Indignation doesn’t work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country–the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples–we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago–occasionally Barack Obama’s pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity–for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go–these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an “angry black man” like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.

[...]

Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around–a notion with longstanding theological grounding–and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.

The rejection and vilification of Wright’s rhetoric by white society seems so very similar to the rejection and vilification of critical theory post 9/11 by folks such as Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and David Simpson. That an analysis of a situation — a critical inquiry into causes and effects and ideology — is read as a justification of events. No, Wright is not arguing that America deserved to be attacked on September 11, 2001, and neither was, say Jean Baudrillard. Instead, they argue that it was predictable, something that could easily be foreseen because we have done it to others so many times before. And, as Wright so smartly notes, to express so much anger and grief at the attacks on the World Trade Center while not blinking an eye at Hiroshima — to condemn one attack and not another — is to mark quite explicitly what bodies matter as human: white, Western, “civilized.” Butler makes a similar point in Precarious Life, noting that we can tell who we value as human based on who we mourn. Simpson, too, notes this, and argues, as I recall, that now is the time when we need philosophy (or critical theory): in society that reacts quickly and moves increasingly faster, we need to slow down and call attention to the injustices of our society.

We need to be indignant, and white folks (myself included), middle class and upper class folks, men, straight folks, need to accept that indignation. But as Wise notes, people don’t want to be reminded of the horror they’re implicated in. This leads to labeling Wright as racist (against whites, of all people!) and anti-American. In the theory class I sat in last term, some students critiqued Precarious Life for the inordinate amount of space Butler devotes to defending herself and her theories against charges of Antisemitism, as she critiques Israel’s imperialism. It seems that we are in a time when not only do we need philosophy, but we need to defend it now more than ever.

My favorite, The Cookie Monster eating the WTC:

An ad for Maker’s Mark, with wax on the buildings that appears more like blood (this one is probably less intentional than the others in regards connoting destruction):

By asking these questions, I wasn’t meaning to demean his bravery or competence, or to state that any pilot could have done what he did. What I mean to ask, though, is what constitutes a hero (a very subject I think we had to take up in a high school English class, if I remember right)?

I’m reading Giovanna Borradori’s Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, and I’m struck by this exchange:

BORRADORI: One last question: What are your ideas on heroism?

HABERMAS: The courage, discipline, and selflessness demonstrated by the New York firemen who on September 11 spontaneously put their lives on the line to save others is admirable. But why do they need to be called “heroes”? Perhaps this word has different connotations in American English than it does in German. It seems to me that whenever “heroes” are honored the question arises as to who needs them and why. Even in this looser sense of the term on can understand Bertolt Brecht’s warning: “Pity the land that needs heroes.” (43)

Habermas seems to ask the right questions here, I think. Who needs these heroes and why? Perhaps this is the question that could inform us in the question of “what is a hero?”

I also found the use of “land” instead of “people” or “country” by Brecht (whose work I am unfamiliar with) as particularly interesting at this point. On Friday in the Post 9/11 theory course, we were discussing what constituted patriotism (as opposed to other, stronger loyalties that Zizek seems to privilege), and someone brought up the roots of patriotism: devotion to a land, rather than a state.

Is Brecht right that a land that needs heroes is something to pity?

over there is over here

you are either with life or against it. affirm life.

To anyone acquainted with the reality of the American way of life, the photos brought to mind the obscene underside of U.S. popular culture—say, the initiatory rituals of torture and humiliation one has to undergo to be accepted into a closed community. Similar photos appear at regular intervals in the U.S. press after some scandal explodes at an Army base or high school campus, when such rituals went overboard. Far too often we are treated to images of soldiers and students forced to assume humiliating poses, perform debasing gestures and suffer sadistic punishments.

The torture at Abu Ghraib was thus not simply a case of American arrogance toward a Third World people. In being submitted to the humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture: They got a taste of the culture’s obscene underside that forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy and freedom. No wonder, then, the ritualistic humiliation of Iraqi prisoners was not an isolated case but part of a widespread practice. On May 6, Donald Rumsfeld had to admit that the photos rendered public are just the “tip of the iceberg,” and that there were much stronger things to come, including videos of rape and murder.

We discussed during class “initiation,” because it seems that the prisoners at Abu Ghraib can never fully be initiated into America, because they can never be America. This brought us to alterity: it seems that one can only be fully initiated once one becomes fully American: that is, once one is fully white, male, straight, middle class, able bodied. The humiliation continues as long as one remains not fully American: a person of color, women, queer, poor, disabled, and so forth. I was immediately reminded of Sandra Lee Bartky’s “The Pedagogy of Shame,” in which she discusses this very act of shaming our culture engages in towards women (I discussed Bartky here).

When I took Creative Democracy last year, we discussed very early in the term what it meant to be American, and some of us came up with: white, male, straight, middle class, able bodied. Those outside the center, those disenfranchised by the system, are never quite fully American. And if you are not, you are attacked consistently with this cultural pedagogy of shame: a regimen of humiliation that continually tries to initiate you into the system until you are finally straight, man enough, middle class enough — or, for women, impossibly, male enough, and since, without undergoing transition, a woman is not a man, she is forever shamed. Indeed, all these folks are forever shamed, for shame and humiliation is something we carry with us. The poor person who becomes middle class carries with the self the shame of internalized classism. The queer person who “reforms” and “becomes” straight surely carries with hirself shame: I was once abhorrent and can only cast aside this abhorrence by casting it as sin and myself as a sinner.

But the prisoners of Abu Ghraib, stateless, homo sacer, can never become Americans: They are too brown, too Muslim, too militant…

I’m a bit unsettled by some of Baudrillard’s ethics, though. While I think some of his assessments in his other works (I’ve only read short excerpts) are correct, I always get the feeling that he somehow doesn’t seem to care about lives and dignity in the same way I do. He seems a bit too cynical (perhaps that’s the right word?) for me.

I think I agree with one of his central theses in this book, that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center were actually symbolic, not political, and that what they symbolize is the self-destructive nature of globalization. He also notes that this attack is different from other attacks in that it used the very tools of globalization against the globalizing powers. He writes:

We have to face facts, and accept a new terrorism has come into being, a new form of action which plays the game, and lays hold of the rules of the game, solely with the aim of disrupting it. Not only do these people not play fair, since they put their own deaths into play — to which there is no possible response (‘they are cowards’) — but they have taken over all the weapons of the dominant power. Money and stock-market speculation, computer technology networks — they have assimilated everything of modernity and globalism, without changing their goal, which is to destroy that power. (19)

I am not sure I agree, however, with his assertion that “We are far beyond ideology and politics now” (9). Globalization is terror for Baudrillard, and the attack on the World Trade Center “is terror against terror — there is no longer any ideology behind it” (9).

I think I disagree because, for someone to be a terrorist, don’t they have to be working under an ideology that views humans as not fully humans — as objects, as tools? If 4,000 are killed, then those 4,000 cannot be seen as valuable in and of themselves, but rather as objects. They are not “Thous” but “Its” (to reference Buber). I don’t agree with Kant’s epistemology of morality, but I do agree with his Humanity Formula that says we should never treat another solely as a means and not as an end in itself.

And Baudrillard has a passage that relates directly to this, in that it seems to counter this Kantian/Buberian(?) ethics, but I can’t seem to find it, and now I’m frustrated. My thoughts are also getting all muddled. I will try to return to this later when they are a bit more clear.