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Think of them as Rebecca Solnit's "explaining" trilogy, three incisive and provocative commentaries on how we (mis)understand our mad world. The first of them, "Men Explain Things to Me," was actually four years old and already a minor classic when, on August 19th, I reposted it as a "best of TomDispatch" summer piece. As it happened, I did so at the moment when Missouri Republican Senatorial candidate Todd Akin decided to explain the "facts" of "legitimate rape" and abortion to the women (and men) of America. His comments sent the piece into the Internet stratosphere.
Less than two weeks ago, the night before the first anniversary of the Occupy movement, I put up the second essay, "Occupy Your Victories." It offered a warning against all the mainstream anniversary pieces that Solnit knew were about to explain to us that it was all over, a flash in the pan, a lot of sound and fury signifying next to nothing. (Okay, maybe Occupy did change the national discussion to "inequality," but nothing more and no longer.) In a way, her piece might have been called "Mainstream Pundits Explain Things to Me," and it offered a vision of just what Occupy, as well as the other global revolts of 2011, began and of just what hasn't ended on our planet, no matter what the best and the brightest at the largest newspapers may think.
Now comes what could be thought of as the third installment, which might be subtitled "Leftists Explain Things to Me." In each case, Solnit opts for the long haul, for counting victories no matter how partial, and for hope over despair. And if you want to get anywhere on this planet, that does seem like a reasonable way to go.
Or maybe the trilogy just adds up to a simple warning: Reader beware; rile up Rebecca Solnit at your peril. Tom
The Rain on Our Parade
A Letter to My Dismal Allies
By Rebecca SolnitDear Allies,
Forgive me if I briefly take my eyes off the prize to brush away some flies, but the buzzing has gone on for some time. I have a grand goal, and that is to counter the Republican right with its deep desire to annihilate everything I love and to move toward far more radical goals than the Democrats ever truly support. In the course of pursuing that, however, I've come up against the habits of my presumed allies again and again.
O rancid sector of the far left, please stop your grousing! Compared to you, Eeyore sounds like a Teletubby. If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears. Because what we're talking about here is not an analysis, a strategy, or a cosmology, but an attitude, and one that is poisoning us. Not just me, but you, us, and our possibilities.
Leftists Explain Things to Me
The poison often emerges around electoral politics. Look, Obama does bad things and I deplore them, though not with a lot of fuss, since they're hardly a surprise. He sometimes also does not-bad things, and I sometimes mention them in passing, and mentioning them does not negate the reality of the bad things.
The same has been true of other politicians: the recent governor of my state, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was in some respects quite good on climate change. Yet it was impossible for me to say so to a radical without receiving an earful about all the other ways in which Schwarzenegger was terrible, as if the speaker had a news scoop, as if he or she thought I had been living under a rock, as if the presence of bad things made the existence of good ones irrelevant. As a result, it was impossible to discuss what Schwarzenegger was doing on climate change (and unnecessary for my interlocutors to know about it, no less figure out how to use it).
So here I want to lay out an insanely obvious principle that apparently needs clarification. There are bad things and they are bad. There are good things and they are good, even though the bad things are bad. The mentioning of something good does not require the automatic assertion of a bad thing. The good thing might be an interesting avenue to pursue in itself if you want to get anywhere. In that context, the bad thing has all the safety of a dead end. And yes, much in the realm of electoral politics is hideous, but since it also shapes quite a bit of the world, if you want to be political or even informed you have to pay attention to it and maybe even work with it.
Instead, I constantly encounter a response that presumes the job at hand is to figure out what's wrong, even when dealing with an actual victory, or a constructive development. Recently, I mentioned that California's current attorney general, Kamala Harris, is anti-death penalty and also acting in good ways to defend people against foreclosure. A snarky Berkeley professor's immediate response began, "Excuse me, she's anti-death penalty, but let the record show that her office condoned the illegal purchase of lethal injection drugs."
Apparently, we are not allowed to celebrate the fact that the attorney general for 12% of all Americans is pretty cool in a few key ways or figure out where that could take us. My respondent was attempting to crush my ebullience and wither the discussion, and what purpose exactly does that serve?
This kind of response often has an air of punishing or condemning those who are less radical, and it is exactly the opposite of movement- or alliance-building. Those who don't simply exit the premises will be that much more cautious about opening their mouths. Except to b*tch, the acceptable currency of the realm.
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