>Justin must be busy today. He hasn't responded yet to my suggestion that
>his praise of "America" was in fact tautological when applied to any
>"national" or "tribal" or whatever group in human history. And as such,
>his post really does not put him among the "Love America" adherents.
>
>Carrol
dearest carrol (and doug too), could you explain how it is love america to say what i typed below? if you hadn't noticed, i was pointing out that those who want to avoid saying that they appreciate various aspects of US culture are still implicitly upholding very US and Western values. how could it be otherwise? to complain about the labor/leisure distinction is to complain about something that is unknown to many people around the planet. that is not their problem. nor are invasions of privacy a problem they are concerned with--not in the same way "we" worry about them.
so how is this 'Love America" to say this, doug? carrol?
iwrote: (ihave a hard time saying this kind of thing because i think it encourages nationalism. but i sincerely believe in the power of internal critique. and i sincerely believe that it is better to engage in what i understand is the centerpiece of a dialectical analysis: you don't throw the baby out with the disposable diaper.)
or this:
well, here's the problem. i suggested the we provide a left version of a rah rah siss boom bah. i have my doubts about that, as indicated by my question at the end of my first post.
what would a left rah rah siss boom bah be? something like this?
"The US is like the World. The US is like everyone. LEt's all join hands and start building, that commmie heaven. Oh yeah, we can make a four hour day, so let's start slackin'. We are the World, We are humanity." <sung to the tune of "We are the world">
Let's all join hands and sing Kumbaya My Lord. Rah rah rah siss boom bah, push em back push em back, goooooooooooo humanity!
something like that?
it seems to me that this approach can only ever lead to some form of ethnocentrism. even in the attempt to embrace others and deny membership in a nation state, those political visions continue to impose one's unique US perspective on those Others.
yet, it also seems to me that trying to take a neutral path, and focus only on the evils of the US government (or whatever), just isn't enough either. by default, it ends up advancing a US vision, if you're a member of US society. trying to ignore that membership, or actively renounce that membership, that history IS a kind of self-hating americanism. it's a kind of demand that if you want to be on the right side here, you have to renounce your identity with the US. really? it's a dream of deliverance, a fantasy, if you ask me.
it reminds me of people who've been abused as children. they grow up and try to resist identifying with their abusive parents. "I will NOT be like them". and yet, they end up being like them. not because they're scarred for life or born that way, but because they cannot deal with the fact that, as abusive and awful as their parents were, their parents didn't abuse them all the time, that their parents often nurtured them and cared for them. to survive, they build a defense mechanism and they have to split the two experiences, the two identities. they make a choice to identify with the aggressor / the victim as helpless and despicable. they can't bear to identify with the nurturing parent / the victim as worthy of being cared for.
is it not a sign of emotional maturity to accept that your parents--you and the world you inhabit, the culture and institutions that you make and remake everyday--are both good and bad? i think it is.
i think building a social movement and advancing a political praxis based on an either/or good/bad is doomed to failure because it rests on a dream of deliverance from the messy complicated wholeness of the life we must live.
as an example that isn't so pyschologistic: the debates we have over merit. sure, right now, merit is nothing more and nothing less than a tool of class exploitation and oppression. but is merit always and forever going to be bad and bad alone? are the master's tools really incapable of bringing down the master's house? i don't know. i'm asking.
what are we fighting FOR? something beyond the US. something beyond the american people. something beyond those kinds of identities. but what? it CAN be articulated: implicit in any negative critique is always a positive vision of what "the good" we're striving for. you can say you're just against this and against that all you want. you can insist that you exist in the shifting interstices that manifest themselves in the struggle against whatever one is against at the moment. but, in the end, you are still fighting FOR something.
in the end, as Marx said, you have to take a side in the 'struggles and wishes of the age' and advance what you think is the most progressive position that you can.
most of our visions for a socialist or anarchist future--however they are articulated--they are going to reflect a uniquely US view if we live in the US. at the very least, they will reflect a very western view of what the problem is and how we should go about eradicating the problem.
i can easily imagine life beyond the US, beyond identification with being an American. i understand and enjoy life in the interstices created from resistance to various forms of power. i prefer being there, playing each side off the other. but i don't think that the path to a future beyond the US, beyond identification with a nation state, beyond identification with a culture is one that requires that I renounce that identification by virtue of denouncing everything about it. nor do i think that a future beyond nation states is one that has or can escape the underlying dynamic that fuels ethnocentrism and nationalism: a "we" even a global "we" is always going to be defined against an Other.
acknowledging that inevitability, however, doesn't give it power. indeed, acknowledging it empowers us to watch out for who and what we Other on the way there.
kelley