``Hmm. Maybe I'll ask him about that. It did cross my mind. What is her opinion on reparations? I just hate how he keeps going back to reparations for slavery. What about reparations for segregation that existed officially until the 60s and 70s. That is why recent immigrants from the west Indies are affected by the legacy from slavery.'' Christine
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I don't know. I suspect she may have never thought of it. The real point would be to psychologically dismantle Horowitz in public.
I mean he's crazy, and there is something about his mind that is twisted up with power, guilt, and a strange group of obsessions that have a kind of indefinable sexual hysteria about them all.
He reminds me of a white bag lady with a heavy Brooklyn accent back in the Eighties who used to harass the AC transit buses on Shattuck. She had it in for black high school kids and used to run after the buses filled with kids going home from BHS. She would wave her clinched fists in the air, and start banging on the sides of the slowly retreating buses, screaming a horrible and venomous racist track.
The kids, safely behind the bus windows would yell, wave and make boogie man faces at her to get her going. There was something funny and horrible about this insane street ritual. It was as if the very essence of racism was distilled and embodied in this woman, and it was finally put on stage for everyone to watch in all its ridiculous, pathetic, and demented glory.
So, if I imagine a debate with Horowitz, its purpose would be to peel away his rhetorical nonsense so as to reveal his rightwing hate mongering, and then dissect that into its neurotic components.
On one level, of course he isn't worth bothering with. And yet, since the rightwing holds almost absolute power in this country, it would be nice to get one of them on stage here, without their media handlers, and carefully screened audiences.
Here is a random quote from Butler's Psychic Lives of Power (Melancholy, Ambivalence, Rage), following up a thought of Freud's:
``...A form of moral reflexivity is produced in which the ego splits itself to furnish an internal perspective by which to judge itself. The reflexive relation by which the ego becomes an object to itself turns out to be a withdrawn and transformed (entzogen and aufgehoben) relation to the lost other; in this sense, reflexivity appears to depend upon the prior operation of melancholia. The ego is also figured as having a voice through this process, and it appears imperative within melancholia that self-beratement be voiced, not merely to oneself, but in the presence of others. The self-reproaches of the ego are not simply the imitation of reproaches once leveled against the ego from the one lost, as is commonly assumed; rather, they are reproaches leveled against the other that now turn back upon the ego.'' (181p)
I think Horowitz is a living example of this phenomenon. But he merely represents the entire rightwing psychotic morality play, masturbating to itself in the public mirror.