My qualm, right now, with
the political left is that it is so taken over by sexual issues, sexual
questions, that we have forgotten the traditional concern of the left was
always social class and those at the bottom. And now we’re faced with a pope
who is compassionate towards the poor and we want to know his position on
abortion. It seems to me that at one point when Pope Francis said, “You know
the church has been too preoccupied with those issues, gay marriage and
abortion…” at some level the secular left has been too preoccupied with those
issues.
You’re saying that the
church — it’s not exactly Catholics, it’s the church itself, the Vatican — has
been obsessed with these questions at the same time the Anglo-American cultural
left has been obsessed with these as well. To the exclusion of other important
issues?
Yes, particularly the very
poor. And it seems to me what the pope doesn’t say when he says we’ve
been too preoccupied with these issues is: why? And that is what really
interests me in my description of the relationship of heterosexual women in my
life. I think that the problem with women controlling their reproduction and
gay men getting married is that we’re not generative, as the Vatican would
judge us. And that’s a deep violation of the desert. It’s the whole point of
the desert religions, to give birth, you know. And when women are not doing
that, or women are choosing to control the process, or men are marrying each
other outside the process of birth, then that’s the problem.
. . .
So somehow we had decided
on the left that religion belongs to Fox Television, or it belongs to some kind
of right-wing fanaticism in the Middle East and we have given it up, and it has
made us a really empty — that is, it has made the left really empty. I’ll point
to one easy instance. Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
delivered his “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. And what America
heard was really a sermon. It was as though slavery and Jim Crow could not be
described as a simple political narrative; racism was a moral offense, not
simply an illegality. And with his vision of a time “when all of God’s
children” in America would be free, he described the nation within a religious
parable of redemption.
Fifty years later, our
technocratic, secular president gave a speech at the Lincoln memorial, honoring
the memory of the speech Dr. King had given. And nothing President Obama said
can we remember these few weeks later; his words were dwarfed by our memory of the
soaring religious oratory of fifty years ago. And what’s happened to us —
and I would include myself in the cultural left — what has happened to us is we
have almost no language to talk about the dream life of America, to talk about
the soul of America, to talk about the mystery of being alive at this point in
our lives, this point in our national history. That’s what we’ve lost in giving
it to Fox Television.
It seems to me that the
New Atheism — particularly its recent gaudy English manifestations — has a
distinctly neo-colonial aspect. (As Cary Grant remarked: Americans are suckers
for the accent!) On the one hand, the New Atheist, with his plummy Oxbridge
tones, tries to convince Americans that God is dead at a time when London is
alive with Hinduism and Islam. (The empiric nightmare: The colonials have
turned on their masters and transformed the imperial city with their prayers
and their growing families, even while Europe disappears into materialistic
sterility.)
. . .
I would say even on an
issue like affirmative action, for example, I haven’t changed. I think that the
hijacking of the integrationists’ dream as it announced itself in the North,
where racism was not legalized but it was de facto, the hijacking of that movement
to integrate Northern institutions by the middle class and to make middle class
ascendancy somehow an advance for the entire population — I think was
grotesque. And so you ended up with a black and brown bourgeoisie and you did
nothing with those at the bottom, and you also managed to ignore white
poverty. What the left has forgotten or ignored is that it is possible to
be white and poor in America. The solution to de facto segregation in the late
1960s, as the black Civil Rights movement turned north, was an affirmative
action that ignored white poverty altogether. And to make matters worse,
Hispanics were named with blacks as the other principal excluded society in
America. Conveniently ignored by the liberal agenda was the fact that Hispanics
are not a racial group and therefore cannot suffer “racism” as Hispanics. And
to turn misunderstanding into a kind of cartoon revolution, it became possible
for, say, a white Cuban to be accepted to Yale as a “minority,” but a white kid
from Appalachia would never be a minority because, after all, whites were
numerically represented in societies of power. (Richard Rodriguez, in an
interview with Salon.com’s Scott Timberg)
- - - - -
Fifty years later, our
technocratic, secular president gave a speech at the Lincoln memorial, honoring
the memory of the speech Dr. King had given. And nothing President Obama said
can we remember these few weeks later; his words were dwarfed by our memory of
the soaring religious oratory of fifty years ago. And what’s happened to
us — and I would include myself in the cultural left — what has happened to us
is we have almost no language to talk about the dream life of America, to talk
about the soul of America, to talk about the mystery of being alive at this
point in our lives, this point in our national history. That’s what we’ve lost
in giving it to Fox Television.
This guy should attend
more to Dawkins' tweets — there's definitely "oratory" in it, and it
actually makes a lot of these technocratic liberals uneasy, as did Nader's oratory.
Since we're in a repeat of
the 30s, we're all of course doing the responsible thing and reminding
ourselves how Hitler came into power in Germany— all his ranting about soulless
materialism and a lack of a sense of belonging. And this is so that when we
hear that people are giving speeches that aren't necessarily going to be
remembered in 50 yrs but adequately serve the occasion now, we remind ourselves
that we're in the company of leaders we don't expect magic from and hardly want
deified. We're bourgeois, civilized—a president just an important job, not a
nation's phallic papa, a la quite properly civilized Belgium.
This gentleman has a
problem with the current left, its focus on making brown and black bourgeoisie
while letting the working class rot. What he does not realize is that it was
precisely the left's interest in progress, in not romancing working class life
but in exploring the heights of bourgeois refinement, that drew the working
class to abandon them. They elected in Reagan/Thatcher, because they
knew these leaders would ensure they were never brought willy-nilly into the
life-affordments the left were far more ready to grant themselves. It would
make them feel spoiled, and abandoned by their comparatively punitive and
self-focused parents. They wanted self-lacerations and misery to feel absolved
of a greater punishment. And this is why the rancid world we live in, not the
left abandoning middlebrow forever and leaving for the coast.
The left did right, continued to
push to empower women and discriminated peoples, to force unprogressive
attitudes out of public acceptability, even though this of course was going to
make them as if in a different world from the white working class. They've got
to hope that their own number stays strong, doesn't begin to as well feel
strangely lost and abandoned and craving "meaning" -- to welcome back old-fashioned ways as if
discovering something more "true”.
Let's hope liberal Brooklynites
dressing like their grandfathers and having every shop they enter feel one
hundred years back and colonial, is as ironic and inconsequent as people like to think of
hipsters as. That it hasn't any real substance behind it.
Emporium / Patrick McEvoy-Halston
Emporium / Patrick McEvoy-Halston
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