distinct, not least because in terms of global income distribution race is (as would-be migrants are well aware) far less predictive than location. You don’t have to be racist to be a xenophobe, for as Levinas commented in an essay on Heidegger, ‘attachment to place’ is itself a ‘splitting of humanity into natives and strangers.’” While Bull’s review takes us through a joining of the Heideggerian narrative of plight to greatness with the pragmatics of a contemporary political economy of citizenship rents, along the way introducing us to the logic of a ‘Fourth Political Theory,’ two other reviews in the same issue of LRB bring whiteness back into the frame. One provides a view of the white US (masculine) left’s nostalgia for self-fashioning by the (Walden) pond, and the other is an explicit critique of white “racial paternalism” and insidious “evolutionism” in the field of international relations as it developed in the 20th century. Stefan Collini’s review of Mark Greif’s Against Everything: On Dishonest Times surprised me by seeming completely out of touch with discursive struggles today. It is a kind and bland review that left me wondering if that reflected more about Collini or about Greif. I am mentioning the review here only because its most striking image is of a man, most decidedly a man, who must “have the nerve to look steadily [at an object of discussion] and think.” The figure of Greif emerges, according to and reflected by Collini, as an American (decidedly white) man who thinks and learns slowly by the side of a beautiful pond. Collini expresses a polite impatience at the end of his review – “but somehow this existential quest has to be made to connect up with collective modes of responding to a world in which global capital threatens to pollute the waters of the pond, build condos around its edge, and prevent access for all but the very rich.” I read this penultimate sentence of the review as residual impatience with an aging, declining trope. Susan Pedersen reviews Robert Vitalis’ White World Order, Black Power Politics, which is a critical history of the field of international relations in the United States. Bluntly, she says, “and Vitalis is blunter,… international relations was supposed to figure out how to preserve white supremacy in a multiracial and increasingly interdependent world.” The history, as told, ends with a kind of “forgetting.” Pedersen tells us: "Mainstream scholars didn’t so much change their minds about race and empire as walk away from the question. Part of this shift was generational, as ambitious younger scholars turned towards bipolar rivalry as the hot new subject of research…. The horrific racial persecution of the Nazi regime had an impact too, delegitimizing explicit racial argument within the academy…. The 1960s would bring ‘race’ back to the academy – but mostly through new African-American studies programs, not political science or international relations…. [Vitalis] wants his discipline [MC note: as does Pedersen, it seems] to understand not only how central the category of race and the structures of racism were to its founding institutions and paradigms but also to see the erasure of that history not as progress but as repression, a wilful forgetting that has if anything made it less equipped to comprehend (much less to address) the shocking racial inequities that still mark both the American and the global order." Pedersen’s review of Vitalis’ book focuses on a familiar narrative of white supremacy and racial inequities. Reading it in the narrow context of Bull’s review of Heidegger’s notebooks and Collini’s review of Greif’s thinking man, and in the broader context of Brexit and Trump’s campaign and win, I see it as more evidence of a writhing, but still long, tail-end of a flipping system, in which “whiteness” is still the face of the greatest concentrations of political, economic, and, yes, intellectual life, but is increasingly threatened by its own growing patches of flaccid entitlement and contradictions, as well as by the increasing authority of post-white voices (including voices from powerful non-white states, voices of superb non-white intellectuals, as well as voices from bodies that look white but are seeking an idiom that is different from the conventional idiom of standard whiteness). I am intrigued by the notion of a “Fourth Political Theory,” but I won’t look for it in the nativist imaginings of Heidegger and Dugin. I believe that, for the most part, the emerging epistemology will leave behind the heroic, self-inventing, white man, whether left or right, though there will always be a role for heroic self-invention in human narratives, whether inspirational or autobiographical. A post-white globalism will emerge over the decades of this century, perhaps over centuries, not without pain, and certainly not a Utopia. Many of the current inequalities of global capitalism will continue and new hierarchies and oppressions will emerge. Does this mean that we should stick with the current, known system? I don’t think we have a choice. The system is changing. And there are exciting new possibilities for equity and beauty. But there are also sobering, very sobering, trajectories towards planetary dysfunction and increasing disparity between technologically-fuelled wealth and the drudgery and deprivation of those who are late, or unable, to access the technological means of production of the 21st century. So while a post-white world is likely to emerge, we will still need to demand rights and equity for all, teach our children that a just system is possible, continue to be open to dialogue and community, continue to speak up when we see inequity and injustice, and, most vitally, continue to defend our planet. * … to quote, quite comfortably, Lord Acton who was a small actor in the solidification of the primacy of the “Western tradition” as the top epistemology in a universe of otherwise lesser epistemologies. ** Of course, it is entirely part of the process to be using hegemonic epistemology itself to understand and critique the consistencies, contradictions, progress, and eventually supersession of that epistemology! We will not be outside that epistemology until we are outside that epistemology. One of the things Hillary Clinton did not do, possibly because she remained a “well-brought-up” woman, was to confront her critics head-on and aggressively, “you’re full of shit.” I just noticed that, in suppressing my own anger, I am doing the same. Some of my anger is directed at Trump, his supporters, the Republican Party, etc. That’s easily expressed in the echo chambers in which I live AND it’s pretty pointless anger. They owe me nothing, they operate on the basis of different values and worldviews from mine. More than anger, I see dialogue, strategy, and political action as relevant to engagement with Trump, his supporters, and Republicans.
The anger that I am suppressing most, that is most difficult for me to utter, is directed at those on the center-to-progressive-left spectrum who comfort themselves that it’s Clinton’s fault and the Democratic Party’s fault. Yes, there are things her campaign could’ve done better and DEFINITELY the Democratic party needs some major overhauling, but once she was elected candidate (by a large number of voters, not by some sneaky number gamed by the DNC), SHE was the alternative to Donald Trump. Those who identify as left-of-center, as Democrats, or as appalled-by-Trump, if you did not support Clinton, you chose Trump. If you held your nose and groaned and moaned about Clinton, you chose Trump because you chose to let innuendo and relatively unimportant Clinton mistakes remain hugely amplified, while ignoring the fact that for the most part she was always left of center, was shifted further left by Bernie Sanders and his campaign, was genuinely open to input on issues of equity, civil rights, the environment, was likely to be open (and with greater authority and responsibility than as Secretary of State) to new ways of engaging with deeply challenging and complex foreign policy issues, and in general pretty intelligent, competent, consistent, and honest on policy/governance issues. Yes, I understand that you disagreed with her spouse’s centrism and its legacies, you disliked her connection to big money, you were suspicious of her hawkish foreign policy positions (not all of her positions were hawkish), you were underwhelmed by her (apparent lack of) charm, you found her white-woman feminism too old-fashioned and classist, many of you were upset that your candidate lost, and once the DNC emails were published you very understandably were angry about the DNC’s favoring Clinton (not nice, but not surprising given her history with the Democratic Party and his history as an independent). But you had a choice. Nurse your grievances (or, like Susan Sarandon, stoke The Real Revolution), OR defeat Trump. Trump did not get more votes than Republican candidates in the past. Clinton got fewer votes than Democratic candidates in the past. I’ve seen posts that simplistically blame Clinton—well, it’s her fault she wasn’t popular enough. My anger is because it isn’t only her fault. Bernie Sanders did his part, Elizabeth Warren did her part, Michael Moore did his part, Barack and Michelle Obama did their part, but if you didn’t support Clinton openly and fully, you helped Trump get elected. I’m closing my participation in this long, critical, often painful, (sometimes, just sometimes, touching or funny) election with a bow to Hillary Clinton, and some thoughts about going forward.
I honor her efforts, her perseverance, her ambition, her many strengths (intelligence and doggedness, to name two), her commitment to women and children, her pragmatism, her consistency AND her willingness to change. I honor her imperfection. This will be an election we and our children will remember for the rest of our lives. We will remember Bernie Sanders opening up the left for Clinton and hopefully leaving behind a movement, the DNC’s decision to back one of their own, her many (many!) plans, her email server and #thosedamnemails, Wikileaks and the Russians, her pantsuits, the Comey effect, “whitelash,” the urban “elites” disconnection with the white working class and rural America, the return of sexual language about and with women, Obamacare premiums going up, the rising power of the Latinx vote, appalling media coverage, the continuing distrust of Hillary Clinton, the shocking losses in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. I hope I don’t remember Anthony Weiner. Donald Trump will be in my face for four years, so there’ll be layers of memories about him, escaping the leaden capsule in my mind I’ve tried to relegate them to. So now the election is over. If Clinton had won, there was a real chance of violence. I am both proud (and a little irritated) that Trump supporters can take for granted the kind of gracious concession Clinton offered, and nonviolence on the part of Clinton supporters and the left in general. So now the election is over minorities, especially Muslims, are under threat. Muslims are a small minority and there is, unfortunately, a very broad population of Americans who would be comfortable suspecting and restricting Muslims. Non-white Americans, the poor, the incarcerated, LGBTQ, and women are also likely to face threats to their rights, safety, and wellbeing. The environment is under threat. Trump has already indicated that he is committed to unravelling clean energy policies. Criminal justice and incarceration conditions are likely to get worse. In the stock market today, the private prison industry was a big winner. Healthcare will become less available AND more expensive. Big pharma will be restricted less, and so on. Now, what are we going to do? The midterm elections come up in two years. Meanwhile we need to focus on protecting the rights of minorities (I am particularly worried about the scapegoating of Muslims), LGBTQ, the incarcerated, women, and other groups that are likely to be vulnerable under Trump; on increasing equitable access to education, healthcare, healthy food, and housing; on protecting the environment. Let’s support local and state initiatives And work to turn the legislature in the midterm elections. Tim Kaine said (quoting Faulkner): “They killed us, but they ain’t whupped us yet.” YES! Clinton said: “Our campaign was never about one person or even one election.... Make sure your voices are heard.... There are more seasons to come.” YES! So, thank you Hillary Clinton! And now the work of citizenship in a democracy continues. Hillary Clinton FULL Concession Speech | Election 2016 Hillary Clinton formally and publicly conceded to Donald Trump this morning after an upset defeat in the presidential election. "Last night I congratulated… YOUTUBE.COM As a Bengali, I was aware that the second Presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump fell on this year’s Maha Ashtami of Durga Puja. As a feminist Indian-American, who has lived almost twice as many years in the United States as my early life in India, I noticed the resonance of this coincidence with a pair of paradoxes that have intrigued me since 1980.
These are the paradoxes. The United States, which has a fabulous history of feminism and women’s movements, with flaws and conflicts, but fabulous nonetheless, has continued to be uncomfortable with female authority and leadership over the thirty-six years I have lived here. India which, despite its own tradition of astoundingly strong and varied women’s movements, has remained widely attached to patriarchy – with daily manifestations that range from the relatively benign passes given to sons and men to the horrors of frequent and casual violence against girls and women – has seemed to me more comfortable with female authority and leadership than mainstream U.S. culture. Starting twenty-six years ago, with occasional updating, my German spouse has said he has yet to meet a “submissive” Indian (especially Bengali!) woman. Indira Gandhi dominated most of my youth in India, but I have also seen and heard numerous other female leaders in India – politicians, businesswomen, educators, and especially fiery civil society women on the left. Today, when I am in India, I am struck by the easy ambition of educated young women, even in the midst of frequent social and professional sexism. In the United States, by contrast, I notice that, in a context where more women are graduating from college than men, highly accomplished and evidently ambitious women censor themselves and almost palpably reduce themselves; or if one does not, she is disliked in a special, generalized way, as much by other women as by men. She is not simply “an” obnoxious woman or “a" flawed leader, she is the expression of the flaws of female authority, which, the mainstream response seems to suggest, easily overflows the banks of natural female goodness. The Hillary Rodham of 1970s American feminism had to become Hillary Rodham Clinton to claim, and inevitably self-constrain, herself even while seeking greater authority. Over the years, with input from anthropology, literature, frequent arguments, and my personal experience, I’ve come to believe that the difference in comfort with female authority and leadership comes down mainly to three things: first, female leaders in very hierarchical (caste/class) societies benefit from belonging to a traditionally privileged category; secondly, where education is accessible only to a very small proportion of the population, educated women gain inordinate status and authority simply from education; and finally the symbolic imaging of women, usually religious, hugely constrains, or amplifies, how women’s power can be imagined. Here I am focusing on the last. As a Bengali, I grew up with Kali and Durga – manifestations of Shakti, power itself. The image of a woman, as woman, fully a woman, fighting for right was something I saw everyday in my mother’s puja room and celebrated every year at Durga Puja. Bengal, perhaps, has power associated with goddess more than any other part of India, but the idea of female Shakti is commonplace in Hinduism throughout the subcontinent, in some places further amplified by animist honoring of female power to generate and protect, in many places influencing the non-Hindu religions of fellow Indians. In the majority Christian U.S., on the other hand, there is no powerful female figure in Protestant iconography and the powerful Catholic figure of the Virgin Mary is above all modest and obedient, attributes that correlate well with the Protestant ideal of a good woman. Growing up in India, the Virgin Mary had been one more powerful female figure among many, not only because I learned about her powerful influence with her son from the nuns who taught me, but these nuns themselves, far from the male centers of Catholic power, both symbolic and real, and surrounded by a hospitable but uninterested majority of non-Christians, were erudite and independent. In the way one absorbs assumptions without really thinking about them, I assumed that their erudition and independence was because they were powerful women of Christianity. Only after coming to the US did I grow to sense and learn that, in this majority Christian country, women are not associated with power. At their best, they are good. So this Maha Ashtami, as I waited to watch the debate, both outraged and wickedly amused by Trump’s “locker-room” hot mic, and as I rooted for the candidate who might be the first female President of the United States, I wondered again at these paradoxes, and the competition between powerful and good. In the end, the best leaders are both powerful and good. They, whether women or men, are usually not perfect with either attribute, but we who follow, or are governed, are doing well if they get most of it right. Early voting for the U.S. Presidential election has started, so if you are a U.S. citizen it’s time to choose.
The questions below should help you decide whether to vote, and whom to vote for. A. Whether or not to vote (beyond already existing self-motivation, and obvious right-and-duty reasons)… a. Is there any candidate, of the four running, who has a reasonable chance of winning, and who you think would be a terrible President? If you answer YES, then VOTE, and tell others to vote as well. B. Whom to vote for… For each question, and for each person, pick a score of 1-10, with 1 meaning least, and 10 meaning most.
ii. Hillary Clinton iii. Jill Stein iv. Gary Johnson 2. Who has been the most consistent policy-wise and “honest” in policy terms, in politically relevant roles that involve serving multiple constituencies with competing agendas? i. Donald Trump ii. Hillary Clinton iii. Jill Stein iv. Gary Johnson 3. Who is likely to win? i. Donald Trump ii. Hillary Clinton iii. Jill Stein iv. Gary Johnson 4. Who, once elected, is influence-able by you and people/legislators/politicians who hold your values/policy preferences? i. Donald Trump ii. Hillary Clinton iii. Jill Stein iv. Gary Johnson 5. Who, given her/his record, can be a canny and effective politician, working with legislators, bureaucrats, and foreign officials across a range of policy positions? i. Donald Trump ii. Hillary Clinton iii. Jill Stein iv. Gary Johnson Notice I don’t ask:
Time to choose, folks! Your choice should be the person who gets the highest total points. REGISTER AND VOTE! More than any other election I have experienced in the U.S., our current Presidential election is making me sick; I feel bloated with the nasty, unavoidable concoction of personality dissection, gossip, and partisan commentary I am fed everyday. I am not the only American who feels this way. We all play a role in the production and relentless distribution of this public pollution, but some of us have greater roles and greater opportunities for influence, and therefore greater responsibility for a political discourse, indeed a political culture, that is now a national disgrace. I hold as particularly responsible the two major parties (occasionally joined by the thin-voiced, childish mimicry of the Green Party and Libertarian candidates) and the media.
At lunch a few days ago, a friend tried to pinpoint when the shift happened from assessing Presidential candidates on the basis of what they stand for to what they are like, where what they are like is a shallow morass of un/successful image-creation, ability to sound like a living-room or bar buddy, common frailties, irrelevant transgressions of relatives and associates, shifting status on a prurient standard of sexual/gender correctness, and portentous judgment on private thoughts and communications that are increasingly publicized and read as the fundament of a “right to information” in democratic process. Attempts to present what candidates stand for in terms of potential policy and action, based on their past records and the substance of their current statements are covered over by either fear-mongering partisanship (…which the major parties now resort to with mind-numbing normality. If you read their emails to their supporters – a daily barrage – it appears that this is the basis of democratic politics in the US. And, yes, I fully intend the “equivalency" in my critique here.); or small-minded commentaries on character that may claim to have a moral basis, but end up sounding like the verbal sniping of a Hobbesian schoolyard. As a voter and a donor to campaigns, I have become increasingly frustrated by the way my party treats me like an ignorant partisan, and I have every reason to suppose that the other party does the same with its supporters.* I continue to believe that under the fluff of fear-mongering partisanship and personality-focused nonsense (both spiteful, usually about the opponent, and hagiographic, usually about one’s own candidate) that my party does hold the values that I hold about access to justice and wellbeing for all people in the country, and the role of government in creating conditions for such equality of access, but I find myself losing interest as the party and political campaigns seem simply to want to trigger me into sheep-like partisanship. I also would like to believe that the other party, under its own fluff of fear-mongering partisanship and personality-focused nonsense, holds values important to its supporters, including what they see as the role of government. I probably don’t share some number of their values and, for the most part, I disagree with their conclusions on the role of government and actual policies, but I’ve lost a sense of the substance of what the opposition stands for, given the irrelevancies they promote, presumably to trigger their supporters into simplistic partisanship. I would love to express my substantive disagreement in public argument and mobilize it in political contest, but, in our politically segregated lives, the space for public conversations across political differences is narrow and cross-partisan language is either politely flat, or poisonous. So I attribute significant responsibility to the major parties for the national disgrace of our politics and political discourse. But I hold the media, “the watchdog of democracy” (if this were a snapchat story, you would see and hear my snort), even more responsible than the major parties. As spouting “news,” indistinguishably from opinion and speculation, has become easier, news outlets compete to capture eyes and ears for their trivial, but often deliciously damaging, tidbits. As “right to information” becomes the right to uncover, publish, and comment on every private communication, regardless of its relevance to the substance of what a person, party, or platform stands for, the top news yesterday, for example, was about what Colin Powell said about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in private emails. I am interested in what Colin Powell would expect from a Republican candidate in terms of policy and governance and the ways in which Donald Trump falls short of his expectations; I am interested in what Powell would be concerned about with regard to Hillary Clinton’s leadership. I am not interested in his casual, abbreviated private judgments on either candidate. Pretty much everyday, I find articles that express, or defend against, snideness, spite, or gossip about the candidates, or even more irrelevantly, their families or associates. Sometimes these articles are routinely sensationalist, or colloquially written and unpretentiously pointless; other times they have a sober tone but belong to the same universe of amplified personality-, gossip-, and arena-style politics. Any critique (like this blog piece!) is ultimately sterile because by itself it does not recalibrate the functions and content of “news” and “media." And yet, I believe, the media with its new technologies, forms, and opportunities is the best equipped to shift our political culture back to substance, not just of personal character and capacity, not even just of the values that underly policies and the practical details of policies, but of the whole framework of values and policies of which a candidate is the face, as well as the legislative, knowledge, administrative, and civil society networks that necessarily undergird, drive, and contest those policies. Even while the internet and new social media have multiplied and amplified polarizing voices of innuendo and adulation, I have been astounded by the range and depth of information available to me with a network connection, and charmed by the way some people’s use of social media has shown me new ways to question and understand the world. Oddly, given my current cynicism and frustration, I am confident that journalists and commentators can craft a world of media that does the serious work of democratic public culture while keeping, if/as we must, the entertainment of free-wheeling burlesque and caricature. Will they? Will enough of them make an effort to draw us away from the untenable political culture we have today? * Communications strategists from both parties would do well to consider the framing, language, and tone of a recent letter by a long-time Republican Precinct Committeeman in Illinois, Chris Ladd. |
AuthorMeenakshi Chakraverti Archives
December 2023
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