The Death of Imagination

I've tried not to get too invested int the Presidential race because it's early days and, ultimately, it's not nearly as important as it's made out to be. But I guess I was more in denial about Warren's prospects than I admitted because I definitely have a sad right now. I know her becoming a compromise candidate at a brokered convention was a long shot (and isn't technically off the table) but at least it was something to cling to.

I'm not a fan of Sanders, but at least I can get behind his agenda. Sadly, though, that's becoming increasingly moot. He hasn't turned out the youth vote like he claimed he could and a lot of folks who like what he and Warren stand for are getting spooked and running to Biden. Fucking Biden. He should never have been in this race. He should have had the good sense and humility to stand aside and throw his support behind someone younger and more forward-thinking. But of course expecting good sense and humility from a career politician is a mug's game.

He's not the worst of the mediocre centrist candidates the Dems have run (last night I was struggling to recall, "How did Dukakis happen?") but he's harder to accept because we've been offered glimpses of something better. But just three years of Trump has been enough to get people to abandon their dreams of something better in the desperate hope of keeping things from getting even worse.

This is one of the toughest choices I've ever had to make in a Chicago election. Normally it's easy: you have a Machine candidate vs a progressive no-hoper in the primary and a Republican no-hoper in the general. This year, we have the unprecedented matchup of two progressives in the general. So of course the entire campaign has been about which progressive is really the stealth candidate for the Machine.

And because--apart from no-hopers--there are no true outsiders in Chicago politics, both candidates are tainted. It's kind of hard to paint a candidate as anti-Machine when she wouldn't have a political career without appointments from Daley and Rahm; it's even harder to make that argument when you've taken substantial sums from Machine poster boy Burke.

In the end, it came down to following the money and listening to activists. A lot of people who's whole lives are spent as and/or with marginalised people are advocating for Preckwinkle and her proven track record. Meanwhile, Lightfoot was endorsed by the candidate we have to thank for keeping Daley out of the final round by drawing away enough authoritarians. The developer and charter school money that would have flowed toward him is going to her now.

Despite this (or rather because of it), the race is Lightfoot's to lose. I'm taking comfort in several things. One is that friends whose opinions I respect very much have spoken with Lori and even worked on her campaign and they have confidence in her. Another is that--contrary to what nearly everyone believes--we actually have a governing system with a weak executive and a strong legislature. It's just never seemed that way because the executive office almost always goes to the man with most political clout in town.

Not this time. And the legislature, despite its overall conservativism, is nevertheless primed to be the most progressive we've ever seen. So there's hope they'll be able to curb her reactionary impulses. Plus we know that the activist groups will be holding her feet to fire on every progressive promise.

It's not even inconceivable that the runoff election in April could be between two Black women.

The runoff election in April is between two Black women.

It's going to be a tough decision for me. Both are positioning themselves as progressive reformers but both have links to the establishment and mixed records when it comes to protecting the vulnerable. I'm going to have to look deeper into their backgrounds and see what I can do to get to the bottom of the badmouthing. Hopefully there'll be a televised debate that delves into these issues.

Apologies are due to my presumptive future alderman Andre Vasquez for calling him "Chicano" when he's really a Chapín. (His parents were unauthorised immigrants from Guatemala.) He came in at 20% to O'Connor's 34 despite being outspent by more than 10-1, so I strongly favour his chances in the second round. It's hard to imagine that anyone who supported one of the other three candidates over Racist Grandpa would change their tune between now and April 2nd.

And Moore is out in East Rogers following a decisive loss to a Black lesbian who he also outspent massively. I'm kind of curious if there'd've been so much hunger for change without a faked-tanned protofascist in the White House. I'm not sure about Hadden but Vasquez cut his teeth campaigning for Bernie and I suspect both benefitted at least a little from the interest (and registrations) generated by the November midterms. Turnout was historically low (as the news kept reminding us) but that doesn't mean there wasn't still an enthusiasm gap and it's not going to have been in favour of the old white guys.

Everything washing out of Cleveland these last couple days has been so awful and depressing, and then Melania Trump went and gave us the gift of that plagiarised speech, which became a meme fountain the likes of which I don't know I've seen since they heyday of Rachel Dolezal (who makes a comeback in one). I was literally laughing out loud during the break in our 3-hour moves planning meeting sharing them with coworkers.

Then, of course, the sharpness of the cleverest ones started to become dulled with repetition and the ugliness of the sexist and nativist ones became harder to ignore. Finally walkthelight had to point up the pathos of her one big opportunity thus far in a campaign she clearly never wanted to be dragged into to present herself as something other than just a pair of boobs blowing up in her face and now I'm back to counting just how many damn weeks are left before November.

My emotional reactions to the attacks in Paris and everything they've stirred up are complex and messy and probably not something I should be trying to sort through in public. But, fuck it, this is LiveJournal, so who's reading this anyway? Somehow I managed not to hear about what happened until I was seated at the dinner table. I hadn't checked social media before leaving work and had to deal with condo nonsense the moment I arrived home, so it was only once that had settled down and I was sipping soup with the Old Man that he brought the conversation around to the events of the day.

My first reaction was to grab my iPhone and scan the news reports. I immediately felt sick to my stomach. It was a stronger sensation than reading the news from Beirut a day earlier. Then my heart sank as I thought, "This is not what they need." Beirut for me is like an elegant and accomplished person who suffered a terrible tragedy years ago and has been struggling ever since to get back on their feet again. Paris, on the other hand, is someone so powerful and celebrated that they should be well insulated from those problems.

But why should they get off easier than Madrid or New York City? No real reason at all. And it's not like the city is any stranger to political massacres either. The last one of this magnitude wasn't carried out by non-state actors but by the French state. None of this was in the forefront of my mind as the attacks were still in progress; they came bubbling up the next day as I began to sift through the news updates and the shitpile of responses and responses to responses.

Far from consoling me, the "flood of solidarity" only depressed me further. I don't know if I'd noticed before just how problematic expressions of support can be. Their value consists of their authenticity, but the mediation of a prefab platform very easily gives them the appearance of something else. I felt less like I was witnessing an outpouring of genuine emotion and more just the workings of habitus. Explanations of why a particular person felt strongly connected to Paris or the French in general read like a form of social positioning (since naturally these connexions are far more characteristic of some socioeconomic tiers and segments of society than others).

It got worse when Facebook released an app similar to the one propagated around the time of the same-sex marriage decision which allowed one to overlay profile pics with the Tricolore. With a "gesture of support" only two clicks away, my Wall began to fill up with doctored selfies. Could you find a better metaphor for making a distant tragedy all about yourself? A couple days later and I still see a trickle of Friends playing catchup. Which makes me wonder: How will they know when it's time to stop draping themselves in the flag? Which cool kids do they look to for their cue on that?

Naturally it took very little time before people began pointing out the disparity in reactions between Paris and Beirut, or Ankara a month earlier, or any other place east of Alsace that had been bombed or shot-up. This quickly became it's own kind of tedious posturing and attention-policing, whatever valid observations lay behind it. The covertly-politicised calls not to politicise the tragedy blended in with the overt politicisations and I just had to get away from it all.

What is the "proper" response in this situation? I don't know. I don't know that there is one, to be honest. People respond how they're going to respond, in a way you can largely predict based on their class background and their ideological poles. Is that a surprise? Is that cause for handwringing and headshaking? Isn't that just as determined a response as any other?

This is for febrile, who was lamenting on That Other Social Network that he misses the political discussion we used to have on LJ. If you see this, pal, post whatever you like and I'll do my best to respond in kind.

Naturally, the uproar over the disturbances in Baltimore is laying bare the limitations of Fakepuck for informed discourse in a particularly heinous. I'm expecting at least one deFriending (no big loss) despite doing my best not to get too deeply into it with anybody. But it's hard to hold my tongue when others are doing so much sanctimonious clucking about a few incidents of looting. (Almost solely from light-skinned people of privilege who have never had to live anywhere as shitty as West Baltimore, natch.) 'Cause that's really the main problem here, not--for instance--the fact that, just since 2011, eleven people have died in police custody in Baltimore and the force have been forced to pay out sums totaling over $5.7 million to settle cases of alleged undue use of force.

And then of course there's Gray's rap sheet, which has been circulating around the conservative blogosphere with such alacrity you'd think it'd just been leaked rather than being something which was widely reported in the dirty liberal media two weeks ago. But that's the most important thing to establish at this juncture: He Got What Was Coming. 33 counts in 8 years, only two violent, and every one of them a misdemeanour. Fully two-thirds are drug offences: possession, possession with intent to distribute, or distribution. Almost all the rest (e.g. violation of probation, lying to a cop, second-degree escape) are related to going through the wringer of the criminal justice system. His last arrest was for possession of a switchblade, which they had to run him down, tackle him (injuring him severely in the process), and search him to find. In other words, he's just the kind of low-level victim of the War On Drugs libertarians would leap to defend--if he were White. (But this isn't about race, oh no, it's about ethics in games journalism or something.)

You know how every time anyone--but especially a Muslim--goes on air to try to explain the reasons why it might be that young Muslims are so fed up with the world that some of them decide to blow themselves up or take hostages or whatever, they always have to preface their remarks with a ritualistic denial of support for terrorism? I think we all agree this is bullshit, but since the expectation doesn't seem to be going anywhere, I'd like to propose an equivalent for any time White people try to talk about the police. We should all be expected to say upfront that police brutality and extrajudicial murder are a Bad Things and that everyone in blue should really try the durnedest to stop doing them. Because I keep seeing people jump right into slamming the victim and condemning the outcry and it makes me honestly wonder if they don't see this as a problem the way the rest of us do.

Somewhere in this apartment I have a chunk of the Berlin Wall. This is not one of the pretty shards chipped to a convenient size and tarted up by industrious Turks for sale at the Brandenburg Gate. (When I visited Berlin in 1990, I had vantage point from which I could see the entire impressive assembly line.) It's a part of the wall Westerners didn't see, the part fronting to the east on the other side of the Death Strip. Constructed about ten years later, it's appalling how poor the quality of the concrete is. The original piece I found fallen on the sidewalk was too large and breaking it down to portable size only took a few whacks against the pavement.

While visiting Rome the following year, I met an East German exile named Holger Hinze. We exchanged information and five years later, when I returned to Berlin with Nuphy, he showed us around the commune he lived in in Weissensee. But our first meeting was at the Vatican and I tried to explain to him what it was like being an ex-Catholic, how there's something about that upbringing you can never shake. He told me it was the same for Ossis, that no matter how long they lived in a united Germany, they would be bound together by that common experience. Recently, Die Zeit published a series of maps supporting that contention.

I've now seen a number of posts commemorating the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen Massacre and I find it interesting to note that not one of them has featured this image. This is the Goddess of Democracy, modeled on the Statue of Liberty and constructed in only a few days chiefly from papier-mâché and foam. For several days, this was the global emblem of the pro-democracy movement, but after it was destroyed in the assault, the image of Tank Man quickly took its place.

It's easy to understand why: Tank man is a powerful image. I find it hard to look at without getting choked up (or at least I used to before it became overexposed to the point where it began to appear in Apple ads). It symbolises the ability of a single person to take a stand against tyranny and oppression, and that's inspiring.

But it also leaves a lot out. The Goddess was a communal project, and that reflects how I remember the movement. At the VP Fair in St Louis, Chinese students at Washington University had a booth where they were selling calligraphy and paper cutouts in order to benefit their comrades back home. I still have a paper tiger and a pink sheet of paper with the words "I am a giant duck" packed away in a box in the basement. It was salutary for me to see that kind of cooperation. After all, not one of us in a million can be another Tank Man.

I was more than a little surprised to find out yesterday (again from reading the Economist) about the riots in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Not because I don't expect unrest there, but because I've heard literally nothing from any other news outlet. I'm not especially catholic in my choice of sites (generally BBC, al-Jazeerah, and my customised Google feed) and I don't spend a big chunk of each day reading them, but I like to think that when there are widespread anti-governmental riots in a European state my country was instrumental in creating, I'll hear about it sooner rather than later--let alone two weeks later.

Delving a bit more into the story, it's not hard to see why there wasn't more coverage. We have a prevailing narrative in the USA about the region which can be summed up as, "Whaddya expect, it's the Balkans." If the clashes had been interethnic, they would've fit right into that narrative. But they weren't. Instead we had crowds of all ethnicities taking on corrupt officials installed with the backing of the EU and its allies (e.g. us). It has far less in common with the "ancient hatreds" which led to the breakup of Yugoslavia than with the Occupy movement and--as we know--reporting on non-USA demonstrations relating to that has been dismal. In addition, despite the presence of Muslims in Bosnia, it can't be linked to the Arab Spring either because, as mentioned above, it's a regime we support, not one we want to see "changed".

Given that, it's not at all unexpected to hear from people in former Yugoslavia that the demonstrations have actually been going on for a year, but it took a building being burnt down to net them any sort of mention in the foreign press. Now that the "riots" have mostly ended, we'll probably stop hearing anything at all. Which is a damn shame, because the system of citizen-organised "plena" which are presently negotiating with local authorities is heartening and a model for how Occupy might've played out if we only trusted direct democracy in this country a bit more.

In his journal, fengi laments the dearth of mentions of the War in Iraq on this, the tenth anniversary of its commencement. I was going to let it slide because, frankly, I don't have anything interesting to say about it, and I doubt the majority of my flist do either. Most of the commentary I have seen is rather light on content, or focuses on the stateside effects of the war.

But there is one thing about which I wonder what opinions people have and that is: What do you think Iraq would look like today if the US and its allies had not invaded a decade ago? Who would be in power and with what sort of legitimacy? What would its domestic situation and foreign relations look like, who would be better off and who would be worse?

If someone has links to informed articles addressing this (whether you agree with their conclusions or not) please share them.