Didactic Synapse

This weekend the nation has been shaken by images from Friday 18 January, of teenage boys from Covington Catholic High School (Park Hills, Kentucky) visiting Washington DC. In the video, they are staring at — and in the background, loudly mocking — a pair of indigenous drummers. Many of the CovCath teenagers are wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, proudly displaying their support for President Trump. A tremendous backlash has ensued, with many calls for action against the students. Snopes is hosting an Associated Press article with lots of details.

Today another 2-hour video surfaced on YouTube, which helps provide some additional context. Some of the students, shaken by what they consider an unfair demonization, have put forward their own narrative. The new video, which apparently was removed from Facebook, is strange and confusing — and I won’t be surprised if it’s removed from YouTube soon as well. But I’ll try to explain what I see, and then discuss a larger context.

What the Video Shows: Hour 1

The video begins, so far as I can tell, at the end of the Indigenous Peoples March, near the reflecting pool of the Washington DC Mall, outside the Lincoln Memorial.

A small group of men, who appear to be Black Hebrew Israelites, are quoting scripture and trying to address everybody who walks past. They level some accusations at the indigenous protesters, including self-hatred and worship of false idols. (At one point, one of the BHI guys says “You got your head up the white man’s ass.”) A few indigenous folks try to talk with the BHI speakers, but most of these interactions are short and hard to follow.

At one point, the man holding the camera (who seems to be part of the BHI group) turns it on himself and says: “The problem is these women coming up with their loud mouth”.

As the BHI guys speak, other folks — of various backgrounds, possibly tourists, possibly from DC itself — approach the group. We start to see young people in MAGA hats and shirts. These are apparently students from CovCath who were in DC as part of the 2019 March for Life anti-abortion rally. The BHI guys accuse the young people in MAGA gear of supporting a “faggot” (because Trump once kissed Giuliani dressed in drag) and a “pedophile” (possibly because Trump has been accused of raping a 13-year-old girl).

The BHI guys then lambast the Catholic Church for its decades of sexual abuse of minors. (It’s not clear if they know that the MAGA-clad students are from a Catholic school or not.) Early in the video, the cameraman suggests that the “dirty-ass crackers” in the MAGA hats + shirts are afraid to come too close. He says they would never wear those items in a black neighborhood. “I will stick my foot in your little ass,” he says.

Throughout the entire first hour of the video, various people try to speak with the BHI guys. Some of these people are black, which leads to accusations from the BHI guys of “Uncle Tom”. The cameraman asks why, with all the MAGA-hat-wearing white folks around, “you wanna fight your brother”. They also refer to black teenagers near the CovCath students (perhaps they are also students at CovCath) as “Kanyes” and “Coon-ye West”. The indigenous protesters occasionally join the argument, but mostly appear to dance and drum in the distance.

At one point, addressing the white students (many of them wearing the American flag or MAGA slogan on their clothing), one of the BHI guys asks: “When was the last time you saw a Mexican or Hispanic or Native American or a Negro shoot up a school?” In response to the silent crowd, the cameraman says: “Yeah. Crickets.”

More CovCath students arrive — all of them guys, nearly all of them white. At least half are wearing “Make America Great Again” in some form: baseball caps, sweatshirts, winter hats, t-shirts. Some of them say things which are hard to understand. Some appear to be mimicking or mocking the native dances nearby.

What the Video Shows: Hour 2

The tone shifts in the second half of the video. One of the CovCath students removes most of his clothing (why, I couldn’t say) and leads the crowd in a chant of some kind. Most of the CovCath students join in. The guy holding the camera asks “Do y’all understand who the real caveman is now?” Referring, apparently, to Capitol Police, he adds: “We’re surrounded, and they won’t do a damn thing about it.”

It’s hard to tell who’s moving near whom, but both the BHI guys and the CovCath students exchange angry words. The distance between them shrinks, until two indigenous drummers — Omaha elder Nathan Phillips and Marcus Frejo, from the Pawnee and Seminole tribes — step between the two groups. They sing and drum for a while, until we arrive at the moment many people have already seen, with the MAGA-hat-wearing CovCath student staring at Phillips. Some students jump and dance, while others do a version of the Atlanta Braves “tomahawk chop”. Some chants of “Build the Wall” are audible.

When the drummers step in, the cameraman says “Here comes Gad”. (Apparently that’s a term among BHI believers for Native Americans.) After a minute of drumming and singing, one of the BHI guys says: “Gad, he calmed all these spirits right down.” In a later interview, Frejo seemed to agree. “They went from mocking us and laughing at us to singing with us,” he said. “I heard it three times. That spirit moved through us, that drum, and it slowly started to move through some of those youths.”

When the CovCath students begin chanting again after a moment, the cameraman says: “Mockery. You’re at a native rally with Make America Great Again hats.” The rest of the video is a series of exchanges between the BHI guys and the CovCath students, most of which is hard to hear. Occasionally a white adult (presumably a teacher) will tell the students to “back up” or stop trying to speak with the BHI guys. “You’re not going to change their minds,” one lady says. Night falls, the cameraman explains that his battery is dying, and the video ends.

What I Think

It occurs to me that I’ve spent several hours composing this post about a disturbing incident that involved no physical violence, in the same way journalists and commentators dissect videos of police officers killing unarmed black folks like Laquan McDonald. (This same weekend, the cop who killed McDonald was sentenced to just seven years in prison. Kalief Browder spent three years in prison for allegedly stealing a backpack.) I could reflect more on that oddity, but instead I’ll just note it for the record, and move on.

I will also state for the record (although anyone who knows me will know it’s a given) that I am appalled and outraged by many statements from the Black Hebrew Israelite speakers. They demonstrate a kind of sexism, hatred of LGBTQ folks, and vile rhetoric that I cannot support. I will not apologize for any of their words, nor will I minimize their role in the proceedings.

At the same time, however, I want to point out that they represent “the hate that hate produced“. Some of their points are valid. (The demonization of black anger compared to the frequency of white gunmen killing people in schools, for example.) Anyone shocked by the attitude of the BHI speakers has never studied Malcolm X or the Black Panthers or the Black Liberation Army or the Nation of Islam. The Oakland rapper Paris once said: “Don’t be telling me to get the nonviolent spirit / because when I’m violent is the only time you devils hear it”. Again, I want to make clear that I do not endorse this brand of violent rhetoric. But it is an essential part of the historical dialectic that white folks generally refuse to consider.

Many people who have seen this weekend’s incident from multiple angles are loudly chastising the media for only showing the students mocking the drummers. They want the larger video to be seen. (The YouTube page is filled with commenters urging everybody to “download this now before they try to bury the truth”.) While getting that larger context is good, I worry that most of those racing to the students’ defense are only willing to consider a medium context, and not a larger, full context.

The larger context of this incident involves centuries of white supremacy. Let’s look at the concerns of the Indigenous Peoples March, shall we?

Missing and Murdered Indigenous women – Since 2016 there are over 7,000 missing and murdered Indigenous women. Within the first 6 months of 2018 there are 2,758 women reported missing. […]

Native Lives Matter – For every 1 million Native Americans, an average of 2.9 of them died annually from 1999 to 2015 as a result of a “legal intervention,” according to a CNN review of CDC data broken down by race. The vast majority of these deaths were police shootings. […]

Honor Our earth…Respect Our Treaties – President Trump’s first order of business was to sign for the Dakota Access Pipeline and the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

Dakota Access Pipeline — The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe members have been fighting to stop the oil from flowing into the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAP).

The Keystone XL Pipeline will go along the Mississippi River and affect all of our water. Keystone scheduled to be built 2019, will illegally be scheduled to be built on Native American-owned lands and private landowners.

Big Bear Ears Monument — Trump administration and investors are disregarding treaties to gain profit from a mining project. This project will destroy our Big Bear Ears monument, a sacred site to many Southwestern tribes.

These problems were not brought about by single individuals or small groups of people. Addressing them requires ardent attention from all of us. I daresay most Trump supporters are indifferent or hostile to the concerns of indigenous communities.

And this is my biggest point: That’s not just any hat. Support for Donald Trump is not just another American political movement. Some people have suggested that MAGA is the new swastika. I don’t agree, but MAGA is not just another slogan.

Trump’s base loves the fact that “he’s not a politician”. Trump often ridicules the way presidents act. He spent years insisting that Barack Obama was not legally authorized to be President of the United States. Hopefully I don’t need to continue with this list. President Trump is willing to destroy the icons of American democracy; therefore we must understand that his movement is based on iconoclastic destruction, racism, and division.

This is the larger context we must address in this weekend’s incident. The CovCath students wore MAGA clothing as a way to make a statement, and that statement was reinforced powerfully through their mocking chants.

Of course we can’t know what that smirking student was thinking, but he made a conscious decision to stand his ground and stare down this indigenous elder as he tried to use music to calm a tense situation. As someone who has worked professionally with teenagers for almost two decades, I can say that he (and most of the other students) probably had one (or both) of the following thoughts in his head:

1. I’m proud of this hat and what it represents. I’ve been told to hide my support for President Trump, but I refuse. I’m taking a stand against everybody who disagrees with me.
2. lolz they are sooo triggered huahuehuahue im totally owning these libs

Either way, I’m confident that these young people have no idea why their mockery was so poisonous. I’m confident that a mini-mob mentality spurred their atrocious behavior. I’m confident that they felt attacked by the BHI speakers, and wanted to assert some pride as a reaction. I’m confident that they don’t understand the historical violence that has always accompanied White Pride. I hope that Marcus Frejo is correct when he says that a spirit of enlightenment reached the CovCath students, but I know from my own classroom that such enlightenment is rare and slow.

Some people have suggested the CovCath students are being unfairly maligned. They say that the indigenous drummers approached them, and they were merely reacting to the music. Some folks say that those of us outraged by the students’ behavior are not considering it in full context, but instead jumping to conclusions.

I think it’s important to be fair, and I’m bothered by much of the frontier/street-style justice I’ve witnessed on the internet. When it comes to issues of race and struggles against oppression, it’s true that we humans often cannot expect justice in any other form. But of course that doesn’t make it okay for people to receive death threats based on short online videos.

So how do we find a third way?

Let’s Resist Oversimplification, Shall We?

I’ve got a long history of resisting oversimplification. The only time I have ever blocked people on Twitter was because they suggested I was unwilling to keep an open mind. I believe my record proves that accusation to be without merit. I frequently play the Devil’s Advocate in my classroom. I often talk to people who disagree with me. I’m currently finishing a book about politics, in which I explain why I frequent Fox News and the Wall Street Journal:

First, I want to make sure I’m responding to what these conservative sources are actually saying, rather than what I expect or remember hearing. There’s a dangerous tendency for us to assume that we know what other people are saying — or would say — and therefore we think based on assumptions without going to the source.

But the other reason I read conservative sources is because I don’t know everything, and my vision of the world isn’t perfect. There’s always another side to every issue, and even the sources I do trust (like Democracy Now! and The Intercept) will occasionally leave things out of the conversation.

Having an open mind means that you seek out different points of view and take them seriously. As Chinua Achebe said in his 1987 novel Anthills of the Savannah: “Whatever you are is never enough; you must find a way to accept something, however small, from the other to make you whole and to save you from the mortal sin of righteousness and extremism.”

I don’t know what a proper condemnation from our society toward these students should look like. It would involve the impeachment of President Trump for a start, for his daily violations of the US Constitution. More immediately, some have called for the expulsion of students from Covington Catholic High School. I don’t know how I feel about that. Part of me finds it harsh, but another part says it’s a fair response to what the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School called, in a joint statement, “behavior […] opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person”.

I was struck by a comment from Diné Navajo social worker Amanda Blackhorse on the issue of punishment for the CovCath students:

i do not intend to discount your fear, anger, and upset, but please keep in mind these boys are of high school age. i am tired, i am upset, and i am overwhelmed, but all i wish is for these boys to be reprimanded by their schools, parents, and friends. i posted this with the intention to spread the reality of being indigenous in 2019. we did not meet these boys with violence for a reason.

More to the point, however, it doesn’t really matter what I think about the punishment these students face. I can’t have much influence on that series of events. But I can reach a few people with these words, and that’s what I want to focus on. I want white folks to understand the nature of this insult. I want America to stop the violence facing indigenous communities, explained above. I want people to understand what white privilege is, and behave in a way that demonstrates this understanding.

I also want an immediate end to native mascots. The American Psychological Association has advocated their end for 15 years, due to the “harmful effects of American Indian sports mascots on the social identity development and self-esteem of American Indian young people”. My friend Colleen Butler recently tweeted:

Native mascots contribute to the dehumanization of Native people. Dehumanization was just what I saw in the eyes, the smirk, and the laughter yesterday. These things are connected.

We must also (all of us) resist the temptation to engage in groupthink and blind certainty. I believe the BHI speakers were driven — as many religious folks are — by a fiery conviction that their interpretation of scripture is The Truth, and that anyone who disagrees is Evil. As Arthur Miller said in The Crucible, about the Puritans of Salem: “They believed, in short, that they held in their steady hands the candle that would light the world.” Many Trump supporters (and members of the International Socialist Organization) share a similar certainty.

I believe the CovCath students were driven — as many teenagers are, as I was in my youth — by a need to belong, and the strange surge of adrenaline that comes with being in a group united by purpose. I believe that the indigenous guys were driven by a desire to calm the tension and provide the strength of spirit their ancestors offered them, through drumming and song.

I want us to escape our silos and have painful, honest conversations that result in true consciousness on all sides. In a way, that’s what the Indigenous Peoples March and the March for Life were trying to do. The confrontation we saw here was, in a way, just an uncovering of the seething resentment that has been festering for years. I’m horrified by what this mirror showed us, but I’m also glad that things didn’t get worse — which could have easily happened.

I’ll close with this: Such consciousness is needed most among white folks. Obviously black folks and native folks and latinx folks also have room to grow, and blind spots of their own to address. But there’s a particular brand of unconsciousness among white people because white supremacy has left a unique stain on the soul of humanity. We have to understand that the violence and poverty among black, latinx, and indigenous communities is the result of a wretched history — but also that this poverty and violence continues today. We must not ignore the suffering of Kalief Browder and Laquan McDonald and Anna Mae Aquash and the unnamed 8-year-old from Guatemala who died on Christmas Day in ICE custody. This suffering is a problem for our entire species. It affects the people in the ghetto and the barrio and the reservation more than it affects those of us in the suburbs, but it’s our problem too. If you truly believe that you are not free when others are oppressed, you need to act like it.

The election of Donald Trump showed a hideous lack of consciousness among white Americans. It showed our willingness as a nation to invest tremendous power in a man who has bragged about sexual violence; mocked disabled people; ridiculed native identities; urged violence against black protesters; and shown utter disregard for the humanity of most Americans. The fact that he won the election (sort of) is a stain of dishonor, the result of a serious lack of consciousness among white folks.

One way for us white folks to raise our consciousness is to hear the voices of indigenous people. The Reddit forum /r/IndianCountry has some great resources and discussions “By Natives, About Natives & The Americas”. The Chicago sociologist Eve Ewing (who should already be in your Twitter timeline) recommended some native folks on Twitter worth a follow: Adrienne Keene, Rebecca Nagle, and Kelly M. Hayes. And of course there are countless online news sources like Indian Country Today.

Claiming that we should all “come together” in an amorphous spirit of “unity” is oversimplification. Suggesting that we should all take pride in being American, and downplay the racism we see every day, is oversimplification. White supremacy has always been based on violent oversimplification. Trump’s wall is oversimplification, based as it is on the idea that swarms of Others are coming to hurt us. Thinking of ourselves as Americans rather than human beings (what Chuck D calls “Earthicans”) is oversimplification.

I refuse to engage in that kind of oversimplification, and I hope you will too.

A luta continua.

EDIT: On Tuesday 23 January, Nathan Phillips spoke to DemocracyNow!. An excerpt:

 I was absolutely afraid. There was a group of over 200 young angry white men who were displaying mob mentality. And they were facing down just four black individuals. And it was coming to a point where just a snap of the finger could have caused them kids to descend on those four individuals. I didn’t agree with the Black Israelites and what they were saying. But what I do believe is that America is a land of freedoms. And as much as I disagreed with those Black Israelites, they had the right to be there.

All this talk lately about a new Civil War in the US has got me thinking.

First, we should all recognize that the election of Donald Trump voided all attempts at predicting the future. Such prognostications are a staple of TV “news”; they creep constantly into our discussions on social media. What will happen in the midterms? Will Trump leave if he’s voted out? What’s Bernie going to do next? Given our inability to determine the weather in four days, we’ve got to start ignoring these feeble efforts at speculation. (If they mattered at all, there would be consequences for those who are wrong. There are none, so they do not.)

Second, as desperate and violent and hateful as the proto-fascist elements of the US right wing are (and I don’t mean to diminish their capacity for violence), I’m skeptical of the idea that we’re headed for a war, because they remain a tiny minority. Trump has corralled them for his narcissistic purposes, and the Republican “leadership” has allowed itself to be driven into a cavern of psychopathy for the sake of a greasy tax cut and a couple of Supreme Court picks. But the actual fascists and proto-fascists are a noisy, hideous gaggle of disgraceful children. (Armed children, but children nevertheless.) They have the means and the motive to kill people and cause suffering on a massive scale. But starting a war is different. It takes numbers.

Ergo, third, what about the outer circle of conservatives and independents and libertarians who have been seduced by the proto-fascist propaganda coming from this gaggle of scumbags (Bannon, Gorka, Miller, Trump, et al)? They’re the second-most important — and the most complex — piece of the puzzle. Many of them are obviously swayed by racist and xenophobic rhetoric. Many of them are closed-minded, surrounding themselves with cocoons of reassurance. Many of them are armed and hostile toward all the undesirables who are, they are assured, coming for their stuff.

The Outer Circle makes me sad and angry, but they don’t scare me. Maybe that’s my white privilege talking (along with my male and straight and middle-class privilege), but I keep hearing about how many people voted for Obama in 2012 and then switched to Trump in 2016. Which makes me think: Anybody that quick to abandon their allegiance to slightly-left-of-center principles can surely be herded into aligning with them again.

Who Do You Trust?

Getting more folks on our side, in my humble and profoundly non-expert opinion, is a project of consciousness raising. If people support dismantling the tiny regulatory changes of Dodd-Frank, it’s because they don’t understand how important stronger regulation is to preventing another crash like the one in 2008.  If people support brutal tactics to punish undocumented immigrants, it’s because they don’t understand the immense suffering and hardship so many people have experienced before arriving in the US; and what those tactics do to our fellow humans in need. If people continue to support the regime of mass black and latinx incarceration, it’s because they don’t understand the terror and misery that regime has been creating for 40 years.

The problem of enlightened consciousness, of course, is not one of information — we’ve all got easy access to a universe of information. The problem today is one of trust. Hardcore MAGAts trust President Trump absolutely, and they refuse to question his outlandish statements. They will not entertain independent reactions or fact-checking; they are convinced that all such attempts to ground us in a universal reality are part of a “fake news” conspiracy to discredit their hero.

But the rest of us operate from a place of trust, too. I trust Democracy Now! and The Intercept, because they have years of journalistic credibility. Of course I don’t trust them uncritically; they occasionally offer perspectives and guests that deserve scrutiny. But for the most part, I believe they are providing me with an accurate picture of the world as it is.

And it’s not just news. We trust the Union of Concerned Scientists on climate change. We trust Amnesty International on torture. We trust the American Cancer Society on risk factors. We trust airline mechanics. We trust other drivers to obey traffic lights. We trust restaurant workers to avoid  spitting in our food.

Many educated people reject this notion, insisting that they are fiercely independent and always do their own research, but this is nonsense. Who among us has the time and expertise to independently check the science behind climate change? (I remember one angry Republican student handing me a 50-page sheaf of papers explaining a study from a prominent anti-climate-change professor. He insisted I read the whole thing and accept it or refute it.) There’s no way for us to verify everything we believe, so we must rely on trust in various forms.

This makes consciousness-raising more tricky, because (A) most people don’t discuss, or accept, the significance of trust in the first place; and (B) how do you get people to trust you? Fortunately (A) is an academic point. If I can win someone’s trust, then I don’t care what they call it. My life would be easier if we could talk about who we trust and why, but then my life as a teacher would also be easier if my students were honest about why their work is late. As for (B), it’s a tricky business. Ironically for our purposes here, the Outer Circle isn’t going to trust moderate or leftist sources if they use the same rule book as Trump and the proto-fascists. We won’t be using fear and hatred of Mexicans and Muslims, so we can’t just tap into that seething hostility.

I also reject the notion that “civility” will win the day. Those of us who spend time organizing street action and movement politics understand that we fight with dignity that is not always civil. Respectability politics has long been weaponized to silence and marginalize those fighting oppression and injustice. Also ironically, if “civility” had any impact on MAGAts and the Outer Circle, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. (Hillary Clinton has been a model of civil political discourse her entire life. Look where it got her.)

Main Point #1: What War Is

Okay, that was a heck of a tangent. Let me move to my main points. First, we need to recognize what it means to actually go to war. It’s a terrible, wretched business that always always always spirals out of control. The Syrian Civil War was supposed to be a quick crackdown on children spray-painting anti-government graffiti. And now 500,000 people have died.

We tend to jump right into World War II as an example of a Good War that did Exactly What It Was Supposed To Do. But World War I was, we would hopefully all agree, a terrible war that did nothing it was supposed to do. Before the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, we anti-war activists tried to sound the alarm of death and misery and suffering that were on the horizon. We were ignored. In the 1980s, the people of El Salvador and Nicaragua and East Timor tried to tell the world about what the wars in their countries were doing to them. They were ignored. Too many people are ignoring the horrible realities of the war waging right now in Syria.

And this leads me to Main Point #1: Those of us behind the “Peace & Justice” barricades understand that war is usually the worst option. Besides the other side having most of the weapons, we understand that — even if it is sometimes inevitable or necessary — war is an atrocity. We read history to learn about other options, and study those heroic individuals and organizations who have prevented terrible situations from becoming even worse through actual warfare.

Most leaders are not Hitler. Most government actions are not Stalinist pogroms. Most swarms of violent morons clutching tiki torches are not actual Nazi stormtroopers. Again, I don’t want to minimize the violence or terror the proto-fascists are capable of. But this is not a small matter: If 1% of the most dire situations we face require war to avoid obliteration or absolute subjugation, then 99% of them do not. And if you prepare for war when there are other options available, then you make a better course of action difficult (or impossible). Everybody always says war should be a last resort; even Reagan said it while arming the butchers of El Mozote, and Bush Jr. said it right before plunging Iraq into its atrocious nightmare.

The real question is: How do we live and act in a way that actually sees war as a dire 1% extremity?

Main Point #2: How Wars Start (and How They Can Be Prevented)

As an English teacher and armchair historian, I am not qualified to provide a comprehensive overview of how wars start. But it seems to me, after studying some gang wars, and the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the fight against Apartheid, and the liberation of East Timor, that we can see a few strains coming together.

Everybody involved in the start of a war believes there is some horrible overreach that requires The Good Guys to fight back. In the US Civil War, it was the “tyranny” of Lincoln and the abolitionists trying to force their opposition to slavery on the south. In a gang war, it’s usually a cycle of revenge, getting justice for a loved one murdered by the other side. “From ancient grudge break to new mutiny”, as Shakespeare said in Romeo & Juliet. (A play which is, after all, about a gang war.) Israel took land from Palestinians to protect themselves after the Holocaust, and Palestinians attack Israeli cities to resist the occupation and impose retribution for these injustices.

Main Point #2: To avoid a war, one side usually must give up something to which they are morally entitled. When the people of South Africa dismantled Apartheid with a nonviolent strategy, no one in the world believed they did not have the right to resist the violence of that regime with weapons. But they wanted the bloodshed to stop. And that’s the core question: Do you want revenge, or do you want an end to the bloodshed? Because you cannot have both.

In the movie Slam, Mike is morally entitled to seek some kind of punishment against the guys who shot him. But Raymond shows him another path, one less likely to continue the cycles of death and misery. The same is true of Debbie Morris, and every family member who finds the strength to show mercy despite unbelievable suffering.

Avoiding war is not sexy. No one wants to watch a movie called We Never Had to Save Private Ryan Because He Was Never Deployed in the First Place. Avoiding war happens with meetings and protests and reading and conversation and reporting and love and empathy. You look much cooler if you display your battle scars and declare your willingness to Give Your Life for What is Right. We often think of the people brandishing weapons as the most important warriors who keep us safe. But very often, the people who actually keep us safe are unarmed. They use words and typewriters and computers and hugs and information.

In 2015 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet, who found a way to keep their country from descending into the chaos and warfare that so many nations in the Middle East experienced in the wake of the Arab Spring. Organizations who had been opponents for decades came together in order to find a less-terrible path among the 99% of options before them.

I hope — I believe — that we can do the same in our 21st century American crisis. The trickiest thing for me is advocating against war without minimizing the harm being done. If I use metaphors and premonitions of war, no one can doubt the urgency of our moment. And yet (once again) I demand a third option. I will declare unyielding hostility against oppressive policies, hateful rhetoric, misogynist violence, and the poisons of racism; while urging my fellow Americans to resist the bloodlust and thirst for vengeance that leads to war.

This is a trying time, no doubt, and my blood boils for the pain and suffering the MAGAts and proto-fascists are causing (ignored or applauded by the Outer Circle). I believe we have to fight, but I also believe we can (and should) avoid an actual war. So let’s work to make that happen, please and thank you.

A luta continua.

To confront the existential horror of President Trump, I’m joined by my longtime activist friend Sofia Ali-Khan. We discuss our lives as progressive rabble-rousers, educators, and Americans. We sort through the problems we face and some concrete steps for action. Let’s get to work, everybody!

Links to things we discussed:

• Sofia Ali-Khan: Dear Non-Muslim Allies
• NYT: The white flight of Derek Black (New College > white supremacy)
• Eric S. Piotrowski: 10 Things Every American Should Do When a New President is Elected
• Eric S. Piotrowski: What Conscience and Honesty Demands of All Americans

Here’s the song at the end, “Simply Are” by Arto Lindsay:

I was going to relax and play Fallout 4 after school, but instead I wrote a thing about terrorism and ISIS. If you want to know what I think, here it is.

I don’t believe that there’s anything fundamental to Islam that predisposes it to violence more than other religions. I read the Koran a long time ago, and most of what I remember is how terrible the suffering will be for those who deny the glory of Allah.

Reminded me of the Left Behind novels, where all the sinners get bulldozed into pain and torture by a Romanian nuclear disarmament activist who moves the UN to Jerusalem. And the authors of those books insist they’re based on an orthodox reading of the Christian book of Revelations.

What’s the Problem?

I won’t deny that there are terrible things being done in the name of Islam, but that’s always been true about every religion — there’s even a Buddhist guy in Myanmar who’s calling for terrorism toward Muslims. Are there more violent acts carried out (intentionally) against civilians in the name of Islam than other religions? I don’t know, I haven’t done the math. Does it feel like it? Kinda. But the US also drops a LOT of bombs on innocent civilians with our flying robots — and Christianity is the dominant religion in this country. I know we’re not dropping those bombs in God’s name, but when you’re on the receiving end, that distinction evaporates pretty darn fast.. (Just as lots of conservative folks are ignoring divisions within Islam pretty darn fast, after WE got bombed.)

I think it’s important to remember that we’re at war with an ideology, not a religion or a culture or even just one death cult. (It’s certainly fair to use that term for ISIS.) We could wipe out ISIS, just as we could maybe eventually wipe out al’Qaeda, if we kill enough adults. But the ideology can spring up again and again and take new and interesting forms. (I mean, think about this progression: al’Qaeda –> ISIS –> ??? Could there be an even worse form of these same scumbags? Sure; things can always get worse.)

How Do We React?

So how do we fight an ideology? Well, that’s difficult. Destructive ideologies are pernicious because they can sculpt our perception of reality to their will. In other words: Once the lens of an ideology attaches itself to the third eye, it’s very difficult to pry it off. And because we pass everything we see through that lens, we come to ignore parts of reality that don’t mesh with our ideology — and most of the time, the ideology comes with a method to explain away the stuff that doesn’t mesh. (So for example with ISIS, they’re convinced that everything is a plot by “The Crusaders” — ie Christians — to destroy them, their religious purity, their families, their Islamic paradise.)

But the tricky thing about ideologies is that we ALL have them. I do, you do, everyone does. There are things you believe, way deep down in the core of your psyche, that influence how you see the world. And examining those things — to say nothing of adjusting or removing them — can be extremely difficult.

For example: Most people in the US believe that our government generally acts in the best interests of the world. Most Americans believe that we can be too aggressive, or insensitive to other cultures, but at the end of the day we’re out there all the time trying to use our power to help people and stop The Bad Guys.

But there’s a good bit of evidence to suggest this isn’t always true. And not just a couple of rare outliers, but a number of historic cases (East Timor, Guatemala, Iran-Contra) that demonstrate the reality that, from time to time, the US acts out of unconscionable self-interest and leaves corpses in its wake in the name of hegemony.

(Is it obnoxious for me to acknowledge the fact that I’m using some fancy words that some folks probably aren’t familiar with, like “ideology” and “hegemony”? Yeah, but I always want to encourage people to look that stuff up if you don’t know about it. Besides, the only way you’ll really get a sense for what they mean is to read stuff about them. Like Derrida. Don’t get me started on Derrida or his obnoxious, useless fan club.)

The horrible cyclical effect of our ideology is that we’re 100% convinced that we’re The Good Guys and our military only fights The Bad Guys. This can prevent (and sometimes does prevent) our ability to realize that we do some terrible things at times. (Some people believe that our military is ONLY or PRIMARILY used for “evil” purposes, but that’s the same simplistic ideology — only flipped.)

The worst part of THAT is that it means we’re likely to do things that prove the case that the ideology of ISIS is trying to make: The US military is The Great Satan. (Again, I want to make clear that i do NOT agree with that ideology.) So both sides keep playing by this tired old script book, and neither is able or willing to admit that our ideologies (and our egos) are what’s really at war.

Blood Will Have Blood, They Say

So how do we fight an ideology? Yeah, I was supposed to answer that. (We’ve been watching “Barton Fink” in Creative Writing, and I’ve been in “circular logic and dodging questions” mode for several days.)

Well, how did we defeat Naziism? I mean, yeah, it’s not dead — scumbags still paint swastikas on things — but it’s got 1% of the life it had in 1935. But the point is: Many people once believed that it would never be abolished. The frenzy in their eyes was too strong. They weren’t human! Same with the Japanese, right? But now we’re all good friends.

Would it take an actual war, like WW2? Even if that were possible (which of course it’s not), ISIS seems like a cockroach in its capacity to survive great physical assault, and keep going. (Heck, the absurd ideology of Wahhabism might even CELEBRATE such a thing.) And besides, I don’t think it takes wars to change ideologies.

But changing ideologies requires empathy, respect (of self and toward others), and compassion. So that guy in Paris explaining to his kid why the flowers are more powerful than the bombs — he’s absolutely correct. (Only in the long term! Kids, do NOT try to stop bullets with chrysanthemums. OH MY VARIOUS GODS! [Futurama, remember that?] I just spelled “chrysanthemum” correctly without looking it up.)

Because if we keep getting kicked in the teeth, and then kicking the other guy in the teeth, and then he gets mad because we just kicked him in the teeth, and so he kicks us in the teeth, and so on.. well, you know. Who kicked who first? Who cares! We go back far enough and it’s Cain vs. Abel (as we all agree, since it’s Old Testament, heh) and it doesn’t matter.

What matters is what we can teach the rest of the world about what it means to be a decent human being. And a decent family. And a decent community. And a decent city or town. And a decent state. And a decent nation. And a decent species. (The Chicago rapper Capital D said: “My father taught me — kid be a man, protect your family / But what if my family is all of humanity?”) THAT’s how you defeat an ideology. The ideology of fascism took a BIG hit from the Marshall plan. People tend to hate you less when you actually help them rebuild. (We haven’t done very well in Afghanistan or Iraq.)

Decent nations don’t ignore the horrors that ISIS is inflicting on its region and (occasionally) on the US and Europe. But decent nations ALSO do NOT ignore the horrors of its own drone strikes, nor do they ignore their moral commitments to the people suffering from war, hunger, poverty, and violence.

I demand a third way. (That’s my ideology, a refusal to accept only two ways of seeing a thing.) I insist that we CAN stand up for the rights of women, men, and children in every nation on Earth, without requiring the perpetuation of a flawed ideology of moral certainty in the form of military action and unenlightened short-term self-interest.

That’s what I think.

We’re on track to have a new show every month, but let’s just see how long that lasts, shall we?

DS#97: Charlie, Chinny, and Chamillionaire

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