A Political Strategy of Necessity and Hope

My endorsement for President of the United States, my vote, goes to David Cobb of the Green Party. Cobb's platform is nearest to my ideal platform, and his acknowledgement that voters in swing states should vote Kerry, in order to unseat the worst President many of us have ever known, may not satisfy the socialist in me, but it satisfies the pragmatist in me. I share Cobb's platform, and his desire to allow the very less-than-perfect John Kerry to assume the Presidency, regardless of Kerry's cosmopolitan, internationalist warmongering, regardless of his super-rich Skull-and-Bones background. I share the desire of most people on the Left (most of whom might prefer otherwise at other times) simply to pull us back from the brink of doom, to gain a little breathing room, a little space. I know it's not much space, but for now, assuming Bush is beatable, it will have to do. Only those of you who know me personally can guess how much it pains me to say this.

Without qualification or hesitation, in a modality of full convinction, I must declare that George W. Bush is the worst President of my lifetime. Bush is not merely unlikable, incompetent, dishonest, and undiplomatic, although he is all of these things to a degree unprecedented in bourgeois politics. Bush has raised the bar on ruling class evil. Even by the standards of bourgeois politics, he is a miserable, lecherous failure, a disgrace to his corporation, a figure who has uniquely mobilized and unified his opposition to a level not seen since Reagan, and who will undoubtedly surpass Reagan in such accomplishment, due to Bush's complete failure to even attempt a rhetoric of unification or national familialism. Those of you who wish for a world of free markets, global exchange, and unlimited corporate power ought to reject Bush simply because a conservative political movement ought not embrace a bad leader--he simply makes all of you look very, very bad. On the other hand, those who long for limits on or alternatives to corporate oligarchy have already rejected Bush, and one can only hope that his across-the-board idiotic malevolence will result in his defeat.

But it's doubtful that the former interest group--those who believe in capitalism and conservatism--will ultimately grasp the importance of having a competent spokesperson, or that Bush's greatest virtue to progressives has been his utterly reliable return to the worldviews of Herbert Hoover. Blinded by the power-grab of the last four years, conservatives have forgotten what happens when one lands without a parachute. That landing very well may not occur a week from today, but occur it will. In fact, I have long wondered whether Bush and his cronies came into office assuming they only had one term in which to move the country as far to the right as possible. To this end, Bush has gutted even moderate environmental regulations and has appointed an Interior Secretary determined to drill, dig, and explode no matter what the cost, the more pristine the target, the better. Bush has overseen an unprecedented increase in unemployment and has endorsed cuts in social services that make Reagan look like Che Guevara. He has sliced and diced bipartisanship and has created an administration of unparallelled secrecy and corporate beholdence. Reagan and Bush the Elder and even Clinton flirted with, sometimes slept with, corporations; George W. Bush routinely performs fellatio on even the sleaziest players in the corporate world. And this is hardly surprising given Bush's key co-workers, including the world's leading profiteer of destruction, Wyoming's own Dick Cheney. And you'll notice I haven't even mentioned the debacle of Iraq, the war whose "justifications" I will always use, far too easily, as a foil in my lectures on deliberative democracy. A sign I saw on the news the other day put it best: "Daddy's Little War Criminal."

I am unimpressed by the apologists who acknowledge Bush's incompetence but refuse to judge his morality. Why is it that we can (and, in my opinion, ought to) condemn politicians caught in small lies but not big whoppers? We have testimony from former key administration figures that Bush knew there was likely no connection between Iraq and September 11. He could not have NOT known of the flaws in intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction. He cannot credibly claim that he did not know that many military planners and brass were warning him of the impending failure of an attempt to occupy and transform Iraq. Not as stupid as he looks or sounds, he must have known the qualitative difference between the opinions of Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz. As it happens, I am not a fan of either of these people, but like I said before, Bush is a failure even by the standards of bourgeois politics. And in the case of Iraq, that "failure," whether in the final analysis it was deliberate or incompetent, has cost the lives of over a thousand American workers in uniform, and many thousands of Iraqis--whose lives are worth just as much as yours or mine.

Rather than "fighting" the "war on terror," Bush has exacerbated terrorism--and not only, in the language of liberal internationalism, by "fracturing alliances," but by continuing to uphold a paradigm guaranteeing poverty and misery for millions worldwide. Those claiming to speak for the impoverished, those who resort to the murder of innocents, are not heroes or revolutionaries; in fact they are more accurately described as mirror-images of Bush himself, more examples of the byproducts of an alienated and deeply hierarchical world, cynics who take advantage of hatred stirred by hunger. The circle is in full motion now and will continue to turn as long as Bush's neoconservatives rule the White House--create the conditions under which terrorism can thrive, then point to that terrorism as evidence that we must continue to "stay the course." Stanley Kubric would be proud, but the rest of us should be very, very angry.

That this undeniable collection of facts probably will not result in Bush's defeat is cause for severe discombobulation among Bush haters. They see statistics like those published last week by the Program on International Policy Attitudes and Knowledge Networks, showing that 72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD or a major program for developing them...or that a slightly larger percentage believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda. They hear their co-workers defend Bush's lack of articulate speech, his smirking attitude, his "cowboy" [as a Wyoming Poke I object to this comparison] attitude, because he reminds them of...them. These are the fruits of an alienated, cynical electorate, half-steeped in the belief that the greed of the powerful somehow works in their interests, half-immersed in the spurious and convoluted mythology of Apocalypse and American exceptionalism.

Because a victory for John Kerry will at best only delay the impacts of such alienation and power inequality, because Kerry is at best a more reasonable, efficient and diplomatic corporate-militarist, I cannot endorse him except in the same indirect and reluctant way that David Cobb "endorses" him. I want Kerry to beat Bush, and so should you, but none of us should feel that it's nearly enough for that to happen. We must defeat Bush AND build alternatives to the world that makes bastards like Bush possible in the first place. As Cobb puts it, in simple, nuanced language:

"John Kerry voted for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. John Kerry voted for the
Patriot Act. John Kerry voted for NAFTA. Kerry opposes single payer universal
health care. Kerry opposes raising the minimum wage to a living wage. I'm going
to be willing to criticize John Kerry on taking positions that progressives
cannot support, and that progressives would like to see enacted. That's the
reason so many more progressives at the grassroots level are actually joining
the Green Party. At the same time, I'm going to acknowledge the truth of the
matter that as bad as John Kerry is on all these issues, George W. Bush is
qualitatively worse. The difference between John Kerry and George W. Bush may be
nearly incremental, but it is not inconsequential."

And so I urge people in "safe" states to vote for the third party progressive candidate of their choice--mine, for now, is David Cobb. And I cautiously respect the choice of those in swing states to do the same. I will defend you from the onslaught of angry Democrats who think they own your vote even though their candidate is perhaps the least principled and most opportunistic Democrat we've seen since...um...Bill Clinton. But the smarter thing to do if you're in a state with a close race is to hold your nose, as they say, and vote for John Kerry. For those on the Left, it's the difference between building our movement from a position of relative security, and trying to build anything at all with a boot crushing our collective throat--in this case, a faux cowboy boot worn by a bumbling, narrow-minded, pro-corporate child of privilege who has, in the past four years, created an America where I am frankly afraid to raise my children. Fuck George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Let's do whatever we can not only to send them back to their vaults, but to create a world where leaders like them don't exist. Voting for Kerry may help achieve the former, but supporting David Cobb and other progressives is vital to achieving the latter. If we're smart and persistant, we will not always have to engage in such dissonant and troubling strategies.

Soldiers' Refusal to Follow the Orders of War Criminals

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/oct2004/iraq-o21.shtml

Three important arguments in this article:
1. Refusal is a legitimate response to illegitimate orders in an illegitimate war.
2. No bourgeois alternatives to war: The choices are stay the course or intensify.
3. Through a series of illegal policies and reckless or sloppy planning, troops have been unnecessarily placed in harm's way throughout the conflict. I wonder if any of the planners, Generals, or politicians will ever be held accountable for that.

I'll spot you that their alternative, complete withdrawal of all outside forces, is problematic. It is a problematicity the WSWS did not itself construct. And to those who point out that things are gradually getting better, and we should stay the course, or intensify, I can only say that the costs are so incredibly disproportionate to the benefits that Bush and his staff, and every Senator and Congressperson who voted to authorize the war, ought to be taken out and publicly flogged. Whether Bush is eligible for the death penalty (either under Iraqi or U.S. law), I leave to all of you to discuss.

Jacques Derrida

"God the king does not know how to write, but that ignorance or incapacity only testifies to his sovereign independence. He has no need to write. He speaks, he says, he dictates, and his word suffices. Whether a scribe from his secretarial staff then adds the supplement of a transcription or not, that consignment is always in essence secondary." (Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy")

I was taken aback, and saddened, to hear of the death of Jacques Derrida. Since reading him in college, I have held the unconventional view that he was a good writer--even, at times, a terribly clear one--and an enjoyable read regardless of your politics or ontology. Derrida brought fun into philosophy for me. The idea of interrogating Greek pharmacies, or using postcards as critical media, or re-interpreting age old maxims and laws as questions and riddles, testifies to how much fun it is to think about thought, speech and writing.

Derrida was one of the relatively few figures I'd grown to love in philosophy before discovering them again in rhetoric. And therein lay part of the reason for my enchantment with him. Besides being enjoyable (see my story of the class discussion on deconstruction below), Derrida instantiated a theme that Rob Tucker, then at Long Beach, brought up on the second or third day of my very first grad seminar class. The idea is this: Philosophy traditionally seeks certainty while rhetoric, from the beginning, displays a methodological respect for uncertainty. Since the object of rhetoric, persuasion, is infinitely subjective even while occasionally surrendering to a formula or principle, the study of rhetoric cannot too strongly concern itself with consistency, predictability, etc. While one side of Communication Studies devotes itself to quantitative studies and experiments, rhetoric's commitment to uncertainty is firmly established even in most of its ancient and classical manifestations.

No surprise, then, that most rhetoricians I know share a desire for and commitment to liberal (and in some cases participatory) democratic politics. Philosophy, or at least a common strain of it, is anti-uncertainty and hence, albeit subtly, anti-democratic. And no surprise that Derrida was part of our introductory survey of rhetorical theory. So we studied Gorgias...Cicero...Aristotle...a bunch of medieval guys...Campbell, Burke, Perlman, and now Derrida and Habermas. Two of my classmates and I were assigned to present a lecture on Derrida on rhetoric. Using power point (the only time I ever used it; one of us was in advertising and knew all the bells and whistles) we explained deconstruction in its simplest terms with moving pictures of cartoon words. Does "pines" refer to trees, or could it mean loneliness? How can we put the dominant meaning of something on the bottom, and center the marginalized one, even for a minute or so, to destabilize the whole foundation and remind us of the precariousness of meaning? The three of us had fun playing with meaning, and it provided me a moment of enjoyment among two fairly unenjoyable years, and I was reminded of a time, back as an undergraduate at BYU, enveloped in philosophy and the Student Review, when deconstruction and Marxism were complimentary, enjoyable political strategies.

Derrida still manages to escape what is now, for me, a comprehensive abandonment and critique of postmodern politics. He openly respected Marxism, was capable of seeing the USSR for what it really was, didn't buy into the various ways in which the abandonment of universal meaning feeds the commodification of culture. As an Algerian and a Jew he understood both colonialism and prejudice in senses so deep that arguments against oppression became enthemymatic foundations of Derrida's style and content.

Dana Cloud has eloquently pointed out that materialism isn't incompatable with the most important lessons of poststructuralism, concerning an awareness of the precariousness of form and the sense of wonder involved in theorizing. Likewise, I always felt that I would very much like to make a world for the Jacques Derridas, the Michels, Jurgens, and Emmanuels, where they would be free to create a politics of uncertainty without being hijacked by power, class divisions, and instrumental rationality. Of course, all of those thinkers would respond that in making such a world I would likely ignore the ways in which power and hierarchy diffuse themselves into language, interpersonal relations, bureaucracy, and ethics. Like the others, Derrida's sympathy for the socialist project was tempered by his suspicion of socialist (and especially Marxist) self-certainty.

75 is way too young to die. Derrida, like Levinas, struck me as friendly and deeply loving at the core of everything he wrote and said publicly. He cheerfully kicked John Searl's ass in their debate over meaning in Limited Inc. (although the clowns at Utah didn't see it that way as they fawned over the comparatively meanspirited Searl when he visited there). He painstakingly researched and composed the thick, beautiful, Joyce-like Politics of Friendship which may, in a few years be rediscovered and utilized to lay the foundations of a new ethic of care. He was friendly to the thousands of students in Southern California who would journey to see him lecture at UC Irvine. He remained friendly to everyone, it seems, in the face of some very unfriendly commentaries and dismissals. Some of you might remember when Allen Bloom and his half-talented entourage of neocons spent that week at BYU back in '90 (or was it '91?). Bloom or Stanley Rosen, I can't remember, said "Well, we should always remember Derrida was a C student." Yeah, I thought, and you guys are all crypto-fascists afraid to publicly admit your homosexuality. Derrida had a field day with his adversaries, but always respected them--a goodness I know I lack.

So I say goodbye to a friend who was always willing to be an entertaining fellow traveler, and occasionally, when I needed to be reminded not to be so sure, so dogmatic, a teacher as well. In a way, he mystified this rigid, working class student, and I embraced the confusion and learned to read a lot of it, and even write a bit. I associate his words and ideas with smiles and laughter in classrooms, and we need more of that...perhaps also in radical politics.

Cheney B+, Edwards B, and the poor are still poor... For the last week I've been reading list serve postings about whether being a good or bad "debater" matters. For some, it matters as much as whether or not Clinton could play the saxaphone, maybe even less. And here was an instance of two men, one more comfortable in a boardroom, the other more comfortable in a courtroom, meeting on common ground of equal discomfort to both. Being the better debater in this debate mattered. Being a good debater is a sign of competance, grace under pressure, and the ability to process information. Anyone who says those aren't essential qualities in a political leader is smoking their lunch.

Cheney B+, Edwards B. Not the crushing of last Thursday, but a confident, lucid, intelligent Cheney edging a not-at-his-best Edwards. Not really surprising to people in Wyoming, but maybe to others. Cheney was the better debater even without the preponderance of facts on his side. Edwards had a large job to do, to establish the continuity and continue the momentum of last week's ass-whipping by Kerry, and he didn't do as well as he should have.

The most brilliant move by Cheney occurred more than once: He surrendered his rebuttal time (not something that would ever occur in a competitive debate!) and in doing so came off as calm and in control of the debate. Overall, the Vice President appeared more comfortable and natural than I have ever seen him. He even effectively negated Edwards' overused appeal to his humble working class origins--it appears Cheney may have come from a similar background.

Edwards simply had more "awkward" moments in the debate, accidentally breaking debate rules, even interrupting Cheney. Furthermore, Edwards was at best unremarkable. He's clearly better with crowds than he is in this forum. And we didn't hear Edwards usual, very effective (albeit shallow) rhetoric of class divisions.

Not that this matters much, but I still think Edwards was ahead on the facts. The current administration enjoys the advantage of the specificity of its own policies over the (inevitable) vagueness of the challengers. But this strength is also a weakness, and Edwards did one thing right in this debate: Where Cheney humdrumly hammered Kerry's voting record (and not very specifically), Edwards effectively extended the points from last week's debate on Iraqi faulure and the administration's own "flip flops." The effectiveness of Edwards' attack on Halliburton was visible by Cheney's nonverbal reactions as well as his non-responsiveness. These are things that, for better or worse, the Democrats need to pound home if they want to win this election. The arguments Cheney didn't deal with, chose to virtually ignore, were centered around a common theme of corporate greed and economic inequality, from corporate flight to tax cuts for the rich, and including Halliburton, which represents a rare intersection of foreign policy and domestic class inequality.

Edwards' closing statement was ambitious and fairly effective. Cheney's was competant but uninspiring. Neither side performed nearly as well as Kerry did, or nearly as badly as Bush. If this were scored on a five-point-must system, it would be Cheney 3-2 over Edwards.

Kerry Overwhelms Bush in First Debate

It was a busy, fun day Thursday. I did three television interviews on the debates, and I'd love to keep doing that. I respect the political sensibilities of these local journalists, and Wyoming is a state full of political junkies and colorful political characters. But as objective as I was watching the debates (remember, I ain't voting for either of these rich gentlemen), and as non-partisan as I wanted to be, out of respect for Wyoming's independent spirit (yeah, call me sentimental), the debate was simply too one-sided to be diplomatic. I didn't say "country ass-whoopin'" on the air, but that's exactly what it was.

From every conceivable angle, John Kerry won this first debate. He was articulate, efficient, and firm in his delivery, while Bush seemed hesitant and uncomfortable from beginning to end. Kerry had both substance and style on his side. His themes of multilateralism, military strength, and honesty with the American people were better explained--with specific examples and eloquent word economy-- than Bush’s tired re-hashing of “stay the course” slogans and platitudes. It’s impossible to know if this substantive difference will turn the election (my guess is that the debates only matter to around 5-10% of likely voters by now), but Kerry won this debate line by line. Even Republican pundits acknowledged this was a bad night for Bush. Kerry was able to point out what Bush hasn’t done in the war on terror, and in this theme he matched Bush fact for fact. He was particularly effective in pointing out examples of Bush’s lack of candor with the American people. Kerry’s specificity and efficient delivery were dominant motifs in the debate. Bush always comes off as earnest and natural, but in this instance it also meant he was not “on point.” I assume the President’s handlers concluded that it was best not to over-prepare their candidate. Because of this, Bush only occasionally did a good job checking back some of Kerry’s assertions, particularly in the case of North Korea. But too often, the President focused more on Kerry’s words than on his policies. Bush’s biggest problem was that he seemed surprised when asked questions, and aghast that Kerry came into the debate with so much preparation and confidence. There is no greater weakness in a debate than showing surprise and a lack of preparation.

We saw many of the same old Bush gaffes: His circular logic about the presence of terrorism in post-invasion Iraq. His repetition of content-free phrases, in this case “It’s hard” (which he said multiple times) and “We must win” (which is obvious and really doesn’t favor either side in the debate). As many commentators pointed out, the President just looked like he didn’t want to be there.

By the end of the debate I had counted at least five arguments Bush did not respond to, including Kerry’s point about the mishandling of chance to get Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan; Bush’s failure to consult Congress on the war; Bush’s promises to work multilaterally and his subsequent failure, the issue of loose nuclear weapons; and the perception that the U.S. has nefarious long-term strategic designs on the Middle East. In contrast, Kerry could have done a better job responding to charges of inconsistency on Iraq, and Bush was able to keep up with him on the North Korea debate, but these two debaters were traveling at different speeds, and Kerry just had a lot more to say.

Stylistically, the debate was probably a tie, but given the expectations that Kerry would come off as arrogant and overbearing, even a tie is a victory for the challenger. For while Bush’s terminal stammering and hesitancy has never alienated his constituency, who’d rather elect someone who sounds like them than someone who sounds like Kerry, the real surprise of the debate was that John Kerry did not come off as arrogant or condescending in the same way that Al Gore did four years ago--although there may have been a point where his uber-confidence could be interpreted as overconfidence. There is always a risk that domination in a debate will translate, in the minds of the audience, into overkill. This is a charge that some may level against Kerry, but pursuing that charge would require that we forget Kerry’s unquestionably superior job of handling the facts, narratives, and image-management of the debate.

The best section of the debate for President Bush was certainly his concluding speech. Undoubtedly rehearsed, these concluding remarks contained energy, articulation, and content—precisely those things he was missing in the body of the debate itself.

Ellen Willis. “The Mass Psychology of Terrorism.” http://journalism.nyu.edu/faculty/files/Willis-The%20Mass%20Psychology%20of%20Terrorism.pdf

The title is provocative because it is derived from Wilhelm Reich’s landmark study The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Before he lapsed into insanity in the 1950s, Reich was concerned with the interaction of sexuality and materiality--sex and economics. Hence, instead of Marx's "political economy" we have Reich's "sexual economy."

In The Mass Psychology of Fascism Reich argued that repressive sexual morality, a strong paternal/patriarchal culture, and deep class divisions combined to make fascism possible in Germany, and that in a more general sense, societies that repress sexuality (particularly among women) are more likely to go to war, treat minorities with brutality, and accept strong, charismatic, authoritarian leaders.

Writing of Reich’s theories, Paul Edwards paraphrases them this way:

“'Intellectual arguments are no match for the "most powerful emotion" on which the mass-psychological influence of religious institutions is based: sexual anxiety and sexual repression.” (http://www.christianism.com/articles/article14.html) This perspective answers Aristotle’s optimistic argument in The Rhetoric that “things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites.” If we are trying to discover why better arguments don’t “win out” over bad ones, one way we can look is to the unconscious. And for Reich, this unconscious neurosis can be collective as well as individual—hence, “mass psychology.”

Willis agrees in the context of September 11:

Without understanding the psycho-sexual aspect of political violence and
domination-and the cultural questions with which it is intertwined-we cannot
make sense of what happened on September 11; indeed, we cannot make sense of the history of the 20th century. I don't propose that we discuss psychosexual
politics instead of the very real, and certainly 1 crucial, economic and
geopolitical issues that have shaped the Middle Eastern and ': South Asian
condition, from oil to the legacy of colonialism and the Cold War to the
ascendancy of neoliberalism to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rather, my
claim is that the particular kind of crisis Islamic fundamentalism represents
erupts when economic and geopolitical issues converge with cultural and
psychosexual conflict.

Because insofar as radical Islam is a reaction against modernity, it is a reaction against sexual liberation—particularly the liberation of women. And I believe that, while radical Islam often takes on Marxist rhetorical trappings in order to criticize the impact of neoliberalism on traditional societies, the conclusions and strategies of radical Islam (violence against women, heterosexism, capital punishment, and anti-Semitism) would be shunned by any progressive anti-capitalists, Marxist or not.

If September 11 signaled the breakdown of liberal democratic capitalism, radical Islam is the fascism of the 21st century.

Back to Willis:

Willis takes issue with Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis. Huntington simply assumes that cultures, holding different metaphysical assumptions, must inevitably clash. Willis responds:

this is not a question of 'East versus West. The struggle of democratic
secularism, religious tolerance, individual freedom, and feminism against
authoritarian patriarchal religion, culture, and morality is going on all over
the world. That includes the Islamic world, where dissidents are regularly
jailed, killed, exiled, or merely intimidated and silenced by autocratic
governments. In Iran the mullahs still have power, but young people are in open
revolt against the Islamic regime.

Instead, according to Willis, what drives each side’s clash is patriarchal sexual repression, although this is manifest in different ways:

The patriarchal religions have served to reinforce this moral system with their
conception of God as the ultimate parent; insofar as they retain social
authority or political power, their appeal to the inner force of conscience is
backed up by communal and legal sanctions.

Willis is quick to point out that religion and spirituality also offer liberation from these things…but remember that Reich was speaking of the co-influence of sexual repression and economic hierarchy. In that context, we can posit that the economically powerful classes can often inscribe their own self-serving interpretations of religion which, they will ensure, will not offer liberation—sexual or otherwise—to ordinary people.

Willis asks:

Might religiously motivated violence, in particular, combine a longing for
spiritual transcendence with guilt transmuted into self-righteous zeal and
rage rationalized as service to God?

Based on this question, Willis also addresses issues of anti-semitism (the perception of Jews as infidels “violating” sacred space), the threat of secularization, and the necessity for progressive activists to understand the links between culture (which includes sexuality) and politics (which is traditionally viewed merely as state-to-state relations). She takes the left to task for ignoring the authoritarianism of some anti-imperialist regimes (Cuba, for example)…hinting that this ignorance may be due to the left’s separation of sexuality from the rest of politics.

She concludes that culture “is a matter of life and death,” and September 11 demonstrates this. “It remains to be seen,” she writes, “whether fear of terrorism will trump the fear of facing our own psychosexual contradictions.”

A Few Interesting Links

Too busy to write anything reflective this week, but in cleaning out my various inboxes, I thought I'd share some links...a few genuinely interesting ones, and some others that are worth a look, a laugh, a good cry, or a dramatic cringe:

Site soliciting testimony of "ordinary Americans" explaining why they won't vote for Bush.
http://www.abbessay.net/

A messy, busy anti-Bush site.
http://www.anti-bush.com/index2.html

A site made by some people I sort of respect, but now full of Ann Coulter wannabees and poor thinkers:
http://www.youngelephant.com/

ACLU's report on an emerging "surveillance industrial complex"
www.aclu.org/surveillance

The trailer for Trey Parker and Matt Stone's scandalous "Team America."
http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/team_america/.

James Hart, open racist, Republican candidate for Congress from Tennessee.
http://www.jameshartforcongress.com/

And more on James Hart.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1278071,00.html

The Republicans are VERY embarassed about him.
http://www.wkrn.com/global/story.asp?s=2162355&ClientType=Printable

END-OF-SUMMER MUSINGS

Stannard calls the Presidential Election in August!

I am calling the election here and now. Bush will narrowly defeat Kerry. This despite a weakened Nader and a Green Party Presidential candidate who is openly calling on people in swing states to vote for Kerry. The Democrats' attempt to out-military and out-patriot the Republicans (whatever the cogency of many of the arguments made during their convention) has already backfired. The Republicans will prove that nobody can do that to them. At their convention, they'll launch a patriotic, militaristic orgy the likes of which have never been seen. Bush will continue to turn his weaknesses into strengths. The Democrats can't present an articulate alternative, because they simply don't have one. "We're slightly less corporate and slightly less militaristic" doesn't cut it. A whole lot of people won't be allowed to vote anyway. Four more years, this time with an incumbent President Bush, will drive many progressives to demoralization and emigration. Will I be proven wrong about any of this? I sincerely hope so. But if I am, I'll publicly say "I am a idiot." (sic) Let's see what happens.


If They Could, They'd Pass Legislation to Pay Us in Toothpicks and Chicklets

The new Bush overtime regulations go into effect tomorrow, and all credible indications are that they will be a disaster for workers like my wife, Ann. Read the AFL-CIO's fact sheet and feel free to post anything which suggests they might be wrong in their interpretation. Ann and I hope they are...our bank account hopes it, Ann's back and muscles hope it, our son Andrew would hope it were he able to articulate such hopes at 16 months of age.

Notes on Class and Materiality in Debate
(lecture delivered at Wyoming Debate Cooperative, August 2, 2004, Laramie)

I'm going to assume most of you know what Marxism is, what its basic theory is. I hope that if you don't, you'll go back and re-trace some of the terms and ideas you hear in the lecture, maybe learn a little bit about Marxism and then come back and read the lecture (available online). I am happy to talk to you about those basics if you find me.

What is Marxist criticism? Before I try and explain it, let me give you a living example of it:

This is what Wesley Clark said at the Democratic convention in his very appealing speech:

“I am an American soldier. Our country has been attacked. We are at war. Our nation is at risk. And we are engaged in a life-and-death struggle against terrorists.... As we are gathered here tonight, our armed forces are in combat.”

Each of these sentences contain certain rhetorical acts of identification with something called the United States. Identification is a powerful and foundational rhetorical act, and one is justified in questioning the thing with which the speaker identifies. In 1990, as plans were being made to attack Iraq, and before I knew much about socialism, I commented to a friend in the Socialist Workers Party that I had heard someone say "We have to stop Saddam," yada yada yada. The friend replied: Next time, ask, "Who is we?"

That response is a good way to approach Marxism from the inside out. For "We have to stop Saddam" could easily mean the "we" of those of us who would never make such decisions, or it could mean those of us who are conscripts for either side of the battle, or it could mean "we Americans," those who identify with America as a nation, a kind of really big family. And it's an insidious kind of process, forgetting that you do it, never knowing or giving much thought to who "we" is. From there, when you start thinking about that, you then think about how you really don't get to make these monumental decisions, and maybe you'd do it differently, and isn't it true that all you really know about Iraq and Saddam is stuff you read in the papers or hear on radio or TV? And when you read more complex literature, journals or independent press, for example, you start to notice it's much more complicated than it is on TV. And again, it strikes you that you're being made part of a "we" that doesn't really mean you.

All of this is independent of the question of whether or not a set of rational actors, given the ability to fully consider their options and potential consequences, would choose to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

I want to talk to you about how to apply Marxist thought in academic debates. First, I'll provide a brief review of Marxist thought, then I will talk for a bit about the basic substantive debate over capitalism and its alternatives. Finally, I want to spend the majority of this presentation talking about the untapped critical potential of thinking about class and materiality in a forum where we advocate various kinds of material, collective actions.

Why is it important to talk about materiality in debate?

-Dana Cloud: Current rhetoric, and rhetorical theory, tends to believe that speech acts occur prior to materiality, that the speech act and symbol are primary. It leads us to believe that we can change social institutions by changing words or ideas. But "workers can't eat symbols."

-Debate itself has been saturated with discursive determinism. We constantly hear that the "criticism" de jure will change things. Or that we need a "mindset shift." We seldom hear that we need a change in material conditions. In fact, the more enamored we have become with idealism, or discursive determinism, the less "the plan" seems to matter. After all, our talking is the only thing that's real.

Brief Review of Marxism:

--dialectical materialism

-But our speech acts are not the only thing that's real. Speaking, writing, expression, occur on a continuum between base and superstructure. At the "base" is the physical, bodily act of speaking. At the "superstructure" are the forms of expression and the ideas conveyed. At the "base" is the rhetoric industry, the physical-economic manufacture of consent. At the "superstructure" are found all the paradigms and floating idealistic visions.

-Now, we argue a lot about how "deterministic" Marxism is, but for some reason we think it's no problem at all to say that language "determines" or constitutes reality. We take Marxism to task for being utopian while we say "the criticism equals peace."

-The fact is that Marxism is in one sense very determinist, and perhaps should unapologetically assert its hard determinism and place the burden on the other side to say why that's bad. For myself, I prefer to say that the base "contextualizes" the superstructure. "Contextualize" carries a huge determinist strain--it suggests that without a particular base, the superstructure would not be what it is. But it also breaks us away from seeing the base as some kind of control room full of buttons, to be pushed in order to manufacture different things in the superstructure.

-It is particularly curious that in debate, where we constantly make causality claims (Go to Ken D.'s lecture on this!) we would have a strong objection to Marx saying the base determines the superstructure.

-And we can never forget what "dialectical" in dialectical materialism means, and how it allows us to understand how Marx could have believed we are both free and determined. Forgive the sexist language here, but Marx wrote that "Men make their own history...but they do not make it any way they please."

-In any event, there is a correlation between production/distribution and ideas. Fishermen worship Sea Gods. And bourgeois discussions about social phenomena in the superstructure take on a similarly self-serving mythos.

--class conflict -Mainly, these discussions tend to obscure the relationship between the haves and have-nots, or more specifically, between those who profit from the labor of others (and the exploitation of nature) and those who have only their own labor power to sell.

The Capitalism Debate:

--relationship of political economy to social phenomena

-If the source or context of a social problem is found in the economic base, and if the solution (the change in the superstructure) doesn't send some kind of shock wave down the line, as it were, and affect the base, then there is a sense in which advocating shallow bourgeois reforms is like playing "Whack-a-Mole."

-Against the objection that these small reforms constitute a localized end of suffering, Marxists may even assert that such reforms delay meaningful change by obscuring the relationship between political economy and social phenomena.

--inevitable collapse

-Bourgeois authors across the board are starting to talk about the coming economic collapse again. Paul Roberts' The End of Oil is a good example.

-Marxists have been saying these things for a long time. Now it's okay to talk about resource wars again. But the base must have a particularly powerful hold over us if it can make us kill one another with such abandon. Maybe some things in the superstructure have that kind of hold, but the collapse of religion wouldn't trigger world wars, while the collapse of capitalism likely will.

-For information on why capitalism will inevitably collapse, I refer you to the myriad theorists and writers on the subject, such as James Devine, Rosa Luxembourg, John Gray, Paul Sweezy, Ellen Menkens Wood. The important thing to remember is that no "epoch" lasts forever, no form of production and distribution lasts forever. We may argue, however, about how such forms and bases change--catacalysmically or gradually.

The Relation of Identities

Dana Cloud writes that what sets Marxism apart from "identity politics" is that class is a relationship, not an identity. However, there are reasons to personally identify with class, or a class. There are reasons why your end of the relationship means something. There are poor people, even in academia, and being poor changes your relationship with other people. For me, Marxism becomes a new kind of identity movement when we are allowed to voice our experiences as poor people, as people who do not share in the pie, nor in deciding how the pie is made.

--Plan=labor

-Those poor people, we poor people are also ignored when the 1AC gets up and reads the plan. The plan contains myriad logistics. Those logistics, and the logistics of the logistics, are implemented by ordinary working people--our mothers and fathers and fellow workers.

-Their project, like all policies, all plans of action, is essentially a "project of labor." It involves setting forces into motion—material and communicative—and those forces, that matter and speech, exist only in a larger, intimately linked political-economic context.

-Whatever’s holding back the "plan" is a reflection of bourgeois labor, while the aff also omits working-class labor; they don’t address the perspective of those who administer, execute, and clean up after the plan.

-the plan will employ wage workers to keep the logistics running. That’s okay, right? Who cares about those wage workers anyway?

-There is no way to understand the effect of plan advocacy on everyday materiality and humanity when the agents of that material field are ignored and taken for granted in the construction of said advocacy.

-Ignoring class is inclusive of ignoring all other identity categories we ought to be concerned with—gender/sexuality, race/ethnicity, age, poorness, etc., because the ORIGINAL omission of class allows those with a vested interest in "business as usual" to utilize otherwise sincere policy advocacy to justify current power arrangements.

What's wrong with Marxism?

-First, what's not wrong with it, or in other words, the least effective answers:

1. Marxism ignores _______.

2. Cap good, judge!

So some potential problems with Marxism are:

-Marxism is plagued by a self-assuredness, intoxicated by its own correctness. This means the movement will never succeed.

-Or, that self-assuredness is more than a mere theoretical irritation. Emmanuel Levinas reportedly says all good ideas are threatened by their own Stalinism. That self-assuredness might mean its adherents wouldn't mind killing or re-educating you.

-Moreover, the scarcity and material chaos that will occur when capitalism collapses means that the Stalinists would get a hearing among the people, or even bypass the people.

-There are many routes to revolution and so calling for a rejection of "reforms" wouldn't make sense to a studied Marxist--she would ask whose interests were being served by those reforms. Marxists don't want people to be crushed until they revolt, to starve until they organize. We don't believe that misery ALWAYS means a better society down the road, and sometimes extreme misery brings out the absolute worst in people and not the absolute best.

-There's been a trend lately to "impact turn" criticisms. I think talking about Stalinism is very important, but given the ease with which one can win the inevitability of capitalism's collapse, and the survival question (most eloquently articulated by Meszaros), the most effective way to answer a Marxist criticism is to link turn it, and in order for that to happen, you must be aware of the relationship between your advocacy and the class struggle. The fact that affirmatives are forced to think about that relationship, of course, means that the criticism is doing its job.

REICH'S MASS PSYCHOLOGY OF FASCISM: SOCIO-SEXUAL PATHOLOGY, SADOMASOCHISM AND DEBATE
(Lecture delivered at Wyoming Debate Cooperative, August 3, 2004, Laramie, Wyoming)

(mpf=Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism)

"THE FORMATION OF THE AUTHORITARIAN STRUCTURE TAKES PLACE THROUGH THE ANCHORING OF SEXUAL INHIBITION AND SEXUAL ANXIETY." (MPF 25)

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) brought the body into psychology; that is, not only did he take seriously the biological urges Freud had discovered, but he also boldly asserted the influence of those urges on the whole of a society.

As a psychologist, he touched his patients during therapy, breaking that wall of words.

Similarly, in debate, there are walls of words. I don't want to break that wall today, but I would like to ask a question: What is the role of repressed or misused sexuality in shaping rhetorical argument?

Others have spoken of repressed desire. The "Nuclear Desire" criticism run by a few teams this year (West GA, Fullerton) says we desire the bomb like we desire other fetishized objects. The social psychology of Lacan speaks similarly of all sorts of utopian fantasies, often including debate advocacies. But Reich is concerned mainly with the interaction of sexuality and materiality--sex and economics. Hence, instead of Marx's "political economy" we have Reich's "sexual economy."

Psychoanalysis reveals the mechanisms of sexual suppression and repression and
their pathological effects in the individual. Sex-economic sociology goes
on from here and asks, For what sociological reason does society suppress
sexuality and does the individual repress it? (MPF 23)

A little longer ago, a team from the University of Southern California argued that debate was a "theater of pain," and following the work of Marquis de Sade, pointed out that we love to talk about pain in debate, that much of what happens in debate rounds is sexual, masturbatory, and that to authentically live this, we might want to advocate violence in debates (with the hint that such rituals would make us less likely to hurt one another outside of debate).

So if I were writing a book about Reichian social analysis, I would entitle it:

NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND RIDING CROPS: THE REPRESSION OF SEXUALITY AS KEY TO WARMAKING AND BRUTALITY

For Reich, the following four things feed on each other:
1. Strong paternal authority
2. Sexual repression
3. Authoritarian personalities
4. Reactionary political ideologies

It's an uncomfortable fact to point out that people found fascism very, very sexy.

Reich borrowed from Freud the notion that the "repression of infantile sexuality is the rule in 'civilized man'". Furthermore, that "human morality, far from being of supernatural origin, results from the suppressive measures of early infantile education, particularly those directed against sexuality" (MPF 22).

However, Reich lamented that the sociological implications of these discoveries were blocked by Frued's resistance to mass-social explanation based on his theories. Because Freud dismissed Marxism, he also dismissed any attempt to combine a study of mass political economy with the study of repressed sexuality in individuals.

But for Reich, this separation made no sense, since he saw in Germany an entire generation of fascist-friendly people who were obviously struggling with their own repressed sexuality.

So Reich proposed the following:

"THE FORMATION OF THE AUTHORITARIAN STRUCTURE TAKES PLACE THROUGH THE ANCHORING OF SEXUAL INHIBITION AND SEXUAL ANXIETY." (MPF 25)

Reich asks us to consider the caseof a working class woman, the wife of a worker. "Her economic situation is the same as that of the revolutionary worker's, but she votes fascist" because "the anti-sexual, moralistic structure of a conservative woman makes it impossible for her to develop a consciousness of her social position, it ties her to the church..." and thus refutes the basic Marxist notion that one's social position absolutely determines one's revolutionary consciousness. Of this hypothetical case, Reich concludes:

...the suppression of the gratification of primitive material needs has a
result different from that of the suppression of the gratification of sexual
needs. The former incites rebellion. The latter, however--by
repressing the sexual needs and by becoming anchored as a moralistic
defense--paralyzes the rebellion against either kind of suppression. (MPF
25-26)

Reich mentions the peacock-like military uniforms, the use of attractive women in recruitment ads, rhythmically perfect parades, as ways in which repressed sexuality can be slowly and carefully extracted from people, to unconsciously satisfy (but not completely satisfy) sexual urges people often don't even know that they have.

Thus: "Sexual inhibition alters the structure of the economically suppressed individual in such a manner that he thinks, feels and acts against his own material interests." (MPF 26)

For Reich, moralistic sexual repression is vital to solidifying class hierarchy:

Since one does not enjoy the economic position of the upper middle classes but
at the same time identifies oneself ideologically with them, the sexual moral
ideologies must make up for the economic deprivations." This is partially
completed through the patriarchal family, in which a sexually repressive father
is submissive to his boss, but then "in turn reproduces submissiveness to
authority in his children, especially his sons. This is the basis of the
passive, submissive attitude of middle class individuals toward Fuhrer figures.
(MPF 44-45)

Put another way:

The establishment of economic freedom of the working people
goes hand in hand with the dissolution of the old institutions, especially the
sexual ones, a process of which the reactionary individual is afraid.
Specifically, the fear of 'sexual freedom'--which in reactionary thinking is
represented as 'sexual chaos'--checks the longing for freedom from economic
exploitation. (MPF 50)

So far, we have explained why sexually repressed societies are susceptible to authoritarianism, but we haven't yet explored the link between authoritarianism and sado-masochism.

Sexual energy, repressed, must go somewhere. For some it becomes mystical, or religious energy. For others, it becomes political energy, given to hierarchy. In either case, it takes on a sadomasochistic brutality, because it is a distorted, frustrated kind of energy. Even the most loving sexual acts involve a kind of "violence" or "violation," a violation to partners' vulnerability even by consent. But unactualized sexual energy cannot control or mediate that violence. Thus, repressed desire becomes, through self-fulfilling prophesy, perverted sexuality: "...sexual stasis...the dammed-up sexual energies seek an outlet through all kinds of pathological channels...This distorted, disturbed, brutalized and debased sexuality in turn supports the very ideology to which it owes its existence." (MPF 75)

Reich suggests that religion is often a substitute for sexuality--

The religious feeling, then, is the same as
sexual feeling, except that it is attached to mystical, psychic contents.
This explains the return of the sexual element in so many ascetic experiences,
such as the nun's delusion that she is the bride of Christ. Such
experiences rarely reach the stage of genital consciousness and thus are apt to
take place in other sexual channels, such as masochistic martyrdom. (MPF
133)

The war-making tendency is an urge to manufacture and use weapons designed not merely to strategically neutralize an enemy (after all, we do not manufacture "weapons" that put everyone to sleep or temporarily paralize them), but to inflict pain and suffering, to destroy many people and inflict the torture of witnessing that death, as well as the physical pain of the survivors:

Man constantly reproduces the machine-like organism by his kind of education,
science and philosophy of life. This biological crippling is reaching the
pinnacle of its triumphs in the scientific, mathematically exact, machine-like
killing of today. As mechanistic philosophies and machines alone cannot
kill, sadism also comes into play; sadism, this secondary drive born of
suppressed nature, the only important characteristic which distinguishes man's
structure from that of the animal. (MPF 295)

THE ROLE OF WOMEN

Imperialistic wars require that there be no rebellion in the women against the
function that is imposed on them, that of being nothing but child-bearing
machines. That is, the function of sexual gratification must not be
allowed to interfere with the child-bearing function. (MPF 90)

It's pretty clear that, for Reich, there was no solvency for oppression and violence as long as sexual desire was repressed by binaristic and metaphysical notions of morality. In "Further Problems of Work Democracy" Reich wrote:

As long as [compulsory sexual repression] prevails, genuine democracy and
responsible freedom remain an illusion. Helpless subjugation to chaotic
social conditions is the hallmark of human existence. The murder of the
living triumphs in compulsory education and war.

WHAT ABOUT NOW? THIS ISN'T NAZI GERMANY

Now, consider: What has changed since Reich? Are we more "liberated?"

Marcuse, on sexuality in advanced industrial society: Just when we thought we had liberated ourselves from victorian sexual mores, along comes late capitalism to distort and commodify our sexuality. Marcuse wrote Eros and Civilization in 1955. In that book--

...he offered a dramatic re-interpretation of Freud's theory of repression and criticized Freud's stress on the genital organization of sexuality and on heterosexual intercourse. According to Freud,
adult sexual development is a progression from oral and anal eroticism in
infancy to the final adult stage of genital sexuality. In response, Marcuse
proposed sexual liberation through the cultivation of a "polymorphous perverse"
sexuality (which includes oral, anal, and genital eroticism) that eschews a
narrow focus on genital heterosexual intercourse.
Marcuse believed that sexual liberation was achieved by exploring new permutations of sexual desires,
sexual activities, and gender roles--what Freud called "perverse" sexual
desires, that is, all non-reproductive forms of sexual behavior, of which
kissing, oral sex, and anal sex are familiar examples.
Marcuse was himself heterosexual, but he identified the homosexual as the radical standard bearer of
sex for the sake of pleasure, a form of radical hedonism that repudiates those
forms of repressive sexuality organized around genital heterosexuality and
biological reproduction. "Against a society which employs sexuality as a means
for a useful end," Marcuse argued, "the perversions uphold sexuality as an end
itself . . . and challenge its very foundations." http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/marcuse_h.html

This may or may not have been an appropriate response to the commodification of sexuality in the wake of repressed desire. Marcuse is somewhat responsible for the role of sexual liberation in the 1960s; he played a role similar to Foucault in that respect. But it seems like "sexuality as an end in itself" was even more marketable than nuclear family, father-knows-best sexuality.

SEX ECONOMY AND THE MORAL IMPERATIVE: DO THESE SAME REPRESSED DESIRES LEAD US TO ENACT NORMATIVE CLAIMS?

So some speculative thoughts here:

Is a moral imperative a manifestation of your desire to control me?

Think of the way we utilize deontological imperatives in our criticisms, and essentially how the call for the ballot is a call to "punish" the other team. Ritualized, public punishment.

WHAT ABOUT UTILIZING CONSTRUCTED THREATS OF VIOLENCE AS RHETORICAL WARRANTS?

Is debate really a theater of pain? And specifically, is there a biological context to this?
--research speculating that male debaters like big impacts like nuclear war.

WHAT WOULD DEBATE LOOK LIKE IN A SOCIETY WITHOUT AN AUTHORITARIAN SEX ECONOMY?

WHO IS WE?

This is what Wesley Clark said at the Democratic convention in his very appealing speech:

“I am an American soldier. Our country has been attacked. We are at war. Our nation is at risk. And we are engaged in a life-and-death struggle against terrorists.... As we are gathered here tonight, our armed forces are in combat.”

Each of these sentences contain certain rhetorical acts of identification with something called the United States. Identification is a powerful and foundational rhetorical act, and one is justified in questioning the thing with which the speaker identifies. In 1990, as plans were being made to attack Iraq, and before I knew much about socialism, I commented to a friend in the Socialist Workers Party that I had heard someone say "We have to stop Saddam," yada yada yada. The friend replied: Next time, ask, "Who is we?"

That response is a good way to approach Marxism from the inside out. For "We have to stop Saddam" could easily mean the "we" of those of us who would never make such decisions, or it could mean those of us who are conscripts for either side of the battle, or it could mean "we Americans," those who identify with America as a nation, a kind of really big family. And it's an insidious kind of process, forgetting that you do it, never knowing or giving much thought to who "we" is. From there, when you start thinking about that, you then think about how you really don't get to make these monumental decisions, and maybe you'd do it differently, and isn't it true that all you really know about Iraq and Saddam is stuff you read in the papers or hear on radio or TV? And when you read more complex literature, journals or independent press, for example, you start to notice it's much more complicated than it is on TV. And again, it strikes you that you're being made part of a "we" that doesn't really mean you.

Now, you might have people you love over there in Iraq or Afghanistan, and you certainly aren't against them--you don't wish harm on them. You want them to come back safely. In fact, once you start to realize that "we" aren't making the decisions together on how and when to fight, or who goes to fight and for how long, your concern for those people grows. It grows even as others accuse you of being against those people. And then it hits you: Somebody on the other side probably feels just as scared, frustrated and disaffected--in the case of a citizen of Saddam's Iraq, probably much more so--and it hits you that the ones you love and the ones they love are shooting at each other over disagreements and bad behavior none of you--none of us--had anything to do with. So who is "we?"

Is it a noble thing to stop Saddam? Sure. Would we reach a consensus on that? Sure. Maybe we'd even elect leaders, just like we do now, but maybe in a world where we have a hell of a lot more input. Where we not only could deliberate on such questions but also talk about how such situations start in the first place. Now, I attend the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Laramie, and our minister, Joe, is one of the wisest men I have ever met. And he's tough on you, and can talk sense into you. I think if he sat down with two world leaders who wanted to kill each other, they'd leave that room feeling sheepish and repentant. But the world isn't run in such a way that encourages people like Joe to talk to world leaders. Why? Isn't Joe "we?"

Now maybe "we" need to be governed by elected officials who can make all those decisions for us. That's cool, you'll notice few Marxists denying that people are good at different things and that smarts is smarts. It's really an irrelevant argument, because long ago, like back in 1776, "we" decided that the process of rulemaking mattered as much, if not more, than the rules themselves. Think about what Jefferson or Madison would say if Washington had committed troops to Tripoli using the argument that Tripoli was raising a legion of fire-breathing dragons and had to be stopped or they'd fly over here and burn us all to a crisp? Even if there was some other legitimate cause, like the Lybian leaders were killing and torturing their own people, Jefferson and Madison would probably invoke the spirit of procedural justice--for them, the Constitution--to object to the manner in which support was drummed up for the invasion. And in any event, everything we know about Washington indicates he wouldn't lie (or err on the side of suspect intelligence) to shove off a bunch of men and ships to the other side of the world. Obviously, what the founders of the USA wanted was accountability through checks and balances. In all fairness, they may not have been willing to consult "the people," and certainly gave the appropriate officials the power to declare war, and other officials the power to engage it. But one reading of their Constitution and their other writings is certainly a world where such decisions are transparent and involve genuine public deliberation, and a world free of legalized corporate bribery of these decisionmakers of whom the founders expected so much.

The examples and stories I've used here not only explain the sentiment (not the mechanics) of Marxist criticism, but also the "link of omission" and counterfactual critical theory that is Habermasian criticism. Some may not believe the two are complimentary, but I do. One explains why those concerned with procedural democracy find the current system unjust and unworkable. The other explains why it is so, and what prevents us from changing it. In both cases, "we" begin with the question "Who is we?"

82070

I pulled up roots in the back yard
while you cleaned the small card table
I chopped down overgrown thistle
while you chopped fresh tomatos
I pounded a path of chicken wire
while you planted wildflowers
and we tried to make something grow grow grow
on these 7000 foot towers

The Giving of Reasons
 
Comments at the 4th annual Wyoming Forensics Institute, Pre-Tournament Assembly, July 21, 2004, Laramie:

Like many of you, I stand in absolute awe and admiration for the minds and the hearts of the people you have been listening to tonight.  I stand in awe of what they do, and of what we all do.  And it's funny--what we do seems so very esoteric, so very unique, to other people.  But we are engaged in the study of something as fundamental to the human condition as eating, building, art.  Our subject is not merely communication, but the giving and receiving of reasons. 

I drove to DIA a few days ago to pick up Brian Norcross, one of UW's coaches.  Of course, when you leave camps like ours, you realize there's a world out there, and you find yourself in possession of unexpected tools to assess it.

So I was listening to the news on the radio and here's what I heard: Three brand new Habitat for Humanity homes were burned to the ground on the same night, before the new families could move in.  Who would do that, I thought, and why?  Then I heard that a nun, in full habbit, had been mugged.  She had been carrying $80.  I heard an update on the parents in Riverton who are alleged to have beaten their 15-month old child to death.  My son, Andrew, is 15 months old and I can't fathom this at all.  In fact, all these acts seemed not only evil to me, but alien.  Otherly.  Without reason. 

Of course they were without reason, and were so by their very nature.  Oh, I don't mean they were without explanation.  There are explanations for criminal, pathological and violent behavior.  I don't think American policymakers spend nearly enough time seeking those explanations.  What I mean is, by their very nature, those acts were without that gesture of justification that emerges in contexts of respect and the valuing of other people.  Because that's what giving reasons means.  Not just saying something about your claim, or your act, but being committed to making sense and bringing your good will to other people.

I'm one of those in debate that thinks the line-by-line, structural methodology of the activity actually makes it more conducive to ethical behavior than the unstructured alternatives offered in the "real" world.  I believe what we do could teach millions of people how to better give and receive reasons, and in doing so, help people better understand and accept one another.  At the same time, I believe the exploration and enactment of new formats of debate also provides both ethical and intellectual relevance to projects designed to improve the world.  The most beautiful debates I have seen, the very few best ones, exemplified everything from music to drama and dialogue to multiple languages to near-incomprehensibly fast debate and demanding levels of intricacy, to slow, methodical debate.  What makes them all good is that the debaters give reasons...not merely provide warrants, but speak to the souls of their audiences.

There is a difference between the inability to give reasons and the refusal to do so.  The hungry person in front of you begging for food may lack the capacity to give reasons; you ought to still feed that person.  But when administrations, governments, organizations, fail to give reasons, that isn't due to some physiological problem. 

In a world of fairness, in a world of creativity and intellectual excitement, reasons flow like water.  Everyone is happy to give them, compelled to give them.  Other people receive them gratefully, giving back some of their own.  Like water, people's reasons flow and blend together, or separate into complimentary streams moving in the same direction. 

In a world of mutual suspicion, paranoia, and scarcity of goods (either naturally or by design), reasons are commodities to be hoarded, disguised, hidden, refused.  Anyone might be a threat to you.  Your giving of reasons also risks your having to change, and you can't do that without pain--revolutionary pain. 

In a world where all people are acknowledged to have equal and genuine value, the giving of reasons is the giving of gifts.  In a world of extreme hierarchy, some people are entitled to reasons and not others.  Some people's reasons are entitled to be half-assed, while others are required not only to be perfectly constructed, but constructed in subordination to the needs of others. 

The failure of public institutions to provide public reasons ALWAYS hurts others, ALWAYS signals a decrease in the quality of political life, and often results in unnecessary suffering, and the infliction of pain on innocent people for the sake of comfort and convenience among those refusing to reason.  

I have to believe that we, speakers and debaters, are part of whatever alternative must emerge to fight this absurd, unjust system.  Regardless of our styles, our preferred arguments, or our paradigms, we are all capable of in some way cutting against this enforced scarcity of reasons. 

As you compete with each other tomorrow and on Friday, and as you leave here to go back to your regions and speak, strategize and win, try to remember this view of reason-giving and reason-receiving.  Toss your arguments to one another like precious jewels rather than throwing them like cutting stones.  Catch each other's arguments and open them and watch them grow, placing them next to yours, even as you ask for ballots and wins.  Demand and beg for the giving and receiving of reasons in every forum and place you find yourselves. 

Remember, also, the words of Emmanuel Levinas: "All generous thought is threatened by its own Stalinism."  As you give and receive reasons, suspend your self-certainty and give equal weight the attempted justifications of others--not equal argumentative weight, but equal ethical weight.  For, as Jurgen Habermas says, it is in that process, that giving and receiving of points and counterpoints in communication, that we find that commonality that unites us all even underneath our radical, violent differences. 

We have been incredibly lucky to discover and share reasoning together for the past two weeks.  You should all be incredibly proud of yourselves and thankful for each other.  I am thankful for each and every one of you. 

Idiot of the Week:

The film incites terrorism??? Sounds like this guy has serious intellectual defects...and may be committing libel!

DECORAH, Iowa (AP) - The president of a company that owns movie theaters in Iowa and Nebraska is refusing to show director Michael Moore's ``Fahrenheit 9/11.''

R.L. Fridley, owner of Des Moines-based Fridley Theatres, says the controversial documentary incites terrorism.

Fridley said in an e-mail message to company managers that the company does not ``play political propaganda films from either the right or the left.''

``Our country is in a war against an enemy who would destroy our way of life, our culture and kill our people,'' Fridley wrote. ``These barbarians have shown through (the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001) and the recent beheadings that they will stop at nothing. I believe this film emboldens them and divides our country even more.''

``Fahrenheit 9/11'' won best picture at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival and has grossed millions of dollars at the box office. Moore won an Academy Award for an earlier work, ``Bowling for Columbine.''

Critics accuse the film of being an unfair and inaccurate portrayal about President Bush's policies before and after Sept. 11, 2001.

Read for yourself

Redline Rants, a republican blog, has posted a transcript of the first 43 minutes of Fahrenheit 911, with promises of more to come.

Although some of the subsequent commentary is absurdly stupid (one reader opines that Moore "should be brought up on treason charges"), the availability of a transcript may aid the numerous not-so-stupid debates going on. The host is also soliciting corrections to make the transcript more accurate. The project itself seems sincere.

Laramie July 4 Activities

For those in Laramie reading my journal, you already know that Washington Park will be the center of July 4 activity in town tomorrow. Here's Leslie from Stand Up for Peace--they'll have a booth there tomorrow, sounds like it will be fun for the kiddies...

Stand Up for Peace will have a booth in Washington Park on July 4. We'll be on the northwest end of the park so, please, stop by and see us. We'll be helping the young ones make "pinwheels for peace" and will be having a raffle for 1) "The Peace Book," 2) a bag of buttons & other goodies, and 3) an XL SUFP t-shirt. Plus, of course, we'll have lots of free literature and our excellent selection of buttons, patches, and bumperstickers for sale.
If you have some time to spare and would like to help with the booth, come by and give us a hand!!!

Victory for Utah Miners!

This week's front page story from The Militant--doubly happy for me because I'm from Utah (even lived in Price for three years) AND because it's a victory, however small, in the middle of the belly of the beast!!!

You can read more articles here providing the background of this inspiring struggle.

‘On toward victory in union election in August,’ Utah miners say

BY ANNE CARROLL
AND GUILLERMO ESQUIVEL
HUNTINGTON, Utah—In a major breakthrough for the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) organizing battle at the Co-Op mine here, the union received a draft settlement from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that orders C.W. Mining Co. to reinstate all of the 75 miners who were illegally fired last September. With most of the Co-Op strikers back to work before mid-July, the chances increase that the UMWA will win the NLRB-mandated union election that will be held sometime in August, workers report.
On June 21, two bosses from the Co-Op mine hand delivered letters to the striking miners giving them an unconditional offer to return to work. The letter stated that workers must let the company know by July 6 if they are returning to their jobs and that they must report to work no later than July 12.

“It’s a victory: we won the right to go back to work,” said striker Domingo Olivas. “All the work we’ve done up to this point puts us in a good position to win the UMWA inside the mine. We hope the miners who are already working inside will be with us.”

“Rather than reporting separately, we will all march together to the mine on July 6 and let the Co-Op bosses know we are coming back united,” said Bill Estrada, one of the strike leaders. “We are inviting all strike supporters to Huntington to march with us that day and celebrate. Fifteen retired UMWA members were the first to tell us they will be there. We look forward to doing everything possible to win the union election in August.”

On Sept. 22, 2003, 75 coal miners were fired from their jobs at the Co-Op mine, owned by C.W. Mining. They were fired because they had contacted the UMWA about getting a union organized at the mine. The miners were being paid between $5.15 and $7.00 an hour with no benefits.

A company union has existed at the mine for many years. Workers have submitted evidence that the officers of this “union” are bosses and are related to the Kingstons, the wealthy family that owns the mine.

The strikers report that the settlement agreement from the NLRB clearly states that any type of intimidation or harassment of pro-union miners by the Co-Op management is illegal. The document states that the agreement must be visibly posted at the mine for 60 days.

This is important because this is what led to the wholesale firings last September, workers say. Prior to that date, the miners had been talking to UMWA organizers about how to get a real union organized at the mine. Bosses began harassing and suspending the miners for this activity. They had cornered miners alone underground and questioned them about “the meetings they were having with the UMWA.”

The bosses also tried to disrupt a meeting the strikers had organized outside the mine, and had threatened workers, most of whom are immigrants from Mexico, with sending the immigration police after them. When they learned of the company threats, the strikers changed the time and location of that meeting. When the miners returned to Huntington after their gathering, they say they saw the bosses standing in front of the old location waiting for the meeting to begin.

The settlement explicitly prohibits any of these practices, workers say. It states that the employers must refrain even from watching the workers, or from giving them the impression they are being watched, while participating in union activities.

On Sept. 23, 2003, the UMWA filed charges with the NLRB stating that all 75 miners were fired illegally for union activity. The national labor board upheld the charge in its ruling.

The NLRB made the decision nine months into the workers’ strike, which has continued to win broader support in the labor movement throughout the country.

The miners also reported that the draft settlement includes a back pay order, the exact details of which are being negotiated and may be settled in court. The settlement reportedly states that employees have the right to pursue any legal claims they may have against the company because of loss of wages or other benefits.

Strikers said that as soon as they received the news, they began contacting all the miners who were fired. Many of the miners had taken jobs in other cities and are in the process of driving very long distances back to Huntington by July 6. A striker who went to Idaho and has been working in the potato fields for several months, for example, informed the strike leadership committee he plans to be back.

Other strikers have gotten jobs at other mines in the Utah area, and a number have indicated they will return to Co-Op.

The NLRB has set a hearing for July 20-22 in Price, Utah, to determine who will be eligible to vote and the time and place of the union election.

After the strikers and their supporters march to the mine office on July 6, everyone plans to meet at the town hall in Huntington for food, refreshments, and a celebration.

For more information, contact the UMWA office in Price at (435) 637-2037 or (435) 650-2019. Solidarity messages to be read at the rally can be faxed to the UMWA at (435) 637-9456.