Really Gives You Something to Think About

NPR's Weekend Edition did an item today on Fox News's cancellation of Lou Dobbs, which may or may not have something do with the $2.7 billion lawsuit SmartMatic filed against Fox. By way of illustration, the segment included a recording of Dobbs and Rudy Giuliani declaring that SmartMatic was founded by some Venezuelans seeking to undermine American democracy by tampering with our elections.

NPR's reporter declared that SmartMatic was not founded by Venezuelans, and that the company has nothing to do with Maduro or the late Venezuelan "dictator" Hugo Chavez.  I thought that the reporter hesitated very slightly before he bore down on the word "dictator," as though he might have been about to say "President" but remembered just in time that this is America.

Or maybe not, it might have been my imagination.  But Hugo Chavez was legally and democratically elected, and managed to stay in office until his premature death of cancer despite a US-supported military coup in 2002 and ongoing US monetary and other support for the Venezuelan opposition. The criteria for calling him a dictator are unclear, given the US' enthusiastic support for dictators elsewhere in the world, so I'll just assume that the reporter was conforming to American propaganda guidelines, as NPR and other corporate media normally do.

It's doubly ironic, because Chavez did not institute a reign of terror after the 2002 coup, which compares favorably with many US liberals' drive to pass new, draconian laws in the wake of our own January 6 insurrection. Democrats are now trying to claim that Russia and China were behind the insurrection.  Even now, the unelected US-designated leader of Venezuela, Juan Guaido, is still at large despite his calls for a US invasion to install him (Trump thought it would be "cool", Lindsey Graham said it was "too early"), for an uprising against the democratically elected President Maduro, and his utter lack of popular support.  That's what NPR considers "democracy" to be.

An Injury to One Is an Injury to All

My liberal friends are very fond of the word "class," though not in a political-economy or sociological sense -- rather a cultural one: Barack and Michelle are so classy!  Well, not only liberals: there was a right-wing meme going around a week or two back, consisting of photos of Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Laura Bush, and Michelle Obama, with the caption Remember when First Ladies had class? Well, no I don't, now that you ask.  Laura Bush was in my opinion the best of that creepy GOP batch, and I don't actively hate Michelle Obama -- it's just that the word "class" has no real meaning in this context, and besides, when you're reduced to judging a presidential administration by the coolness of the President's wife, you're pretty much signaling that you have turned off whatever intelligence you had to begin with, which in most cases was not much.

The word "class," used in this way, reliably sets my teeth on edge: it points to stuff like accent, looks, dressing stylishly, possessing a certain je ne sais quoi that says "I'm better than those debased, watermelon-eating, cousin-marrying trailer dwellers out there," and that allows the fan to identify with the classy person even (or especially) if the fan lacks all those traits oneself.  It's a lot like participating vicariously in the victories of a sports team, sharing in its glory even if your sole athletic skill is working a remote.  But as I say, my liberal friends are big on this, no doubt because of "class" anxieties and insecurities of their own.  When I reminded one of them of the riots that followed our own little school's last half-successful basketball season, he said, "Let's hope we can celebrate with a little more class this time."  That was quite stupid, if only because the rioters were mostly privileged white kids, the kind whose skulls the cops never crack, the kind who see someone else's car as something to be overturned, the kind whose yards in my neighborhood are covered with refuse for days, even weeks, after their parties.  They're the kind of people who set the tone for these celebrations: rioting after a sports victory is a hallowed IU tradition, and what could be classier than Tradition? But as Raymond Williams remarked of his Cambridge days, "nobody fortunate enough to grow up in a good home, in a genuinely well-mannered and sensitive community, could for a moment envy these loud, competitive and deprived people."

Nice middle-class people have sometimes tried to reassure me that I'm one of them, because I read and I think and I'm smart and I don't talk like trailer trash.  Increasingly, as I observe them, I don't think so: reading and thinking are among the things that show I'm not like them.

But what I'm thinking of is Hugo Chávez, who, whatever his failings, had no "class" in this sense at all, which is one of the things I like about him.  That he had respectable pundits and politicians (who felt a sense of personal kinship with the worst tyrants in the world) foaming at the mouth because he disrespected Our Dear Leader at the United Nations was an added bonus.  (Was that moment "scripted"?  Who cares?)  According to a piece by Greg Grandin at The Nation, however, Chávez' shtick was to a great an extent an act, a conscious performance.  Granted, Chávez was low-class by background: he was "the second of seven children, born in 1954 in the rural village of Sabaneta, in the grassland state of Barinas, to a family of mixed European, Indian and Afro-Venezuelan race ... he was sent to live with his grandmother since his parents couldn’t feed their children".  This wouldn't be held against him if his rise had consisted of allying himself with the wealthy and powerful instead of opposing them, of course.

The high point of Chávez’s international agenda was his relationship with Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Latin American leader whom US foreign policy and opinion makers tried to set as Chávez’s opposite. Where Chávez was reckless, Lula was moderate. Where Chávez was confrontational, Lula was pragmatic. Lula himself never bought this nonsense, consistently rising to Chávez’s defense and endorsing his election.

For a good eight years they worked something like a Laurel and Hardy routine, with Chávez acting the buffoon and Lula the straight man. But each was dependent on the other and each was aware of this dependency. Chávez often stressed the importance of Lula’s election in late 2002, just a few months after April’s failed coup attempt, which gave him his first real ally of consequence in a region then still dominated by neoliberals. Likewise, the confrontational Chávez made Lula’s reformism that much more palatable. Wikileaks documents reveal the skill in which Lula’s diplomats gently but firmly rebuffed the Bush administration’s pressure to isolate Venezuela.

Their inside-outside rope-a-dope was on full display at the November 2005 Summit of the Americas in Argentina, where the United States hoped to lock in its deeply unfair economic advantage with a hemisphere-wide Free Trade Agreement. In the meeting hall, Lula lectured Bush on the hypocrisy of protecting corporate agriculture with subsidies and tariffs even as it pushed Latin America to open its markets. Meanwhile, on the street Chávez led 40,000 protesters promising to “bury” the free trade agreement. The treaty was indeed derailed, and in the years that followed, Venezuela and Brazil, along with other Latin American nations, have presided over a remarkable transformation in hemispheric relations, coming as close as ever to achieving Bolívar’s “universal equilibrium.”

There are other intriguing anecdotes in Grandin's piece, like the one that gives

the lie to the idea that poor Venezuelans voted for Chávez because they were fascinated by the baubles they dangled in front of them. During the 2006 presidential campaign, the signature pledge of Chávez’s opponent was to give 3,000,000 poor Venezuelans a black credit card (black as in the color of oil) from which they could withdraw up to $450 in cash a month, which would have drained over $16 billion dollars a year from the national treasury (call it neoliberal populism: give to the poor just enough to bankrupt the government and force the defunding of services). 

(Dangling baubles in front of the rich -- tax breaks, cutting services to the poor, "austerity" -- is not just acceptable but the natural order of things in "classy" politics.)

Grandin also tells of Chávez successfully lobbying Lula and then-Argentinian president Kirchner on a proposal to give debt relief to numerous poor countries in Latin America.

Chávez asked a number of thoughtful questions, at odds with the provocateur on display on the floor of the General Assembly ... We later got word that Chávez had successfully lobbied Lula and Kirchner to support the deal. In November 2006, the IADB announced it would write off billions of dollars in debt to Nicaragua, Guyana, Honduras and Bolivia (Haiti would later be added to the list).

I've felt hesitant to write about Chávez (but here I am, with my second post in twenty-four hours), because I really do believe that personalities are less important than issues.  I'm not interested (except lustfully, which is moot now) in Chávez so much as whether the organizations he worked with will be able to adapt and protect their gains after he's gone. This is why I've found myself defending Obama and Bill Clinton against right-wing attacks, and even Bush and Romney against liberal ad hominems. As I wrote before, only time will tell whether the good things he built in Venezuela will survive him; I've already seen his critics gloating, and there was already a celebration at the Atlantic's site last night. But he clearly did build alliances in Latin America that have made some breathing space for freedom there, and if you want to blame anyone for his ascendancy, blame George W. Bush, who overextended US power with his brutal, expensive wars and weakened its influence in Latin America and elsewhere.  In that area, as in so many others, Obama has followed in Bush's footsteps.

But one thing I do know: a major reason Chávez was hated so much by US elites was that he had no class.  This morning Democracy Now! did a segment on post-Chávez Venezuela, also featuring Greg Grandin.  Eva Golinger, one of the participants and an associate of Chávez, described how the Venezuelan vice president, Nicolás Maduro a former bus driver and union activist, was attacked by the opposition: "Oh, he’s a bus driver. You know, he knows nothing. He has no education. How could he be the top diplomat of the country?" When I look at how ignorant and stupid the properly entitled people (commonly known as the "meritocracy") have consistently shown themselves to be, I figure a bus driver couldn't do any worse.  As things turned out, it appears that he did much better.  But those attacks also remind me what most of the rulers think of the people they rule, and I know which side I'm on.

The Vultures Are Circling

I just heard that Hugo Chavez has died, and I must say that matters more to me than the latest deaths of TV sitcom stars and the like.  I'm not uncritical of Chavez, he did make some moves I objected to, and it seems he abused power at times.  I put it tentatively like that because the corporate media were so dedicated to lying about him that it became more trouble than it was worth to distinguish lies from truth where Chavez was concerned; I just tended to assume that everything bad I heard about him was false, except on the rare occasions when it came from someone more or less trustworthy.  When it comes to human rights violations and abuses of power, though, Chavez didn't begin to compare to any number of rulers the US has propped up to the bitter end -- to say nothing of our own President.

My real worry is whether Venezuela will be able to maintain the good things Chavez worked for.  The main thing that bothered me about his electoral successes was that they were too tied to his person, and it was hard to tell whether a political culture was growing in Venezuela that would survive him.  I guess we'll find out now.

I expect a lot of material from right-wingers and centrists to turn up on Facebook celebrating Chavez' death, so I'm girding my loins and opening a big can of whoop-ass.  But part of me is asking quietly, "What's the use?"  I imagine that will pass once the monkeys start throwing their handfuls of fecal matter.  Still, it's a valid question.  Ta-Nehisi Coates has a good post today about the national "Conversation on Race":

Writers who focus on race/gender/sexual orientation are often of the mind that the issues that they are tackling have, somehow, never been tackled before, or if so, have not been tackled "honestly" or "forthrightly" or "candidly." In the arena of race, the notion that Americans "don't talk about race" is a particularly pernicious rendition of this logic. I've never actually found this to be true. On the contrary, there's a lot of literature on the subject -- some of it enlightening, some of it clueless, and some of it racist. The sheer amount of material should, theoretically, raise the bar for "writing about race."

But because Americans actually enjoy yelling about race a great deal, it does not.

He might have qualified that first sentence by specifying "writers for corporate media", but you know what he meant, don't you?  There is a lot of good "literature" on all those subjects (race/gender/sexual orientation, and he could have added religion or politics in general), but little of it turns up in the corporate media.  (Coates himself is one of the notable exceptions.)  That's not because of a conspiracy, but because the people who run the media are generally not very knowledgeable about anything, and writing that strays from the corporate center with all its squishy goodness will be found to be "not right for us, thanks."  So the same tired cliches on controversial subjects persist for decades and more, and as I've gotten older I've found that more and more dispiriting.  Sure, I keep myself sane by reading outside the corporate media, but sooner or later I have to face what the mainstream is saying: the same old same-old.

An instructive example is a post that also appeared on the Atlantic's site, explaining why Cuba will still be anti-American after Castro.  At first glance I thought it had possibilities: someone could write a good article about the reasons Cubans have to look askance at the US: invasions, terrorism, multiple assassination attempts on Castro, and economic warfare in the form of a decades-long blockade aimed at starving the Cuban people into submission. This article, however, wasn't it: it was all about Fidel and Raul find it politically expedient to blame the US for all of Cuba's problems (which works so well because the US is to blame for many of Cuba's problems) as they pack the government with loyalists, more elderly revolutionaries, and their own kids. These would be good points if they were put in context, but author Jaime Suchlicki isn't interested in context, just in the perfidy of the Castro brothers. He has not a word to say about the dictatorships the US supported in Cuba before the Revolution, nor about US attempts after the Revolution to return Cuba to its proper place in our sphere of influence.  To talk about Castro's anti-Americanism as though it were a total fabrication in the face of US benevolence, which is what Suchlicki does, is to mark his article as "clueless" at best  in Coates's classification scheme, which means it's perfectly mainstream.

Trouble and Turmoil, and Reagan's Third Term

If I hadn't been off my feed for the past couple of weeks, my Right Wing Acquaintance 1 was giving me plenty of fodder for blog posts, like his link to this National Review Online article on Hugo Chavez, to which he added this comment:

Venezuela is in for trouble and turmoil, whatever Chavez's health. He has been Castroizing the country with the help of experts from Cuba, and the opposition is systematically being jailed, intimidated, and suppressed. It is probably not too late for the opposition to resist, but the situation looks precarious. This is caudilloism under the red flag.

The usual sack of lies. If Chavez really were a dictator -- a Mubarak, a Pinochet, a Suharto, a Duvalier, a Saddam Hussein -- RWA1 and the National Review crowd would be behind him all the way, with perhaps some faux-fastidious concern about his going over the top now and then but you can't be too fussy about a little torture and murder because he had to do something! Chavez isn't a patch on people like Mubarak or the usual run of Latin American dictators, and RWA1 was not happy to see Mubarak go. I doubt he even knows what Venezuela was like before Chavez came along. The prediction of "trouble and turmoil" for Venezuela is of course a hope, not a prediction: gotta punish those grimy yahoos for trying to throw off the benign yoke of American corporations and their local friends.  Give 'em a bloodbath, a constructive one, to teach them obedience.

Soon after RWA1 put that story up on his wall, I learned that the Guardian, the most liberal if not left of mainstream British newspapers, had tried to smear Noam Chomsky for writing a letter critical of Chavez (via). It wasn't the first time the Guardian had misrepresented Chomsky, either.

Chomsky said:

It's obviously improper for the executive to intervene and impose a jail sentence without a trial. And I should say that the United States is in no position to complain about this. Bradley Manning has been imprisoned without charge, under torture, which is what solitary confinement is. The president in fact intervened. Obama was asked about his conditions and said that he was assured by the Pentagon that they were fine. That's executive intervention in a case of severe violation of civil liberties and it's hardly the only one. That doesn't change the judgment about Venezuela, it just says that what one hears in the United States one can dismiss.

(RWA1 has been silent about Bradley Manning, on Facebook at least. And it's not irrelevant that Human Rights Watch, which has criticized Chavez, also has called for an investigation of Bush-era torture by the US, which President Obama has no intention of doing, but of course Human Rights Watch are just a bunch of backward-looking extremists when they can't be used for US propaganda against its official enemies.)

Chomsky also told the Guardian:

We may compare [Venezuela's record] to Colombia next door. Colombia's human rights record is incomparably worse. The judges in the constitutional court have been investigating cases of corruption, crimes at the highest level, and they have been intimidated. They have received death threats, and they have to have bodyguards and so on. And apparently that's continuing under [President José Manuel] Santos.

RWA1 has been silent about Colombia too; but hey, human rights violations in countries that enjoy massive US support aren't news, it's like dog bites man. Besides, our allies around the world are under attack by Communists and terrorists -- they have to do something!

But it was RWA1's link tonight that was the most amusing: an opinion piece, "Winning Moderate Millennials," by one Elise Jordan. It's mostly a review of a book by Herbert Hoover's great-granddaughter Margaret.

... To attract the next generation of Republicans, Hoover says, we need to re-brand conservatism or risk extinction.

"Re-brand" -- you can tell RWA1 is depressed when he doesn't jeer at an article with that kind of marketing jargon in it.

Hoover nails how Millennials — that next generation of voters, ages 18 to 29 — view the GOP’s brand as almost exclusively socially conservative. She discusses what she calls “conservative tribalism,” the labels — neocon, crunchy con, paleocon, lib-con, and theocon — that are tearing the party apart in the absence of a unifying leader. She points out that when Millennials look at the infighting, they see only the most socially conservative ideas winning. But if we were to focus on conservative principles embodying individual and economic freedom, we could actually tap into this fifth of the electorate. Hoover’s message is that there are conservative issues that should be a priority — such as education reform, expanding legal immigration, and combating radical Islam — and there are those that should not — fighting gay rights, pushing intelligent design, or denying climate change.

But here's the punchline:

[Hoover] points out that Reagan himself was very “impure” — he raised taxes, left Lebanon, and cut deals with Tehran — yet he was still the most successful conservative president — thanks to his pragmatism, not in spite of it.

So let’s be on the lookout for the next Reagan, not the next Trump.

Um, the next Reagan is in the White House, right now. Of course he's wearing the wrong brand, but he's on record as admiring the Great Communicator and his party, and he's worked very hard to show that he means it.

I'm reminded of the way that some liberal writers have been wringing their hands over Obama's political future, and what will happen to the Democratic party. For party loyalists (and RWA1 is a party man, just like Elise Jordan and Margaret Hoover), the letters D and R trump everything, including the good of the vast majority of human beings.

Bang Head Against Wall. Repeat As Necessary.

Do you ever feel like throwing back your head and howling like a forlorn dog? I've been feeling like that a lot recently, which has made it difficult to write.

There's been a fair amount of fuss lately about a forthcoming edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the work of a (white?) academic, which replaces the 219 uses of the word "nigger" with the word "slave." I don't like bowdlerization either, but much of the criticism ginned up in the liberal blogosphere has been pointless. It's not as if this edition, published by a small regional press, is going to cause the standard version to disappear. That didn't happen when John Wallace, a school staff member in Virginia, published an edition of Huck Finn with the very same substitution twenty-five years ago; I doubt it will happen now. Does such a revision constitute "censorship"? Only in the tiniest technical sense, as far as I can see. Even if every school in the nation supplied its students with the New South edition for study purposes, the standard version would still be all over the place. Even removing Huck Finn from the curriculum wouldn't be censorship, since literally dozens of books are not in the curriculum, which changes from generation to generation. There have been at least two literary retellings of Huck Finn, both of which dealt with the issues it raises in different ways -- I was about to say, "by de-gaying" it, though that's not quite right, since it isn't gay. But ever since Professor Leslie Fiedler pointed in 1948 to the "homoeroticism" in the original (and in so much classic American fiction), many critics have tried to get rid of it. Is that "censorship"?

And I am impressed to see how many white people are quite comfortable telling black kids that they should toughen up and deal with it when white kids call them "nigger." Or even that, since they have encountered the word many times already in their lives, a few more times won't hurt. After all, they've heard the word many times in hiphop, so why should it bother them if it turns up in Huck Finn? On the whole, I'm inclined to agree with Toni Morrison's take (PDF) that trying to excise the N-word is "a purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children" -- though appeasing adults instead of educating children is just what the American school system has largely evolved to do. And brushing off the problem by saying that the teacher should be able to deal with it, while in principle correct, is also ignoring the difficulties teachers face. Mark Twain's handling of race doesn't fit well into the multiple-choice tests that have taken over so much of American school time, thanks not to teachers but to various bureaucrats (and of course the highly lucrative testing industry). Just about everyone who derisively opposes the NewSouth edition seems determined not to think about the problems Huck Finn poses.

Some writers (sorry, I'm too burned out to supply enough links -- will try to fix it later) accused the editor of the NewSouth edition of thinking that if we just eliminate the n-word, that will be enough to stop racism. I think that's a straw man; I haven't seen anything to support the claim. I don't believe, when I pick on people for using "faggot" and other homophobic epithets, that stopping their use is all that's needed to eliminate antigay bigotry. But since their use is a sign of bigotry, attacking those who use them is one small part of working against bigotry. I've argued before that the best way for gay people to deal with the epithets is to reclaim them, but in the meantime, anyone who uses them in the traditional way should expect to be confronted. (As The Onion once put it: if we don't protect free speech, how will we know who the assholes are?)

Come to think of it, I think I detect some kind of connection between this jumping on the bandwagon against the NewSouth edition and some recent attempts by ostensible progressives / leftists to rehabilitate the word "faggot" as a pejorative for what one of them called "kneelers." And one of John Caruso's commenters who was especially furious about removing the n-word from Huck Finn also seems to be concerned with establishing Ralph Nader's bonafides as a manly man rather than a "shrinking violet." But of course there couldn't possibly be a connection. If there comes a day when white racism really is not a problem in the US, then it will be possible to teach Huck Finn as a purely historical document, whose language can simply be glossed by teachers. The trouble is that things haven't yet changed enough.

For that matter, as several commenters at Racialicious asked rhetorically, if Huck Finn is taught to teach white students the humanity of black people (the very kind of "politically correct" approach to literature that the critics of the NewSouth edition condemn out of the other side of their mouths), wouldn't books by black authors do the job even better? Frederick Douglass's Autobiography, for example. As Toni Morrison suggests, trying to turn Huck Finn into an anti-racist tract does as much injury to its complexity (and as she shows, its incoherence on many levels) as denouncing it as a "racist tract" would do. In the good old days beloved of many white people my age and older, books by black authors about black experience were not in the curriculum. That's no longer the case, thanks to "politically correct" demands of "identity politics" that a wider range of voices need to be heard, and taught. But the gains that have been made are always in danger of being lost, and the threat comes from all over the political spectrum.

We all have our blind spots, though, and John Caruso wrote a much better post on the US media distortion of the Wikileaks controversy. But even he weaseled, just a tiny bit, on the accusation that Julian Assange "stole" documents.

It's true that Assange didn't personally "steal" the material Wikileaks has been publishing, but if I'm not mistaken it's also illegal to fence stolen goods: the fact that you didn't personally steal them doesn't exculpate you. And it's also true, as Glenn Greenwald has been pointing out, that reporters not only receive leaked material, they encourage sources to get that material for them. The reason why so many Americans are having tantrums about Wikileaks is not that they consider government secrets to be sacrosanct -- they have no objection to the US spying on other countries to steal their secrets, for example, and would probably be happy if even Wikileaks published "stolen" material about their own pet conspiracy theories -- but because they don't want to know the bad things their government is doing. So while it's true that, in a narrow sense, neither Assange nor Wikileaks "stole" those documents, it's somewhat a waste of energy to defend them against the accusation. If Assange had personally entered the corridors of the Pentagon, rifled the file drawers, and walked out with the materials Wikileaks has been publishing, he'd be a hero even if he was legally a thief.

I was struck by a deranged commenter to one of Greenwald's posts who wrote that Assange "received stole [sic] property and should not have made them public, instead he could have shown real backbone by notifying the ones who were robbed (the American people) and returned them." That's exactly what Wikileaks did, of course: notified the American people that their military and their government were hiding these things from them, and let them know some (a very small part, since Wikileaks can only publish what others leak to them) of what their government was illegitimately withholding from them.

And ah, then, there's my RWA1 on Facebook, who linked to an attack on Hugo Chavez with the comment, "The American Left has disgraced itself by apologizing for this incipient Mussolini." Oh, come on! If Chavez really were a Mussolini, neither RWA1 nor most Americans would have any objection to him. Hell, the US got along with the Mussolini at first: he was good for business and hostile to labor, which is what matters for good relations with the US, right or far-right. When Venezuela was ruled by a dictatorship, the American Right was perfectly comfortable with it. Saddam Hussein got along just fine with the US, until we no longer needed him.

A good many years ago I confronted RWA1 on just this point. Like many conservatives he tended to get green around the gills when reminded what his tax dollars were paying for in Latin America and elsewhere, but he rallied. At first he blustered about "those goddamned Latin American generals!" I reminded him that those goddamned Latin American generals were trained, paid, and equipped by the US government, and wouldn't last a week without our support. Well, he said glumly, we had to do something to stop those countries from going Communist. (Which is neither here nor there, since the US has supported coups to overturn elected social-democratic governments that had nothing to do with Communism.)

So it goes. What has me wanting to bang my head against the wall, you see, is not the great unwashed, the illiterate, the know-nothing Teabaggers, or Fox News; it's highly educated, politically progressive (except for RWA1 of course) people who are supposedly on the same side I am, but who (among other matters) throw hissyfits over trivial matters like the NewSouth edition of Huck Finn, who feel it necessary to exonerate Julian Assange of accusations of theft. And contrary to RWA1, much of what he would consider "the American left" has been trying to distance itself from any appearance of defending, let alone apologizing for, Hugo Chavez.