Uncritical Race theory

Lots of us White People, especially us guys, the kind who lead pretty exemplary lives of hard work and church on Sunday, followed by the NFL and hot wings, maybe a few Budweisers, we don't need a big guilt trip put on us about our heritage. Did our ancestors make some mistakes? Sure. Did our country make some mistakes, sure, what country didn't? But that doesn't mean you have to drive anti-American, anti-White propaganda into our kids' brains at school. They hear enough depressing shit as it is. So maybe we could just "accentuate the positive", as the song says. Talk more about Morning in America.Think of all the awesome stuff they could be teaching; winning world wars, winning the space race, most gold medals in the Olympics for example. What would be so wrong about that? Just let bygones be bygones and move forward, without all the baggage you can't do anything about anyway. Let the kids have a fresh start. After all, we had a Black President! There are Black Superstars in sports and entertainment,think about how suceessful Oprah is! I mean we already have Black History Month, a whole month! So why be so critical? You want to take a knee, do it in your own home.You want to teach about the Civil War? Include both sides.

Revere The Law

Sure, you have a right to your life, but it is conditioned by The Law and what The Law giveth, The Law can also taketh. Liberals are upset over the Rittenhouse vedict because they are forced to confront their reverance for The Law as the glue holding not just civil society but civilization together. But as society slides further into barbarism and The Law is exposed as the enforcement mechanism of whiteness and wealth ( always obvious but the illusion gets harder to maintain) liberals cling ever more desperately to the established order. Fund the police to be kinder and gentler. Build some nicer tent camps with toilets somewhere on the edge of town. Try to focus on the bright spots of COP 26. Pass an infrastructure bill to "invest in the future". Act as if you don't know. So-called "conservatives" also revere The Law as the upholder of property and order but worry it is being undermined by wokeness police. If libs are woke that means they must be asleep, but they are every bit as conscious, they do their own research, they are paying attention and reading the signs. In fact they are hyper-vigilant, hyper-alert, hyper-awake to the machinations and conspiracies.

Dystopic Portlandia

Unless you have been there recently, it is difficult to imagine the extent of houselessness that exists now in Portland. Missoula has its camps but in the Portland metro area, tents and tarps are literally everywhere. Any public space- freeway right-of-ways, parks, downtown sidewalks, underpasses, empty lots- is occupied by those living rough. And after three days of hard, cold rain I mean unbelievably rough. At the practical, policy, municipal level, this population is a "problem". Garbage piles up, police and ambulances are called, neighborhoods adjoining the camps get robbed,services must be provided, etc etc.. On this level, as the camps grow, the "problem" grows. But if you stop for one second to realize these are human lives, that in a country of unimaginable wealth and gross over-consumption we have normalized a totally disposable population, the whole soggy, muddy landscape becomes insanely obscene. White people used to whine about "ghettos" and "the projects" and urban blight. But those people at least had a roof over their heads. We now accept that people live in tents and shit in the bushes. They are exiled to the outside of the margins, banished from the community. The Other Portland goes to day spas and eats organic yogurt at seven dollars a pop. They drive past the camps on the way to the stores and restaurants and donate to United Way, all the while blocking from their tolerant minds the increasingly unavoidable fact that the system, their precious liberal capitalist "democracy", is crumbling before their eyes. The facade is being ripped off and all they can do is wonder how to fix "the problem".

Legitimization

In a debate taking place between Patrick Bond and Tom Athanasiou on SCNCC list, Bond made this statement: ... The big question from this COP is whether to legitimize or delegitimize the elites. With his request to OPEC buddies to increase the oil pumping, and his failure to get his own party behind his weak climate plan, Joe Biden is helping us move rapidly to the latter. Tom, whom I have debated in the past, finds this point about pulling back the curtain to be nonsensical. I have long argued it is in fact the real task and think it is worth revisiting the work of Jurgen Habermas on legitimization theory to understand the degree to which a hegemonic discourse can be undermined through contradiction. Habermas explains how power that does not depend on coercion must appear legitimate. It is this buy-in by ordinary citizens that upholds the entire ediface of capitalist "democracy" and I think Bond is correct that Biden, following Trump, is whittleing away at the system's legitimacy in the eyes of many. Of course the system (and its dominant narrative) has long been riddled with contradiction: we all hate rich people but we all want to be one. We all know two party "politics" is a farce but we still vote. We all know endless growth is impossible but we still work and shop and invest.The real question is which contradiction breaks the camel's back. When a tool like Biden has to publicly admit "the irony" of pumping more oil while calling for emission reduction you know legitimacy is in play. Of course it is not ironic, it is madness. Lift the curtain high enough and you just see a sad old man who achieved his dream and finds it's a nightmare. Just like a boycot on voting is a radical rupture, not showing up for the COP show would send a message to elites that the Kubuki is no longer entertaining.