Impractical Living

In August, 2017, I moved back to the USA after two years of living in Beirut.  I quickly sensed the tension of Donald Trump’s America, but it wasn’t especially jarring:  Donald Trump’s America is just a more explicit version of what “America” has been my entire life.  I found more jarring the constant displays of patriotism, something I never liked and was happy to forget shortly after I left the country.  (Lebanese displays of patriotism are no more comforting, but they don’t resonate the same way to a Western expat.)  After a few months, my family settled into a townhouse in one of DC’s anodyne suburbs. 

I took up the habit of walking to a shopping center around a mile away to buy granola bars or cheese slices, the treats a pretext, or perhaps a reward, for the exercise, an unusual activity in such environs unless performed in stinky, over-stimulating gyms, yet another replication of spontaneous activity. 

During these walks, as the townhouses gave way to the higher tier of single-family units, I noticed that one property was vigilant in its civic responsibility.  A decorative vane painted in stars and stripes adorned the front lawn, carved in the shape of a determined bald eagle, its wings spinning in the wind.  Next to the front door, alternating arrows declare “God.  Bless.  America,” one word per arrow, the top one pointing right.  In October, the owners hung a banner in an autumn floral pattern announcing that “the [redacted] family will always stand for the flag and support the troops.”  In November, up went a life-sized Santa blow-up doll in camouflage proclaiming support of the military.  That Christmas, the jolly old man apparently would be carrying bombs in his sleigh. 

I’ve always wondered what inspires such devotion in people, and such eagerness for that devotion to be seen.  I don’t doubt the sincerity of the display, but the show of piety transcends pride of position.  Performances of devotion are everywhere visible in this heavily militarized area.  Women talk in low tones of their husbands “in the service,” enunciated with an anguish calibrated to elicit sympathy.  It’s a logical gambit.  Soldiers—“the troops”—guarantee our freedoms.  They are selfless warriors for democracy, a special class not of the labor force, but its benefactors throughout a chaotic world.  The troops exist in a benevolent ether, immune to the vulgarities of criticism.  In turn, no group feels more entitled to praise.  Along with expecting mothers, they enjoy priority boarding on airplanes and reserved parking at Whole Foods.  Both kinds of consumer are, after all, responsible for preserving human survival. 

Two doors over from the family that pledges to always stand for the flag and support the troops is a household whose inhabitants resemble many of the people on the receiving end of the troops’ drone strikes and sniper fire.  Based on style of dress, the household appears to be Muslim.  Whatever the case, it doesn’t meet the criteria of real American-ness.  When driving my kid to school, I see a mother and daughter on the corner waiting for the bus and I wonder if they feel awkward in the presence of their neighbor.  Are those neighbors friendly?  Does each family keep a distance?  Does the [redacted] family passive aggressively make the Muslims feel unwelcome?  Is the [redacted] family openly aggressive about it?  Is the Muslim family on some level anxious in the current environment of suspicion and snitching?  Do its members ever consider what the [redacted] family would do in a state of emergency or upon even a minor breakdown of the social order?  Or in keeping with the social order that already exists? 

I’m not conducting a thought experiment.  These families exist; they commune within a racial ecology that grants each household disparate levels of power.  In turn, it’s difficult to imagine that the [redacted] family, with its cheerily belligerent landscape architecture, isn’t somehow racist, if only by accepting (and promoting) the structural advantages of normativity and the political safety of unthinking nationalism.  At best, it considers the Muslim neighbors to be that rarest of breeds, “the good ones.”  The family might hypothetically be non-racist (I can’t make the same hypothetical commitment to “anti-racist”), but the ephemera it displays undoubtedly is racist.  The racism is implicit, but it’s not hard to identify.  I know the family by those symbols, through which it announces a politics.  The abstractions of its chauvinism are made palpable by half a millennium of uncountable corpses. 

The Muslims’ house, on the other hand, is bereft of symbolism beyond what an ordinary suburban home with a garage and a small lawn already symbolizes.  It’s rare in domesticated spaces for brown people to display nationalistic imagery from the lands of their origin.  In student rentals or dorms, one might see a Third World flag, but such things are verboten in places with a homeowners’ association.  Immigrants from the Global South are more likely to display a US flag or some other acceptable trinket.  These choices tell us little of the subject’s politics.  After 9/11, my mom, in Southern Appalachia, festooned a small American flag to her bumper, though she’s decidedly anti-war.  She could have been motivated by a sense of amity or mourning, but I’d guess that mostly she didn’t want anyone to damage her car.  (She lived in the land of the “white working class,” remember, where fifteen years after 9/11 over eighty percent of her neighbors would vote for Trump.) 

It’s possible the Muslim family is Republican and resents all the “bad” immigrants coming into the country.  It’s also possible the family is anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist and empathizes with oppressed communities throughout the world.  There’s no way to tell from the sidewalk.  The migrant, the wretched, the dark-skinned, the newcomer…their voices are layered with hints and undertones that allow them to survive America’s patriotic norms.  The same social order that supposedly assures their safety also produces a constant sense of danger.  Symbolism lacks guile in white America. 

The narratives that led to Trump’s popularity among a segment of the population are obscene and violent.  I understand that the office requires obscenity and violence.  I’m reacting to what a vote signifies in this environment.  White Trump supporters terrify me.  (Those who imagine the Democrats to be a safe alternative instill a special kind of trepidation.)  Whiteness produced untold terror well before Donald Trump existed, but he embodies a brand of nativism that summons the ugliest epochs of US history.  People of color are made to relive the ugliness in each profession of national pride.  I returned to America from Beirut to find a change of form but not of function.  Those who imagine themselves privy to genetic and cultural superiority are simply more emboldened to announce their predilections. 

Even if little has changed in the White House, on the street—or at least in the suburbs—suspicion and anxiety predominate.  Every time I walk past the [redacted] family home, its paean to military violence shooting into my vision like a rocket’s red glare, I’m afflicted by a stark recognition:  this is no way to live; every which direction, at all times, we suffer a battery of coercion—into silence, into peonage, into unease, into acquiescence.  Corporate primacy governs everything from cultural antagonism to neighborly relations.  Then I walk past the Muslim residence and realize that the condition is ephemeral.  Something isn’t fit to survive—either the existence of those who suffer racism or the system that produces the suffering.  The accumulation of tension in the United States is unsustainable, as is the physical environment in which it occurs. 

All humans, particularly the disempowered, should have a say in the outcome.  And it would be foolish to pursue incremental change.  Upheaval is the task.  It might not be likely.  It might not even be possible.  But it’s the only thing that will work if the goal is justice, or the humbler goal of seeing life endure into the next century.  There are useful ways to participate in the system:  agitating for progressive taxation, universal healthcare, corporate accountability, environmental protections, and civil and human rights.  In the end, these are partial, temporary interventions.  Even the most robust menu of rights will produce only minimal necessities of survival amid economies dependent on impoverishment and alienation.  Just as nature begins reclaiming a physical structure the moment it is built, capitalism immediately erodes the political concessions it is forced to provide. 

Whatever possibilities exist are best found in unauthorized (and often unauthored) sources of knowledge.  Auspicious dreams exist among the powerless, the despised, the expendable—those apparitions in prisons, shanties, ghettos, reservations, and refugee camps—in nations such as the Murrawarri Republic, Honduras, Palestine, Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Chiapas, Gambia, Kashmir, Hawaii, Western Sahara, Papua, Yemen, Haiti, Aotearoa, and Puerto Rico.  We need to pay mind to these places instead of taking refuge in the commonplaces of a corrupted, decaying modernity affixed to fantasies of a redeemable America.  Wisdom is available if we push beyond the strictures of common sense, which takes for granted that certain people are destined to suffer.  Realism might demand the exclusion of viewpoints too radical for mainstream consumption, but expecting oppressed peoples to relinquish their aspirations is the most unrealistic scenario of all. 

Had Palestinians surrendered to notions of Israeli pragmatism, they would no longer exist.  There’s no place for Indigenous peoples in a world actualized through settler colonization.  The normative household will always enjoy a structural advantage if the sources of its entitlement remain in place. 

Consider that those classed as “Native American” or “American Indian” exist across enormous territory, spanning the North and South American continents (and much of the Caribbean).  Their resistance is highly varied.  At Standing Rock, water protectors decrying the imposition of an oil pipeline opted for immovability in the face of state violence.  By opposing a corporate-governmental alliance that epitomized an economy of pragmatism, they announced a better way of managing the world.  No honest witness could absolve the US government of its brutality. 

Similarly, Black activists have shut down shopping centers (including the colossus of excessive retail, Minnesota’s Mall of America), blocked interstates, disrupted political events, commandeered entire blocks, staged “die-ins,” and returned smoking tear gas canisters to the police.  A huge intellectual and cultural apparatus exists alongside #BlackLivesMatter.  The need of Black people to survive, live, and flourish, a natural sequence for the white and wealthy, is everywhere treated as impractical. 

We should attend to whatever capitalist and white supremacist cosmologies cannot recognize.  Though we like to imagine justice as a spiritual or psychological resource to trade among sovereign communities, in a world that conceptualizes business interests as a model of probity it can become a rhetoric of obeisance.  An immediate task is to extricate human need from corporate dominion.  Doing so requires intellectual in addition to physical labor, a search for perspectives contraposed to exercises of institutional power—or for unseen actors who maintain the contraposition.  We have to acknowledge violence that is deliberately unnoticed, the material that makes Western democracy an automated machine of self-denial.  Thinking first of the collective rather than of the institution requires training, or perhaps retraining, because personhood is mediated through imperatives of capital.  It means abandoning individual rewards—when rewards are disbursed in this situation, the ruling class accumulates the prizes. 

So we pursue unimaginable futures.  Politics needn’t be formulaic; it can be articulated through attitude, temperament, and sensibility.  It’s instructive to observe the expression of viewpoints through behavior.  How do you treat those nearby and far away?  Do you excuse or ignore the misbehavior of people with social and economic capital?  Are you more interested in capturing an audience than in disrupting authority?  Do you ignore or ridicule those already unloved by power?  Whom are you eager to praise?  Whom do you refuse to defend?  (By now, I can get a decent sense of a person’s actual politics simply by noting whom that person retweets and whom that person avoids.) 

I’m not speaking of revolution as a branding exercise, but as a seething need to live free of oppression.  The groundwork of revolt happens in the tedium of daily existence.  Avoiding the petty rewards of merit.  Undermining orthodox imperatives.  Refusing to conform.  Lifting up the powerless.  One thing I’ve learned from years of hanging around activist and academic environs is that being able to recite a revolutionary discourse with breadth and rigor doesn’t mean shit.  Find people willing to actually practice revolutionary ideals.  It’s no accident that by this point the decorated Marxist scholar who sides with management when grad students want to unionize, or the male feminist luminary who’s super-creepy in private, is practically a cliché. 

This sensibility—stubborn, yes, but an exercise of my sole influence—was nurtured by the enormity of Palestinian struggle.  Rachel Corrie, the American activist murdered in 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza, once stated, “I think freedom for Palestine could be an incredible source of hope to people struggling all over the world.”  The statement has deepened in subsequent years.  We see the strength of Corrie’s sentiment in videos like Vic Mensa’s “We Could Be Free,” in moments when Black visitors to Palestine sing Negro spirituals, in the Palestinian flags that fly amid munitions and chemical agents in the imperial core.  No matter how adamantly Israel wishes to render these convergences a portent of terrorism, the real terror for the settler exists in unified shows of decolonial power. 

The convergences have generated valuable movements, but their greatest potential is still ahead.  We needn’t seek perfect or foolproof modes of solidarity.  Based on variegated histories, cultures, languages, and thousands of other things, discrete communities won’t be perfectly aligned.  Relationships will suffer tension and suspicion, and in worse moments conflict and distrust.  A common need for liberation is enough to maintain those relationships, no matter how challenging.  Their development, in any case, must continue, if only because they make each community better. 

Anti-Zionism, for instance, isn’t merely compatible with a desire to eliminate racism within the Arab American community; the two commitments are inseparable.  Likewise, North American decolonization isn’t a diversion from anti-Zionist activism; it is a necessary application of anti-Zionism to our immediate environs.  Let anti-Zionism become synonymous with liberatory aspirations.  Let it become a stalwart against racism.  Let it pursue the meek and destitute of this world.  Those seeking Palestine’s liberation cannot maintain exclusive ownership of political desire, of the needs that boil in the hearts and brains of the oppressed.  The nation is a stimulus.  It belongs to everybody who suffers persecution and colonization.  The upshot of its generosity will be an all-consuming freedom.  No other aspiration is worthy of our time. 

There are many ways to perform resistance, each one tried and tested and therefore impossible to invent.  We can only sift through voluminous examples and decide which have value, and in what way that value can be determined.  Electoral politics and reform of the Democratic Party, approaches that can sometimes offer temporary relief, are dead ends of transformational politics (if the goal is to transform capitalism into anarchism or socialism).  There’s no indication that anything but continued plutocracy and police state fealty will emerge from that hidebound organization.  In turn, electoral participation has severe limitations. 

This claim isn’t guided by delusion or, to use a popular liberal term, purism.  Pursuing lesser-evil strategies consistently results in a more reactionary Democratic Party.  Progressives and some leftists often cite the tactic as pragmatic and yet it has no visible successes in improving conditions among the downtrodden inside and beyond the United States.  In fact, all evidence indicates that the Democratic Party is a ruling class instrument to quash challenges to the system from the left.  Anything can be reformed, but it requires deconstruction to change an organism’s fundamental anatomy. 

Strategic choice is less important than revolutionary spirit.  If an action is guided by radical sentiment rather than reformist conciliation, then its success doesn’t need to be immediately apparent.  It can be measured by survival of the radical sentiment.  Insurgency isn’t a short-term enterprise.  It has to sustain itself beyond caution and tension.  The immediate goal is to withstand the enervating conventions of capitalism and colonization.  The ultimate goal is to destroy these sources of enervation. 

It can happen only by welcoming the queer and quixotic, the offbeat and the alien, so that we might introduce chaos into the familiar cycles of corporate and celebrity activism (voter registration drives, astroturfing, mainstream media access, imperialist common sense, pleas to respectability), which would have long ago sputtered but for the lucrative benefits they accord to liberal elites, these days busy peddling a vitiated breed of socialism and reviving New Deal orthodoxy through campy marketing—luxury communism!  ecomodernism!  the white working class!—as they slowly colonize the North American left, capping the ceiling of possibility at reform of a feckless, capitalist party. 

Some impracticality is in order.  A practical politics—“practical” in the sense of visualizing strategy according to established strictures—will avoid trouble, but its caution leaves centers of economic and imperial power unthreatened.  Be wary of any person or group that becomes a darling of old-money liberal media, whose central mission is to preserve tolerant iterations of private enterprise. 

In contrast, a politics that emphasizes disruption rather than rehabilitation can elicit various punishments:  employment termination, arrest, deportation, torture, assassination.  Expecting recrimination doesn’t mean recrimination is likely.  It probably won’t happen, at least not in ways that generate media interest.  But it’s possible.  Punishment isn’t always obvious or immediate, either.  (The possibility of its occurrence changes according to the social position of the agitator.  Recrimination isn’t a neutral practice.) 

Punishment traditionally has been a communal practice, deriving from a central institution and delivered by people invested in its authority.  It’s most evident not through spectacle, but insidious suppression of undesirable classes.  Members of those classes don’t always know when they’re being punished; injury is a normalized feature of daily life, the unwanted birthright of earth’s wretched. 

Beyond the need for self-protection, and protecting the communities in which an individual operates, it’s important to be clear-eyed about our antagonists.  Corporations, governments, and billionaires aren’t benign or sympathetic; revolutionary politics, by definition and design, eliminate safe spaces.  Good organizing proceeds from the assumption that capitalism is designed to inhibit genuine compassion.  The absence of genuine compassion opens space for suppression and sanction, so let’s cancel the delusion that centers of power will cede anything substantive to the dispossessed—perhaps such an outlook is borne of deeply-felt hope in the redemptive capabilities of even the most depraved actor, a lovely sentiment, but a delusion, nonetheless.  There is a causal relationship between dispossession and wealth.  The system can accommodate the odd apostate stricken by an onset of conscience, but despite the occasional defector its depravity is self-regulating.  Anybody in conflict with administrators, politicians, or businesspeople quickly learns that no demographic enjoys greater in-group discipline than the ruling class. 

How do we avoid punishment?  It’s a good question, but the wrong one to ask.  We can’t avoid punishment.  Recrimination is an inherent feature of revolutionary politics.  It’s better to think about what kind of risk you’re willing to assume.  A political ethos will emerge from the decision.

A long time ago, I had numerous conversations with my spouse about potential consequences of Palestinian nationalism—namely, being ousted from my chosen profession or not getting hired in the first place (I was a grad student at the time).  We agreed that despite the possibility of negative outcomes I would continue discussing Palestine.  When one of those outcomes came to fruition many years later, neither of us was pleased, but we were prepared.  We honored our commitment by refusing to assuage either the sources of punishment or their liberal enablers. 

What sort of punishment are you prepared to suffer?  Determine your level of participation accordingly.  Wishing away recrimination, however, isn’t an option.  Flags of ominous suggestion fly proudly throughout the United States. 

While you’re at it, go ahead and abandon desire for widespread adulation.  Nobody who insists on principled recalcitrance is becoming a media darling.  If earth is to survive long enough to host our descendants, however, our task is to produce something more durable than the evanescent pleasure of fame.