queers

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Mon May 25 09:45:16 PDT 1998


Maria Gilmore wrote:


>But the wall progressives keep
>slamming into is the wall of class, class which cuts across race, gender and
>sexual orientation. The class situation in this society isn't getting better,
>it's getting much worse. I know, we all know that...or do we? Depends on
>where you live and what job you have and the kind of money you make...which is
>what I think people like Moore and maybe Alterman are trying to point out.

What's exasperating to me is that Moore, Alterman, Rorty, and the rest treat this as an either-or thing. As Alterman reported in his own incoherent column, the racism/sexism/homophobia folks were the strongest volunteer contingent in the University of Virginia's living wage campaign.

Speaking of Rorty, this discussion inspired me to blow $18 on his latest book, Achieving Our Country. I've only started to read it (and I may not finish it), but what a bucket of crap. It reeks from the very first sentence - no, the very first clause:

"National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals..."

Well, no, not really. It's always dangerous to psychoanalyze whole societies, especially an imperial monster like the United States. But of course we're not supposed to call the U.S. an imperial monster, because that would interfere with developing positive narratives about America. The narratives needn't be true - they just gotta sound good.

Next paragraph. Having established the need for national self-esteem - he's as bad as Clinton in transforming politics into psychobabble - Rorty then confesses that he hopes "that the United States of America will someday yield up sovereignty to what Tennyson called 'the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World." Oh, the black helicopter set won't like this! So in paragraph one, we learn that the U.S. needs more self-esteem, but in paragraph two we learn that this is but a prelude to a surrender of sovereignty to a world confederation. He's as incoherent as Alterman.

And maybe I made a boo-boo in setting Rorty against the Derrideans, but he's no fan of those sinister Europeans: "The trouble with Europe, Whitman and Dewey thought, was that it tried too hard for knowledge: it tried to find an answer to the question of what human beings should be like." Instead, they should have made room for "pure, joyous hope." Barf bag please. Has there ever been a country that thought itself the model for the world more intensely than the USA? Has there ever been a system so convinced that it had achieved perfection, from the days of the shining city on the hill to Bill Clinton's favorite maxim, "What's wrong with America can be cured by what's right with America"?

Oh, and the stuff on Marx is just delightful. "Some socially useful thinkers - for example, Cornel West, Fredric Jameson, and Terry Eagleton - still speak of themselves, for what seems to me purely sentimental reasons, as 'Marxists.' Such sentimentality appalls Poles and Hungarians who never want to hear Marx's name again." Let's go back to Herbert Croly and the Progressive Era for our models instead! Croly, says Rorty, "begins his book by saying that Americans are entitled to their 'almost religious faith' in their country, except that it's been sorta fucked up by "industrial capitalism." Gee, Marx wouldn't have anything to say about that, would he? No, because "we Americans did not need Marx to show us the need for redistribution." Marx as redistributionist, that's an interesting spin.

And onto this rhetorical climax: "I can sum up by saying that it would be a good thing if the next generation of American leftists found as little resonance in the names of Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as in those of Herbert Spencer and Benito Mussolini. It would be an even better thing if the names of Ely and Croly, Dreiser and Debts, A. Philip Randolph and John L. Lewis were more familiar to those leftists than they were to the students of the Sixties.... They should be able to see, as Whitman and Dewey did, the struggle for social justice as central to their country's moral identity." This is little more than high-end nativist boosterism.

Doug



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