On the perils and benefits of complexity and nuance for public scholars.
I
once had a pretty unpleasant Facebook-thread argument—in the immediate context
of the summer 2011 debt
ceiling nonsense and President Obama’s responses to it—with a leftist political
activist (not someone I know personally, but such are the promise and peril of
Facebook and the internet) who feels that “academic liberals” are “the lamest,
most clueless, most useless motherfuckers in the world.” Since he said this to
me directly, after I had offered him what he admitted was “unreciprocated
civility,” the line certainly reflects most centrally the guy’s particular and
unattractive online voice and personality. But leaving the insults aside, his
broader points, which focused on how academic liberals (and perhaps liberals
more generally) don’t have the will or tenacity to do whatever it takes to “win”
political arguments and thus are ultimately powerless in the face of
win-at-all-costs conservatives like those currently running the show in DC, are
ones I have myself considered often, including in and in regard to this space.
For
example, much of my yesterday’s post focused explicitly on the question (in
response to a few prompts, including William Hazlitt’s still relevant 1820
essay “On the Spirit of Partisanship” and the work of Reconstruction-era
activist and writer Albion Tourgée) of whether liberals should fight
conservative fire with fire or with complexity, should (at least at times and
when necessary) abandon the high roads of historical awareness and knowledge
and context (among many others) and play dirty in order to take on conservative
movements that seem often to rely heavily, even depend, upon propaganda and
misrepresentations and bald-faced lies. Since this blog began I have, I will
admit, included more contemporary and political topics among my focal points
here than I had initially planned; but I have not, I devoutly hope, abandoned
even a fraction of my desire for nuance and context, for awareness and
knowledge, for connecting such issues thoroughly to the long and multi-part
threads that can be traced from them to so much of our national history and
identity and narratives. As I wrote in yesterday’s post, and as I certainly
believe, trying to provide all of those layers is the right thing to do; but
what my Facebook interlocutor might ask (if with more vulgarity), and what I
certainly ask myself frequently as well, is whether it’s the best thing to do, at least for those of
us seeking to enter into and even ideally influence broader national
conversations.
I’d
be lying if I said I had the answer to that question. But I think another
2011 news story illustrates, if I do say so myself, the real and urgent
need in our national conversations not only for the voices of public
AmericanStudies scholars in general, but in this particular case for the
argument at the heart of my second
book specifically. In this story, the despicable anti-Muslim bigot Pamela
Geller, about whom I wrote in my July
25th and July
26th, 2011 posts, comes out in support of Norwegian terrorist
Anders Breivik; Geller makes that disgusting case in a variety of ways, but in
one particularly telling comment (later scrubbed from her site but caught in a screen
capture) she captions a photo of the kids at the Norwegian youth camp (taken
the day before the shooting) by asking her readers to “note the faces which are
more Middle Eastern or mixed than pure Norwegian.” Geller may think that she’s
making a point there about Norway specifically or European societies more
generally—and certainly she, like Breivik and the rest of their anti-Muslim
ilk, are indeed intertwined with social changes and concurrent hate movements
throughout the continent—but to my AmericanStudier’s mind the loudest echoes
are of deeply American narratives about who is and is not a “pure” or “real”
American, narratives which have been and continue to be constructed in direct
response both to immigration and to racial and cultural mixture. And
narratives, yes, that represent precisely a crucial inspiration for much of my
own attempt to define American identity precisely through the concept of such
mixtures, to make them the most “pure” version of who and what we have been and
are.
If
I had to guess, I’d say that my Facebook conversant would argue that the best,
and perhaps the only, way to respond to somebody like Geller is to publicly
attack and shame her, to put her bigotry and vitriol on display for all to
see—and to make clear at the same time how deeply interconnected she and they
are to the current Republican party (note the photo of her with House Majority
Whip Eric Cantor in that linked news story). Again, he might well have a point.
But to me, responding by first noting the deep-seated national narratives to
which her bigotry and vitriol connect, and then positing some alternative and
more genuinely communal narratives in their place, can and, I still believe,
will ultimately allow us to move into a future where we all stand a better shot
of winning, maybe not immediate prizes of power or influence but fundamental and
more meaningful ones of equality and hope. At the end of the day, I’m going to
keep making that point, here and everywhere else.
Crowd-sourced
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. So what do you think? Responses to any of the week’s
posts and questions, or any related issues, for that weekend post?
11/16 Memory Day nominee: W.C. Handy,
the factory
worker and son of ex-slaves who became one of America’s most pioneering and
significant ragtime
and blues musicians
and composers.
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