Wednesday, October 25, 2023
In bed by 9:30, awake at 2:30, onto lzb till 3 and then up with earworm "You've Got to be Taught" from South Pacific, and thoughts of Caste, llistening to sump pump. 63°, high of 70°, light rain, AQI=51, win SW at 15 mph, 5-15/30. Sunrise at 7:17, sunset at 5:53, 10+35.
From Fintan O'Toole's Defying Tribalism in NYRB, 11/2/23 issue.
For almost all of its thirty-year duration, it seemed quite natural to think of the conflict in Northern Ireland, unfolding just a few dozen miles away from my hometown of Dublin, as an anachronism. The local joke was that when planes landed at Belfast airport, the pilot announced, “Welcome to Belfast. Put your watches back one hour and three hundred years.” This was part of the fascination for outsiders of what was otherwise a rather intimate catastrophe. The Troubles seemed a strange temporal regression, a rip in the fabric of European history through which the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had entered into the enlightened, secular present. White Christians who spoke the same language, lived cheek by jowl, and mostly watched the same movies and TV shows were not supposed to be willing to kill each other because their ancestors had taken different sides in the Reformation.
It was not so much the violence itself that seemed archaic—there was plenty of that around elsewhere in different forms. It was, rather, the way violence appeared as merely the starkest manifestation of a tribalized society. Tribalism in this sense (the term being otherwise rather insulting to most tribal peoples) is not at all the same thing as political partisanship. There are three important differences. Tribalism spills beyond the strictly political arena into parallel assumptions about history, geography, economics, and, of course, religion. Unlike partisanship, it makes the ethnic or social group, rather than the nation or the state, the primary locus of belonging. And neither side in this (typically binary) contest truly accepts the legitimacy of an electoral defeat. Being outvoted is understood not as a disappointment but as an existential threat.
These differences were—and to an extent still are—apparent in Northern Ireland, but they no longer look like distinguishing features that mark it as a unique kind of political space in the democratic world. Its holdovers have turned into harbingers. The throwback now feels more like a foretelling. What seemed in the 1970s and 1980s like a very niche retro political fashion is now all the rage.
Max Weber defined a nation as “a community of sentiment which would adequately manifest itself in a state of its own.” But in Northern Ireland it became all too obvious that “a community of sentiment” can be formed and sustained by distrust and dislike of another community’s sentiments. Where this feeling becomes definitive, the idea of the state becomes profoundly uncertain. Thus the Troubles are now—and not in a good way—everybody’s trouble: there are, in the United States and Europe, powerful forms of mass political identity that do not “adequately manifest” themselves in loyalty to the institutions, laws, and values that make a democratic state possible.
. . .
[Martin Luthr] King, in that speech, called his people “the veterans of creative suffering,” a remarkable phrase in which “veteran” replaces “victim” and pain is reimagined as a stimulus for transformation. It ought to be a touchstone for the left.
Perhaps one of the reasons why it ceased to be is the difficulty of finding a language that acknowledges, on the one hand, the specificity of the suffering of particular social groups and, on the other, the universal travails of most people under feral capitalism. Adrienne Rich, writing in 1996, noted:
In the America where I’m writing now, suffering is diagnosed relentlessly as personal, individual, maybe familial, and at most to be “shared” with a group specific to the suffering, in the hope of “recovery.” We lack a vocabulary for thinking about pain as communal and public.
Class politics, underwritten by Marxist theory, provided at least one way of doing exactly that: thinking about pain not only as a personal or group experience but as a public condition produced by the ways economies and societies work. It was possible to recognize, for example, that a straight white male coal miner enjoyed the privileges of whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality but also suffered oppression and exploitation as a worker. It was possible fiercely to oppose systemic injustices without suggesting that those who escaped their very worst effects were just as guilty as those who created them.
. . . .
in the binary imagination of tribalism, there are only two possible states: to be dominant or to be dominated. Even a genuine revolt against repression and injustice can be understood only as a strategic move by those in the second category to move themselves into the first.
Hpppy horseshit. I wonder whether any Vietnam veteran or anyone who simply lived through the "Vietnam Era" can be blamed for cynicism from leaders of hegemons waging war on occupied peoples. I and many of my fellow Marine officers stationed at the air wing headquarters at Danang had our fill of "happy horseshit" a few months into the war, or wouldn't it be more accurate to write 'into our invasion"
Speaking at a UN Security Council meeting, Mr Guterrres said that “It is important to … recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” However, he added that the grievances of the Palestinian people could not justify “the horrifying and unprecedented October 7 acts of terror” Mr Guterres also condemned "clear violations of international humanitarian law," calling Israel's constant bombardment of Hamas-controlled Gaza in response to the attack, and the level of destruction and civilian casualties, "alarming." He said the Hamas attacks “cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people”.
Escalating the row on Wednesday, Israel's ambassador to the UN told Israeli Army Radio: “Due to his remarks we will refuse to issue visas to UN representatives. We have already refused a visa for under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs Martin Griffiths. The time has come to teach them a lesson.”
Good grief! What lesson is it that Israel's leaders teach the rest of the world? How to become a pariah?
Things that go bump in the night. At 4:15 this morning, as I sat in my recliner reading Fintan O'Toole's book review in the NYrB, something that sounded like it was hard plastic fell over or toppled on the bookshelves behind me. Something moved, seemingly by itself, in such a way as to make a noise of some amplitude, not all that loud, but distinctly loud at 4:15 in the dark morning when and where nothing else was moving so as to cause something else to fall over or topple. "From Ghoulies and Ghoosties, long-leggety Beasties, and Things that go Bump in the Night, Good Lord, deliver us!"
Mike Johnson, second in line of succession to the Presidency.
1. Evangelical Chirsitan
2. Election denier
3. Anti-democracy
4. Anti-states-right
5. Voted against
Establishment of independent January 6th commission
Bi-partisan infrastructure bill
Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act
CHIPS and Science Act
Bill to avoid government shutdown on October 1st
All abortion rights bills, favors national ban on abortion
Bill to codify Same-Sex marriage recognized by SCOTUS
Very pleasant, God-fearing, Trump-loving, Southern Baptist gentleman from Shreveport, LA, and a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary. "Jim Jordan with a suit coat and a smile."
Treadmill. 20.28, 0.50 I could have lasted longer, but thought perhaps it would be better after the last few days off, to take it slow. Plus, it was a lot easier.😎😉
Geri had the pest control fellow here today. He found holes and absence of screening on 2 gable vents plus chew-through damage to a connection between the central air conditioner and the house.
Prep for meeting with Melinda tomorrow. I looked through the long list of programs in the Whole Health program and made a list of questions on a 3X5 card to bring to our appointment.
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