People received free dental work last month during the Seattle/King County Clinic, a four-day event that also offered free vision care and other health services. Credit David Ryder/Reuters

By Ann Neumann

“Although we could not find a single factor whose explanatory power was greater than that of non-college whites, we did identify a group of them that did so collectively: an index of public-health statistics.” —The Economist, “Illness as Indicator,” November 19, 2016

 It was the broken Democratic party machine. It was misogyny. It was racism. It was Bernie Sanders and his braying bros. It was poor whites who threw every minority group under the bus for the promise of their own economic salvation. It was the media, transfixed by spectacle and its resulting profits. It was the FBI’s director, James Comey, who kept the story of Clinton’s email misuse in the media. It was white women who betrayed the sisterhood. It was the deluge of raw stories about Donald Trump, overwhelming credulity and preventing any one from sticking, like eggs sliding off Teflon. It was the global perversion of authoritarianism that leapt from Brexit UK to the complacent US. It was clueless elites, blind to the challenges of “real” Americans. It was the electoral college, set to betray the popular vote. It was the meddling Russians. It was the pompous pollsters who distracted us from impending horror with their statistical certainty. It was white evangelicals who traded their prudish morality for the conservative future of the Supreme Court.

The aftermath of November 8th’s election has been a melee of finger-pointing; we’re in a state of blame and flying explanations that demonstrates just what a surprise Trump’s election really was—even to Trump himself. Certainly, as the next four years will dramatically, devastatingly show, there’s enough blame to go around. And also certainly, all of the parties above played a role in Trump’s election—particularly, as Trump’s cabinet appointments are revealing, the Religious Right.

But as new analysis from The Economist shows, the greatest indicator of Trump’s electoral victory was not on the whole any one of those causes touted above and amplified by the media, but rather the drastically declining physical health of a segment of the voting population.

The Economist came to this conclusion after a challenge from pollster Patrick Ruffini on November 15. The “best predictor” of Trump’s win in the initial days after the election was the change in “non-college white” votes from 2012 to 2016—the percentage of potential voters who are “non-college whites” and had not voted for Romney but came out for Trump. “Find the variable that can beat % of non-college whites in the electorate as a predictor of county swing to Trump,” Ruffini said.

The Economist used research from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which had compiled county-level data on “life expectancy and the prevalence of obesity, diabetes, heavy drinking and regular physical activity (or lack thereof).” The Economist writes:

…counties with a large proportion of whites without a degree also tend to fare poorly when it comes to public health. However, even after controlling for race, education, age, sex, income, marital status, immigration and employment, these figures remain highly statistically significant. Holding all other factors constant—including the share of non-college whites—the better physical shape a county’s residents are in, the worse Mr. Trump did relative to Mr. Romney….

… the specific subset of Mr. Trump’s voters that won him the election—those in counties where he outperformed Mr. Romney by large margins—live in communities that are literally dying.

The article notes that Trump voters in this category were not “particularly down on their luck”—higher income voters tend to vote Republican—but when they lived in counties that are physically suffering, they were motivated to go to the polls. The sicker the people in a county, the greater chance that the county would go to Trump. “If an additional 8% of people in Pennsylvania engaged in regular physical activity, and heavy drinking in Wisconsin were 5% lower, Mrs Clinton would be set to enter the White House,” The Economist writes. A hurting segment of the population, blighted by declining life expectancies, voted to change the course of their health. And change is exactly what ailing Trump voters—and the country—will get. “Even if Mr Trump’s policies are unlikely to alleviate their plight, it is not hard to understand why they voted for change.”

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Even a month before the inauguration, there can be no doubt that the election of Donald Trump is a horror for the future of public health, one that could take us decades to recover from, should the nation’s institutions survive at all. Although Trump has been inconsistent or even self-contradictory about what his policy objectives are throughout the campaign, it’s clear that, in the weeks since the election, he has surrounded himself with a team that will wreak havoc on public health, economic well-being and physical safety. His actions regarding the Affordable Care Act will likely exacerbate the significant health challenges many Americans already face.

How bad is it? Last year Anne Case and Nobel prize winning economist Angus Deaton confirmed what many health workers already knew: the death rates of white, middle-aged Americans are on the rise. “The declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites” were falling so dramatically that they were “increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans,” wrote The New York Times last November when the report was released. The Times also quoted an analysis of the report by Dartmouth economists Ellen Meara and Jonathan S. Skinner that was published by the National Academy of Sciences: “It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude,” they wrote.

In an article for the Fall 2016 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, Amy Woolard reported from the country’s largest free pop-up medical clinic on the fairgrounds of Wise County, Virginia where one in five adults and one in four kids live at or below the poverty line. Remote Area Medical, the organization sponsoring the event, was founded by a British philanthropist, Stan Brock, who has also organized “medical missions” to Mexico and British Guyana, places with medical needs seldom considered on par with the rural US. Wollard writes:

Shame, poverty, and the verb beget are at the rotten root of what brings people to RAM clinics. Poverty begets depression and anxiety. Shame begets avoidance. Poor nutrition begets decay. A dearth of doctors and dentists begets poor preventive care. Pain begets self-medication. And it’s cyclical: Missing teeth beget unemployment, begets missing teeth.

The President-elect has somewhat walked back on his promise to repeal Obamacare, but that doesn’t mean that at-risk, financially strapped, ailing populations that have subsidized coverage will be able to keep it. As reported by Ryan Lizza for The New Yorker on November 16, Trump stated the Friday after the election that he would keep two popular parts of the Affordable Care Act: the provision that “requires insurers to accept new customers without regard to preëxisting medical conditions” and “the regulations on insurance companies that require them to allow children to remain on their parents’ plans until the age of twenty-six.” Lizza notes, “This is classic Trump: he is for any policy that is popular, and he made no effort to explain how he would retain these regulations without maintaining the individual mandate, which was the insurance industry’s price for accepting the new regulations when the legislation was negotiated.”

Patients being seen at the Tacoma C.A.R.E. Clinic in 2011.

In addition to Obamacare’s open insurance options, its Medicaid extension may also be changed. On November 16, The New York Times’ health reporter, Robert Pear, considered expected changes to Medicaid. Twelve of the 20-plus million people who obtained coverage under the ACA did so through the Medicaid extension. Regardless of what changes are down the road, Pear speculates that the “Trump administration is almost certain to give states more leeway to run their Medicaid programs as they wish,” requiring “co-payments and work requirements” of those who receive coverage.

Obama has successfully blocked some of the most egregious state requirements: In November the administration halted New Hampshire’s request for proof of citizenship and state residency. When Arizona sought to charge a premium for people above the poverty level (a meager $20,160 a year for a family of three), the Obama administration approved, but they denied the state’s request that recipients also be given a work requirement or a time limit on coverage. Ohio and Kentucky are also seeking restrictions.

As well, Republicans have been trying to cut the overall federal payment for eligible beneficiaries, which will cause the cost of coverage to skyrocket in many states. In early November, Speaker Paul Ryan reiterated his plan to replace Medicaid expansion with “refundable tax credits for people to buy affordable health insurance.”

Vox’s Sarah Kliff reviewed all seven of the Republican plans for replacing Obamacare that have been floated. All of them, including Ryan’s “Better Way” and Utah Senator Orrin Hatch’s “Patient Care Act,” will reduce enrollment and raise premiums. Eighteen million people would lose coverage under Better Way. Nine million would under the Patient Care Act. Kliff writes, “If we can say one thing about most Republican plans, it is this: They are better for younger, healthy people and worse for older, sicker people.”

But the increasing inaccessibility of health coverage is only the most explicit expected change in the future of the nation’s health. Recently at Dame magazine, Marie Mung-Ok Lee, whose son is autistic, highlighted Trump’s mocking of disabled journalist Serge F. Kovaleski, the likely escalation of disastrous policing policies regarding the physically and mentally disabled, and the presence of former New York police commissioner Rudy “shoot first, ask questions later” Guiliani in Trump’s circle. “As a parent ever alert to changes that may affect my son, the election results add another fold in the complex and fragile origami that holds our son’s life together. Can we count on the Americans with Disabilities Act as any kind of protection in a looming ‘law and order’ Trumpian world?” Lee writes.

Photo via Dan Munro

A Trumpian world may also deliver environmental catastrophe. Trump has named Myron Ebell, a global warming skeptic, to head the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has been grotesquely complacent about global warming to date; even on Obama’s watch, Natives are being assaulted in South Dakota for protecting their water and countering yet another “profitable” pipeline. What will the coming confrontations over drilling on public lands, snaking fracking pipelines, rising sea levels, natural disasters, and global public health look like under an agency that denies the climate is dangerously unwell?

Access to clean water, largely thought to be a “third world problem” is mortally real for many across the US. While the fight in South Dakota violently continues and Flint’s shocking and ongoing water contamination—as well as the political callousness that caused it— have grabbed headlines lately, we shouldn’t forget that parts of Appalachia have suffered from tainted water—and the poor health it brings—for decades.

Nor can we lose track of a host of other tragedies the country faces, including the rise of shooting deaths by police. Untracked in a consistent manner in the US, The Guardian, a British publication, was inspired to start its own count. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 17.4 percent of children (ages 5 to 19) and adults (20 to 44) have untreated dental issues. They don’t even have statistics for elders (and, ask any hospice volunteer, elders have them in aces). And then there are the mortifying statistics regarding maternal health. In September, The New York Times reported that US maternal mortality rates were climbing at a rate that “[defies] global trend.” We currently rank 26th among industrialized nations for infant mortality.

Public health in the US is the complex story of millions of personal tragedies, suffered every day. Obamacare was certainly not a comprehensive solution. But a Trump presidency will reverse any gains that Obamacare brought, and exacerbate current declining public health.

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If the task ahead were to contain the destructive, hateful and erratic behavior of a rogue president, we would be in dire enough straights. But this abnormal presidency will come with an unleashed cadre of trenchant Religious Right appointees and cabinet members. It’s been a cliché to claim the death of the Religious Right, even as it’s been a cliché to claim its resurgence. And yet, the weeks since the election have proven that the draconian ideology of this political group will rule the future, untethered by the ballast of a Democratic House or Senate, and abetted by an enthusiastic conservative electorate.

In an article at Religion & Politics, Tiffany Stanly tallies Trump’s unexpected support among evangelicals (81 percent), white Catholics (60 to 37 percent), and Mormons (61 to 25 percent). Why would white religious conservatives fall in for a charlatan and grifter who looks peaked when pastors move his way? There are several answers. The fate of the Supreme Court, a charged issue for this demographic since the 1970s passage of Roe v. Wade, for one.

Seth Masket writes at Pacific Standard that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell knew just what he was doing when he refused to consider Obama’s appointment to the Supreme Court, dooming the court to a hobbled 8 justices. It was a risk, but, Masket writes, it paid off “bigly” because it “motivated conservatives to stay on board with the Republican presidential nominee no matter who it was.”

The Rural Area Medical Event at the Wise Country Fairground photographed by Susan Hale Thomas

Other answers to why conservatives held their noses and voted Trump? Same sex marriage. The second amendment. But also: race. Stanley gives us a history lesson:

But then as now, the Religious Right did not organize only on the basis of Roe v. Wade. Race cannot be separated from its history nor this present moment. That we are witnessing a surge of white Christian voters to Trump’s side after two terms of our first black president cannot be dismissed. Dartmouth’s Randall Balmer has made the case that the Religious Right was galvanized in the 1970s not by abortion alone but by keeping segregation, the old order, in place.….

…Schools like the fundamentalist Bob Jones University did not admit black students, and the government eventually yanked their tax exempt status—a move that incited the mostly white, mostly male Christian conservative leaders to rail against the government intrusion into Christian practices.

That “old order,” deemed worthy of defense by the Religious Right, is a fever dream, of course, an amalgam of a mythic 1950s social order that put white men first, put women in their places, and put God in government. “The America of the past,” as Stanley calls it, is an era that 72 percent of Trump supporters told pollsters was better than our current era. “A utopia of the past,” Bruno Latour calls it at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Fictive, yes, but nonetheless compelling.

Another tally from Stanley, this one of Trump’s rag-tag conservative appointees:

Trump’s transition team and the longlist for his cabinet read like a who’s who of the Religious Right of yore. Former Governor Mike Huckabee, once a values voters’ evangelical pick, and Governor Sam Brownback, a socially conservative Catholic, are being considered for agency posts, according to Buzzfeed. Ken Blackwell, a senior fellow at Perkins’ Family Research Council and a longtime public servant known for anti-LGBTQ stances, is overseeing domestic policy for the transition team, according to Politico. On the lists are other politicians who have boosted Religious Right causes, including Senator Jeff Sessions, Reagan aide and former Attorney General Ed Meese, and immigration hardliner Kris Kobach. Then there is Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, who has a long track record of socially conservative policies—from voting against LGBTQ rights to enacting one of the strictest abortion laws in the nation.

Sessions is a notorious racist. Pence tried to jail a woman for abortion. A return to the certainty of male entitlement, to better times when families could survive on one income and families stuck together, overwhelmingly appealed to conservative Christian voters, never mind the agenda of hate and violence this nostalgia papers over. Trump and his belligerent alliances with white supremacists, his grabbing, smarmy frauds and scandals, his coterie of ideological discriminators? Worth tolerating for the next four years if it delivers a conservative Supreme Court for the next four election cycles. And so it will. Along with regressive health and safety of women, the poor, the disabled and minorities.

The health and safety of the public is a moral issue, one that administrations have taken up in fits and starts over the course of American history. But Trump’s election is a break in that onward course; no longer is our narrative about an arc bending toward a healthier future for all. No longer is moral courage a national objective, even if hollow. As neglected economic concerns for the white working class continue to be touted as the cause of our current political crisis, so should public health concerns be tracked as an indicator of the future of our political institutions. The Economist reminds us that the health of the country is dire—and those health concerns have delivered a devastating blow to the future of millions. As it turns out, our public health is also the health of our body politic.

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Past “The Patient Body” columns can be found here.

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Ann Neumann is a contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine and a visiting scholar at The Center for Religion and Media, NYU. Neumann is the author of The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America (Beacon Press, 2016).

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Our Sick Body Politic appeared first on The Revealer.

By Ed Simon

“Thus every one before the Throne/of Christ the Judge is brought, / Both righteous and impious, / that good or ill had wrought.”

— Michael Wigglesworth, The Day of Doom (1662)

“Are you ready/For the great atomic power? /Will you rise and meet your Savior in the air? /Will you shout or will you cry/When the fire rains from on high?/Are you ready for the great atomic power?”

— Ira and Charlie Louvin, Great Atomic Power (1952)

“It’s coming to America first/the cradle of the best and of the worst.”

— Leonard Cohen, “Democracy” (1992)

“Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers. /One hundred million angels singin’. /Multitudes are marching to the big kettle drum. /Voices callin’, voices cryin’. /Some are born an’ some are dyin’. /It’s Alpha’s and Omega’s Kingdom come.”

— Johnny Cash, The Man Comes Around (2002)

Michael Wigglesworth would have heard the sobbing winds off the coast of New England; here where the very landscape seemed to conspire in rejecting his people. The minister would have laid in a creaking wooden bed, under rough wool blankets, and at the midnight hour listened to the battering of storms and Nor’easters, much more violent than anything in his placid birthplace of Yorkshire. He would have heard the imagined (or sometimes real) war cries of the Wampanoag, the Abenaki, and the Narraganset who seemed to dwell as ghosts but a few miles from the rocky coast to which the settlers huddled here on their errand into the wilderness. In the panicked mind of the minister, the country itself seemed to always be chilled through with a shivering fever dream. For the Reverend Doctor Wigglesworth, pathetic fallacy was no aesthetic deficiency, but rather a necessary interpretative aspect of the world itself, one with crucial personal implications. Clouds and shoals and weather and seasons were all equally open to being read as clearly as scripture was – and sometimes what was interpreted were terrifying aspects of a terrifying world, especially for a man naturally predisposed to nervousness. God’s providence still existed in this godless place, even here in the country of Satan’s Throne. God’s divine countenance still dwelled among every pine cone and smooth black beach rock, and it was the job of Puritan divines like Wigglesworth to read the landscape as clearly as they would parse the significance of a particular Hebrew conjugation in Daniel, or Greek declension in Revelation. And like those old books, the landscape of this New World signaled that the revealing was upon them; indeed the discovery of this fourth part of the world at the moment the true Christian remnant blasted her horn against the trumperies of the false Romish Whore of Babylon and signaled that the final seals in heaven would shortly be broken, for these were miraculous days of miraculous wonders, especially at the ends of the world where he awaited the end of the world.

And so, he wrote. As nature was but a language, he could enter into her conversations through quill and paper of his own, and as a contribution to that dialogue Rev. Wigglesworth produced the most popular book in colonial America; indeed, arguably one of the per capita most read works ever written by an American (and no doubt one which very few of you have ever heard of, much less read) – the epic apocalyptic poem The Day of Doom. So popular was The Day of Doom that virtually no complete copies of that first printing survive in their entirety, the pages worn away by the feverish repeated consultations by those who owned the books, the ink smudged off by the entropic readerly enthusiasm that is really a form of love. In colonial New England the only book held closer to the bosom would have been the Bible itself, and no other work of contemporary literature would have occupied their imaginations as fully as Wigglesworth’s apocalyptic epic. If his book were as similarly popular in the contemporary United States, adjusted for per capita population difference, then more than seventeen million Americans would own a copy of The Day of Doom. And in colonial New England libraries were not large; Harvard University’s library was founded in 1638 only a few decades before Wigglesworth penned his epic, with an initial gift of only four hundred books, less than the collection in a contemporary Harvard professor’s personal collection. Remember too, individual copies would have been shared; when the size of colonial New England families is considered, it is not unlikely that half of all homes owned a copy. The Day of Doom went through ten printings, and even in the early nineteenth-century it’s reported that New Englanders grew up hearing the jingle-jangle rhythms of Wigglesworth’s verse. From the crooked cow paths of muddy Boston to the frozen shoals of the cape and the red brick environs of Cambridge and throughout all of New England, what thundered forth from pulpits and was quoted in conversation and reflected upon in private was the deceptively simplistic rhyming doggerel of one Michael Wigglesworth. “Thus one and all, thus great and small,/the rich as well as poor,/And those of place, as the most base,/do stand their Judge before:/They are arraign’d, and there detain’d/before Christ’s judgement seat/With trembling fear their Doom to hear,/and feel his angers heat.”

There is sometimes a certain cringe among us who study early American colonial poetry, a sense that the literature of the time is deficient when compared to the richness of what would come in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. Anthologies will include the immaculate verse of Anne Bradstreet, thicker collections will often see fit to include the metaphysical speculations of Edward Taylor, but Wigglesworth, when he endures, is mainly seen as a subject for specialists. And while the best of colonial American poetry can stand next to the canonical usual suspects of seventeenth-century English verse, it would take a special type of critical sophist to argue that Wigglesworth can compare to the triumphs of the decade in which he wrote, remembering that John Milton published Paradise Lost only five years after The Day of Doom is written. Part of me sometimes likes to defend Wigglesworth; and though no doubt he wouldn’t consent with this particular reading of his work, I detect a gothic sensibility in his Puritan plain style, the proto-Augustan rhyming couplets giving the overall tenor of the poem not just a sort of wry and ironical singsong quality, but also a feeling of supreme unease, as if we’re reading a particularly long, uncanny, and creepy nursery rhyme. His broad ballad meter makes his verse simple, but in that simplicity there is terror. Imagine a choir monotonously repeating, “For day and night, in their despight, /their torments smoak ascendeth:/Their pain and grief have no relief, /their anguish never endeth. /There must they lye, and never dye; /though dying every day; /There must they dying ever lye; and not consume away.” The Day of Doom was unequivocally the first contemporary best-seller in American history, and though you have never heard of it, its legacy is profound for the moment it both initiated and also embodied. What The Day of Doom announced as clearly as the trumpets that heralded the breaking of the seals in Patmos’ Revelation is that American civilization would not just be an apocalyptically obsessed one, but perhaps the most eschatologically inclined culture ever, and that this desire for a collective Thanatos would define what it means to be an American, for sometimes better and oftentimes for worse, across religion, ideology, and culture.

A fragmentary copy of the first edition of The Day of Doom, held at Houghton Library, Harvard University

So, the aesthetic qualities of his poetry are less important than the sort of unseen, and uncommented on, fiery thread of what could be called eschatomania which link his moment to ours. Here in the United States of Apocalypse we’ve always been obsessed with a particular aesthetic that might as well be termed the “American apocalyptic sublime,” and though Wigglesworth inherited his chiliasm from older sources he made it distinctly American and traces of it are everywhere in our culture, both religious and secular. Many colonial Puritans thought that the New World held a certain eschatological promise, and that belief still defines our civil religion.

That the United States is a particularly apocalyptic-minded culture should not be a controversial claim. We have always perversely taken our own destruction as our own birthright. In the centuries since Wigglesworth, apocalypticism, and specifically a type of premillennial dispensationalism (which can often enough be secularized), has thrilled Americans across religious and ideological lines. We take an eroticized thrill in considering our own demise. How many times have we seen the skyline of Manhattan or the great monuments of Washington DC destroyed by invading armies, terrorists, natural disaster, asteroids, or space aliens? The actual destruction of some of those buildings, which people commonly remarked “looked like it was from a movie,” could scarcely quench our insatiable thirst for tales of our own destruction.

In language eerily prescient of a nuclear attack, Wigglesworth wrote, “For at midnight broke forth a light, /which turn’d the night to day:/And speedily an hideous cry/did all the world dismay.” Which puts me in mind of the passage from Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 masterpiece of post-apocalyptic literary genre fiction The Road, where speaking of the unspecified calamity which ends civilization the nameless narrator explains that, “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” Paul Boyar, a scholar of millenarian movements, writes that Wigglesworth “memorably pictured the Second Coming and Last Judgement as lightning-bolt eschatological events, with no reassuring hint of gradual betterment or an intervening Millennium.” There has always been this tension in American culture between millennium and apocalypse, or perhaps more accurately between pre-millennialism and post-millennialism.

On the one hand there is the utopian allure of progress, think of John Winthrop’s contention aboard the Arbela in 1630 that we shall be as a “city on a hill,” or Martin Luther King’s oft-quoted contention that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it tends towards justice.” But there are also our ever-present apocalyptic nightmares, which pulse like an ominous metronome implicitly and sometimes explicitly in our politics and culture. Wigglesworth writes, “God began to pour/Destruction the world upon, /in a tempestuous shower.” The colonial Puritans were not just fearful but excited, just as we are when we read and consume our apocalyptic literature, television, and film. This is neither a liberal nor a conservative predilection, but rather an American one. This should not be read as condemnation, nor God forbid celebration, but rather simply as observation.

The American apocalyptic sublime is evident in all the usual places, from the jeremiads of the seventeenth-century to your A.M. radio dial. And of course it has long been a vestige of popular culture, a common theme in genre fiction and film. From Stephen Vincent Benet’s 1937 pre-nuclear era post-apocalyptic fable “By the Waters of Babylon” through the entire oeuvre of director Roland Emmerich, Americans have been enmeshed in a type of secular eschatology, the aforementioned eschatomania. The last decade and a half has seen the American apocalyptic sublime move from the genre ghettos of science fiction and horror to the esteemed shelves of literary fiction. In part a reaction to the apocalyptic traumas of 9/11, the Great Recession, and ecological collapse, and perhaps a manifestation of the writer’s ever prescient ability to pick up on those historic frequencies that can only be heard with one’s creative ear to the ground, literary fiction has seen a flowering of the American apocalyptic sublime. Critically acclaimed and often award winning, we’ve entered the renaissance of literary manifestations of the apocalyptic, of works that embody the unveiling inherent in Wigglesworth’s moment when “Skies are rent asunder, /With mighty voice and hideous noise, /more terrible then Thunder.” As exemplified by Cormac McCarthy’s relentlessly dark post-apocalyptic travelogue The Road (2006), a reading list of this moment in contemporary literary history could include Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse (2008), Kevin Brockmeir’s The Illumination (2012), Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet (2012), Lauren Groff’s Arcadia (2012), Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars (2013), Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles (2013), Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers (2014), Greg Hrbek’s Not on Fire, But Burning (2015), Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2015), Edan Lepucki’s California (2015), and Alexis M. Smith’s Marrow Island (2016).

The works are divergent – from Lepucki’s frighteningly realistic description of an incredibly divided nation with a rapidly fraying social contract to Marcus’ depiction of language itself turning into a type of virus, or Groff’s long-sweep Great American Novel beginning in a 1960’s intentional community and ending in pandemic in our own near future to Crace’s rewriting and reversing of the perennial American myth of westward expansion transposed onto a far primitive future where Americans await the arrival of a god named Abraham who they find evidence for on copper medallions dispersed across the ruined North American landscape. But for all their variety, they share literary fiction’s tone, style, and rhetoric. In language, narrative, pacing, and characterization they owe more to The New Yorker than Amazing Tales. The emergence of this movement, or collection, or trend, or whatever you want to call it is important for several reasons. As I mentioned earlier, these works are in part a direct reaction to the disastrous events of the twenty-first century: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic collapse, impending environmental cataclysm, and so on. With their descriptions of how the world can change irrevocably in one moment, they reenact the traumas of epoch-altering historical events. And they are all consummately American, especially in their evocation of capitalism’s relation to Armageddon. Consider the passage in The Road where McCarthy’s characters, a nameless boy and his father traipsing across a scarred wasteland, find that “On the outskirts of the city they came to a supermarket… By the door were two softdrink machines that had been tilted over into the floor and opened with a prybar. Coins everywhere in the ash. He sat and ran his hand around the works of the gutted machines and in the second one it closed over a cold metal cylinder. He withdrew it slowly and sat looking at a Coca-Cola.” What could be more American than that? Everyone is dead, the world is extinguished, but somehow that most American of products still endures. Even after the blasting of the trumpets you can still buy the world a Coke. Philosopher Frederic Jameson anticipated scenes just like this, writing that “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”

And the thing is, no matter how shackled or oppressed our monotonous lives may feel, we would still love a Coke. Who wouldn’t? We simultaneously yearn to be liberated by the systems which constrain us as we still nestle into their comforts, and paradoxically apocalypse provides us a means to do both. In Mandel’s achingly beautiful Station Eleven, which follows the almost medieval and carnivalesque Great Lakes meanderings of a group of Shakespearean actors in the decades after an extinction level epidemic has decimated the world, she pauses to reflect on all of the daily assumptions of life in late capitalism that have disappeared from her new world. Listing chlorinated swimming pools, baseball games, and airplanes, she finally ends with a description of something we all often claim to hate (or at least to have extreme annoyance with) while thrilling over its addictive hold on us: the internet and social media. She writes that after the end there shall be:

No more internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, please, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

Part of what is so striking about the new eschatomania, this new manifestation of the American apocalyptic sublime, is how eerily familiar it seems. As Wigglesworth wrote in the language of his dominant faith, so to do our new authors write in the vocabulary of our totalizing religion. And as his readers simultaneously feared and desired apocalypse, so do ours.

Wigglesworth’s audiences got a thrill out of Christ appearing in the sky to inaugurate the millennium as surely as modern audiences derived a strange pleasure from McCarthy’s similarly world-ending nocturnal luminescence in his novel. In the promised land of America, apocalypse is not something just for Holy Roller sermons and Hal Lindsey screeds, for evangelicals clutching Left Behind books or viewers of The 700 Club. We’re all Wigglesworth’s children, and the secular can match Tim LaHaye with The Stand, or The Hunger Games, or wondering who Negan is going to club to death this Sunday night on AMC. We get off on this stuff, always have, always will (that is at least until the apocalypse actually comes, and worrying prophecies always have had a way of being self-fulfilling). While we’re certainly not the first civilization to view ourselves as an apocalyptic “redeemer nation,” to borrow the historian Ernest Tuveson’s memorable phrase, we’re certainly the only one to achieve the status of superpower, and furthermore the first to actually invent the mechanism by which apocalypse could actually be literally and materially be made manifest though human hands in the form of nuclear weapons. British philosopher John Gray wrote in his book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (the one indispensible book on political theology in the last decade) that American culture is defined by “a current of the millenarian ferment that passed from medieval chiliasm through the English Revolution. The sense of universal mission that is such a prominent feature of American politics is an outflow from this ancient stream.” And central to this sense of mission is that apocalypse must itself mean the dissolution of America, that the two possibilities are intimately intertwined. Americans find it impossible to envision a world without us, so it is easier to simply envision there not being a world at all. The fear that we must all have is what happens when a nation that sees itself as the one indispensable empire in world history, against all evidence, perceives itself to be minimized? How dangerous is a snake in its death throes? And how terrifying is the country that invented the means of destruction which Patmos could only hallucinate? We’ve never been the land of the free and the home of the brave so much as the land of utopian and millennial dreams and apocalyptic nightmares, a complementary if paradoxical pair. What finally may draw us to the American apocalyptic sublime are not just the vagaries of aesthetics, but the anxious sour stomach of prophecy. What the new apocalyptic authors of the twenty-first century offer us are not just reflections of what has already happened, but horrifyingly they may also offer us transcriptions of that which they heard when they placed their ear to the ground – the increasingly loud frequencies of those four sets of horse hooves galloping towards us from those arid deserts in the direction of dusk.

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Ed Simon Ed Simon is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Lehigh University, where he researches the religion, literature, and culture of the seventeenth-century. He has been widely published at a variety of sites, and can be followed on twitter @WithEdSimon, or at his website.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post The American Apocalyptic Sublime and the Twilight of Empire appeared first on The Revealer.

Photo of the chronically polluted industrial skyline of
Mossville, near Lake Charles in Calcasieu Parish by Alexander John Glustrom

By Patrick Blanchfield

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, “Is it good, friend?”

“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it

“Because it is bitter,

“And because it is my heart.”

— Stephen Crane, III, The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895)

Empathy has suddenly become, in the commentarial argot, problematic. With the Trump victory leaving many liberal Americans reeling, appeals to “empathize” with voters who elected him can ring hollow. Does not empathizing with them play into a process of “normalizing” a toxic leader, and help mainstream an unacceptable ideology? Is it not cruel to ask some Americans to put themselves in the shoes of groups of people who are fundamentally prejudiced against them?

Against this backdrop, Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, published by The New Press shortly before the election, is more relevant than ever. The book is a nuanced yet readable portrait of a segment of America whose support for the Tea Party, and then for Trump, has been instrumental in bringing about our current situation. It is also a challenging meditation on the politics of empathy more broadly, frustrating and challenging precisely at the points where the reality it depicts is frustrating too.

Hochschild is a distinguished sociologist, now emeritus of the University of California Berkeley. Strangers in Their Own Land is the product of five years of extensive interviews and on-site research in Louisiana bayou communities. Hochschild embeds herself among Tea Party diehards from a variety of backgrounds, attending political rallies and crawfish boils, touring homes and industrial parks, gathering stories of economic hardship, environmental destruction, and political conviction as she goes. The organizing frame is an explicit reprise of Thomas Franks’ 2004 What’s the Matter With Kansas, namely an investigation of why blue-collar conservatives support a political order that is manifestly indifferent to their material interests. With its extreme poverty, broken education system, low life expectancy, and terminally underfunded public infrastructure, Louisiana ranks 49^th on the American Human Development Index, and thus serves the purposes of Hochschild’s inquiry well. Louisiana also presents an additional riddle, as for all the Red State’s governing rhetoric of rejecting handouts, it depends heavily on Federal aid, which amounts to greater than 40% of the State budget. This seeming contradiction, a “need for help and a principled refusal of it,” is what Hochschild labels “The Great Paradox,” and it drives her focus on a specific touchstone issue – the environment. Here again Hochschild has picked a stark example. The towns she visits are at the heart of a massive “petrochemical empire” of oil refineries and chemical plants, places where the bayou has turned toxic from mishaps and illegal dumping. The stories are heartbreaking and nightmarish. Sinkholes produced by drilling swallow entire homes; wildlife die horribly from pollution; more. In one extended Cajun family Hochschild profiles, every single member has been afflicted by devastating cancers; another interviewee tells a story of how her horse was exposed to industrial waste, had its skin become “rubberized,” and died in agony. And yet these people almost exclusively reject the prospect of Federal environmental regulation as anathema, and vote for politicians who favor deregulation and who pillage social services to incentivize yet more industrial development. “How can a system both create pain and deflect blame for that pain?,” Hochschild asks.

Part of her answer is material: poor conservative voters are not dupes – rather, they are struggling people who are making what they see as the best decisions among a range of miserable options. Bayou residents know that the fish they depend on have been fouled, but they make the best of it. “If the companies won’t pay to clean up the waters they pollute, and if the state won’t make them, and if poverty is ever with us—some people need to [fish] for their dinner—well then, trim, grill, and eat mercury-soaked fish,” Hochschild sums up their attitude. Many of Hochschild’s subjects also combine an emphasis on the virtue of making do with belief in an apparent forced choice between regulation and employment; as one interviewee tells her, “Pollution is the sacrifice we make for capitalism.”

Religion looms large in the worldview Hochschild documents. Being “churched” is essential to how her interviewees understand moral formation, and the churches themselves offer them community services that they otherwise reject when provided by the state. Through providing things like gyms, addiction recovery meetings, day care, and more, “Baptist, Pentecostal, Catholic, and all the churches I visit also meet needs beyond the spiritual, in a way that avoids the indignity that my Tea Party friends link with things public.” In turn, churches receive their support in a way the state does not: “they pay taxes, but they give at church.”

Equally important, religion offers Hochschild’s interviewees a frame for processing the hardships of economic life on the one hand and environmental devastation on the other. Their Christianity shapes how they “recognize blessings” (i.e., steady employment, industrial development) and recuperates their earthly suffering. “Their faith had guided them through a painful loss of family, friends, neighbors, frogs, turtles, and trees,” Hochschild writes of one family. “They felt God had blessed them with this courage to face their ordeals, and they thanked Him for that.” Many readers may perceive in this, if not an illustration of Marx’s attitudes toward religion-as-opiate per se, at least another kind of tragedy. Indeed, some of Hochschild’s subjects bear suffering while looking forward to the Rapture, and view environmental destruction through an eschatological lens: “But if we get our souls saved, we go to Heaven, and Heaven is for eternity…We’ll never have to worry about the environment from then on.” In this instance and more broadly, Hochschild sees religion as supplanting and precluding political mobilization. “Word from the Lake Charles pulpits seemed to focus more on a person’s moral strength to endure than on the will to change the circumstances that called on that strength,” she writes. “In their tough secular lives, life [for these Louisianans] may well feel like “end times.” But word from the pulpit also seems to turn concern away from social problems in Louisiana—poverty, poor schools, pollution-related illness— away from government help, and away from the Great Paradox.” “They say there are beautiful trees in heaven,” one Louisianan, who has spent a lifetime watching his beloved bayou die around him, tells Hochschild.

Above all, Hochschild argues, the politics surrounding the Great Paradox are about organizing and expressing a set of feelings, asserting an emotional narrative of selfhood and collective experience. The role of feelings is the core of Hochschild’s inquiry, and central to her account of contemporary politics. As she argues, current American political discourse is structured around a clash of “feeling rules”: injunctions of how to feel about what, and correlative operations of shaming for feeling otherwise. Offering examples, Hochschild writes: “The right seeks release from liberal notions of what they should feel—happy for the gay newlywed, sad at the plight of the Syrian refugee, unresentful about paying taxes. The left sees prejudice.”

The excavation of such feelings leads Hochschild to propose what she calls “The Deep Story,” a kind of primal scene of emotions and self-understanding that underwrites all political ideology (a word that does not appear once in her own prose). As she writes:

“A deep story is a feels-as-if story—it’s the story feelings tell, in the language of symbols. It removes judgment. It removes fact. It tells us how things feel. Such a story permits those on both sides of the political spectrum to stand back and explore the subjective prism through which the party on the other side sees the world. And I don’t believe we understand anyone’s politics, right or left, without it. For we all have a deep story.”

Through her interviews, Hochschild constructs a Deep Story for her conservative Louisiana subjects. In this ur-narrative, the story’s protagonists – white men, exemplarily – are on a line waiting to arrive at the American Dream, which lays just over the horizon. The pull of the Dream is palpable, making hard work and suffering worthwhile:

“The American Dream is a dream of progress—the idea that you’re better off than your forebears just as they superseded their parents before you— and extends beyond money and stuff. You’ve suffered long hours, layoffs, and exposure to dangerous chemicals at work, and received reduced pensions. You have shown moral character through trial by fire, and the American Dream of prosperity and security is a reward for all of this, showing who you have been and are—a badge of honor.”

But realizing this dream grows increasingly dubious: financial precarity, loss of income, and personal failures all make it seem more distant. And then, to make matters worse, people start “cutting in line.” Minorities, women, immigrants, even endangered species all suddenly cut ahead, receiving public sympathy and material advancement while the line slows and stalls behind them. The sense unfairness is acute: “These are opportunities you’d have loved to have had in your day—and either you should have had them when you were young or the young shouldn’t be getting them now. It’s not fair.” What’s worse, even as these groups cut ahead in line, liberal media and smug Northerners start to dismiss those stuck behind them, mocking their culture as synonymous with backwardness, their faith with ignorance, and their resentment with bigotry. “You are a stranger in your own land. You do not recognize yourself in how others see you. It is a struggle to feel seen and honored. And to feel honored you have to feel—and feel seen as—moving forward. But through no fault of your own, and in ways that are hidden, you are slipping backward.” This wound to self-esteem rankles, and prompts a reactionary contraction of sympathy:

“You’re a compassionate person. But now you’ve been asked to extend your sympathy to all the people who have cut in front of you. So you have your guard up against requests for sympathy. People complain: Racism. Discrimination. Sexism. You’ve heard stories of oppressed blacks, dominated women, weary immigrants, closeted gays, desperate refugees, but at some point, you say to yourself, you have to close the borders to human sympathy— especially if there are some among them who might bring you harm. You’ve suffered a good deal yourself, but you aren’t complaining about it.”

The tension between this desire for material advancement and restored dignity on the one hand and a rejection of the victimization rhetoric of “poor-me’s” on the other finds, Hochschild argues, its logical expression in rhetoric and affects of the Tea Party.

When Hochschild proposes this “Deep Story” to her interviewees, they endorse it heartily. And it is indeed resonant as a kind of key for understanding both the Great Paradox and so much of contemporary working conservative politics. But it also raises issues. The feels-as-if dimension and emphasis on narratives of (restoring) self-esteem leaves little room for acknowledging histories and other people Hochschild’s subjects would rather not contemplate. Race in particular becomes troublingly peripheral; as Hochschild notes, “Missing from the image of blacks in most of the minds of those I came to know was a man or woman standing patiently in line next to them waiting for a well-deserved reward.” This signal absence of empathetic imagination on the part of her interview subjects is thrown in ever sharper relief given how Hochschild’s own inquiry is itself presented as a kind of exercise in empathy, an effort to think beyond a liberal “empathy wall.” “An empathy wall,” Hochschild writes, “Is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances.” But if Hochschild is admirably willing to break down or scale an empathy wall when it comes to her conservative subjects, there is little signal that they are willing to do much of the same for others, and for minorities in particular.

And this is where things fold back on themselves in a frustrating way. The injunction to understand the emotional plight of immiserated Conservatives, for all its merits, does not guarantee any reciprocal emotional movement from them. In fact, it feels rather like just another “feeling rule” — this time, enjoined by liberals upon themselves. And like so many feeling rules, it flirts with erasing or eliding some feelings in favor of others. In a closing section of Strangers in Their Own Land, Hochschild attends a rally for Donald Trump, whom many of her interviewees support, and astutely paints him a candidate of and for feelings (or rather, of and for a particular set of them). Trump may not represent the material best interests of these Louisianans, but he embodies their “emotional self-interest.” Hochschild invokes Durkheim’s notion of collective effervescence to cast the Trump phenomenon as offering her subjects a delirious “high,” a glimpse at recapturing a sense of self-worth amidst abjection. But this seems, to me at least, to understate another key affect at play in Trump events, and in Trump’s broader appeal: rage.

What her subjects want, Hochschild repeatedly says, and what they apparently see in Trump, is an opportunity for “vindication.” But “vindication” means something more than just “recognition” or “being seen.” Etymologically, “vindication” derives from a word for vengeance, and, ultimately, the assertion of authority through force. In America, such appeals to emotional revanchism, even when nominally colorblind, have never been neutral, and have fueled centuries of both structural oppression and extrajudicial violence (as documented brilliantly in Carol Anderson’s magisterial White Rage). However unpleasant it may feel, acknowledging a desire for restored dignity on the part of marginalized whites is likely vital if the nation is to move forward – but the task of severing that demand from an all-too-proven history of racial and other persecution is an absolute moral imperative.

And it is an imperative now more so than ever. Not just because, as Hochschild notes, liberals need to overcome their own hypocritical complicity in “an industrial system, the fruits of which [they enjoy] from a distance in their highly regulated and cleaner blue states.” And not just because, with Trump, we now face four years of the Great Paradox writ nationwide. But because, as Hochschild documents, if the tragic politics of her Louisiana subjects derive from mourning a loss of status and a collective “structural amnesia” of their suffering, these are conditions that, going forward, will hardly be restricted to poor enclaves in the South or the Gulf of Mexico. The writing is on the wall: environmental collapse and automation threaten the livelihoods, dignity, and survival of more Americans than ever before, and if we forget or write off such suffering, toxic politicians will pick up the slack and disaster will follow. In yet one more paradox, the Trump election now appears to have left many liberal Americans feeling exactly how Hochschild paints her conservative subjects: wondering whether “sympathy” for various marginalized classes is worth the bother, or if it’s instead just an insult, a demand for yet more emotional expenditure when every reasonable instinct calls for a contraction of empathy instead. Such demands for sympathy and understanding may indeed feel supererogatory, even cruel, and in of and of themselves will amount to nothing (or worse) if not coupled with political action and a staunch refusal to tolerate intolerance in the guise of recognition or acceptance. But such is the moment we live in, where an exertion of superhuman effort to reckon with the all-too-human may be the only way any of us can survive.

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Patrick Blanchfield is the Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at NYU. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University and is a graduate of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He writes about US culture, guns, and politics at carteblanchfield.com and is on Twitter as @patblanchfield.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Brokenheartlands: Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land appeared first on The Revealer.

By Geoffrey Pollick

Continuing its work of social critique through mass-mediated artistic expression, Jill Soloway’s Transparent once again delivers advocacy, humor, and somber wit in a third season on Amazon.com’s Prime subscription service. As showrunner, Soloway depicts experiences and identities that infrequently rise to the surface of U.S. televisual culture, and extends patterns developed through two earlier seasons.

In this most recent iteration, released during September 2016, Transparent deepens its engagement with questions of identity and belonging, and establishes connections between the identity explorations of both its transgender and cisgender characters. Soloway underscores these links with especial impact through manipulations of her characters’ variable adherence to Judaism and their affiliations with the program’s central family grouping, the Pfeffermans.

In its first season, Transparent introduced characters and premises; in its second, the show differentiated individual problems and trajectories among the Pfeffermans. As I wrote previously, in season two, Soloway put ritual to work in representing those individualizations.

Through the new release, Soloway reveals her characters struggling to find and integrate identity in the now-familiar bit still fluid contours of their family structure. In the season’s ten episodes, Jewish ritual persists as a central narrative vehicle. But Soloway expands her representations of religious practices as wider forms through which to articulate and advance characterization. Religious practices begin to stand in for and overlap other practices of identity and belonging. And through them, the Pfeffermans and their community resist and reconfigure normative expectations for selfhood.

***

José Esteban Muñoz, a theorist of queer performance studies, developed a concept of “disidentification” that helps to describe the representational work of identity resistance and reconfiguration that Soloway accomplishes in season three. In his book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Muñoz uses disidentification as a tool to describe the symbolic and practical effects of works presented by LGBT* performance artists. For Muñoz, these artists uncover and display “world[s] where queer lives, politics, and possibilities are representable in their complexity.” By representing the disconnection between identity as experienced by queer people and identity as demanded by society, performances create space for self-assertions of legitimacy.

Put differently, if mainstream culture represses positive representations of queer selves, then queer performers resist these prohibitions through artworks. According to Muñoz, this work “serve[s] a politically pedagogical role…[by] provid[ing] the spectator the material to…disidentify with [the normative] world and perform a new one.”

In this way, disidentification refers to the politically engaged work of resisting and reconfiguring selfhood through artistic performances. Art provides strategies for changing politics by depicting identity in ways that reject exclusionary norms. Disidentification describes the tension that links normativity to oppression, and, at the site of this link, creates an affirmative identity.

Performance culture among drag queens illustrates this link. One example, RuPaul’s Drag Race, broadcast through cable television, represents a range of subcultural expressions of female impersonation that are most often performed by gay men. Through highly stylized representations of femininity—especially in the artistic forms of lip sync and fashion styling—Drag Race’s queer performers exaggerate normative symbols of femaleness, thereby calling into question the perceived stability of gender identity itself. If “men” can produce the appearance of authentic “womanhood,” then to what essential markers of identity do “male” and “female” refer at all? Drag Race’s gay men disidentify with heteronormative maleness by reconfiguring masculinity behind hairspray, mascara, sequins, and pop music. Through the art of drag performance, they create new spaces in which to articulate more fluid representations of their self-identities beyond the stage.

In this way, the political work of performing disidentification both deconstructs norms and produces new standards of selfhood. Resistance and reconfiguration occur simultaneously through performance. Muñoz observes the following in his discussion of this process:

Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture.

Neither mere protest nor pure invention, by resisting, disidentification reconfigures what already exists. Exploiting this representational strategy, Transparent’s characters enact performances of religious practices staged as performances of disidentification. They use normative expressions of gender and Judaism to critique those norms and establish new terms for identity.

At the close of the third season, for instance, the show’s central protagonist, Maura Pfefferman (played by Jeffrey Tambor) improvises a ritual of gender affirmation and body acceptance. A transgender woman whose experience of coming out furnished the series’ initial premise, Maura has learned that she cannot undergo gender affirmation surgery due to health complications. While vacationing with her family on a cruise ship, she has decided to relinquish the garments she wore to modify her body’s appearance.

Maura stands at the ship’s rail, facing open ocean, when her child Ali approaches and comments on Maura’s new athleisure outfit, purchased for its unisex design. Gesturing to a garment to be discarded, Maura explains, “I’m just saying goodbye to my Spand-X and my feminine shapewear. This one has my tuchus in it.” Further explaining her inability to pursue surgery, Maura expresses her resolution of disappointment through self-acceptance: “I’ve already transitioned. I’m trans. I’m just…this is me. This is it.” Ali then ritualizes the moment, asking if they can recite a prayer. “Do it,” Maura answers.

Grasping one of Maura’s garments, Ali initiates the ritual: “This is your butt?”

“This was my butt.”

“Face the ocean and raise your arms: Great mystery, Goddess, let us mark this moment to say goodbye to these tight, terrible Spanx.”

“Goodbye tight, terrible Spanx!”

“Deliver us from feeling bunched up in the ass.”

“Dayenu!”

“And restricted and confined. Let us just be.”

The improvised performance concludes with the two exclaiming in unison, “set us free.” Their recitation of formulaic language and configuration of bodily poses refers to no specific practice from traditional Jewish ritual culture. Instead, Ali and Maura assemble a pastiche of ritual elements, inventing an ad hoc religious performance that addresses Maura’s womanhood and acknowledges their family’s identification with Judaism. References to Passover (“Dayenu!”) and to feminist theology cross the ritual wires of identity for Ali and Maura, and open a space for disidentification with normative femininity and traditional Judaism. By resisting norms, the parent-and-child pair reconfigure their self-understandings as Jewish women.

More than this, Transparent elevates disidentificatory performances from the “subcultural circuits” where Muñoz discovers them. Soloway’s episodes make disidentification available to mainstream culture through examples of everyday experiences streamed through the web (although limited by subscription). Transparent’s characters—whether queer or straight, trans or cis—all modify the socially prescribed terms of their identities. By implementing the cultural pedagogy described by Muñoz, Soloway aids in reprogramming culture by rendering trans*, lesbian, bisexual, feminist and other non-normative identities in close proximity to normative experiences. Midway through the season, for instance, Maura’s child Josh—portrayed as a heterosexual, cisgender male—undergoes a crisis of religious affiliation and temporarily converts to Christianity in order to strengthen the bond with his own estranged son. Through this plot element, Soloway depicts Josh’s religious performances of identity on equal terms with Maura’s. In Transparent, normative and non-normative identities all find expression through disidentification.

Through its representations of religious practices and their modification, the most recent episodes of Transparent convey impactful disidentifications that question the stability of all forms of identity, especially those rooted in religion, gender, and sexuality. In the program’s depictions of multidimensional queerness, religious practices function as resistant representations of identity while they simultaneously open spaces for characters to reconfigure their senses of selfhood.

Soloway establishes these dynamics especially clearly in season three’s first episode, entitled “Elizah.”

Through the episode’s opening 55 seconds, viewers come to understand the connections that draw together religious practices, performance, and the invention of identity. Rabbi Raquel Fein (played by Kathryn Hahn), a prominent character in all three seasons, stands beside a piano on the main platform of her Los Angeles synagogue, dressed in running shorts and leggings. At first in monologue and then in voiceover, Raquel addresses empty pews as she rehearses a Passover sermon:

You wake up with two words emblazoned on your chest; it’s time. You’re gonna make a break for freedom, you will not be a slave any more. You get out of bed. You grab your things. You run outside. And then there you are, free. The first light of day. Behind you is your past, everything you came from, everything that you thought you knew. You start running. As you run, you listen for the voice of the divine, but you hear nothing. So you stop and you listen closer. What is that? Is it nothing? No. It is stillness.

While Raquel recites these words, the scene shifts visually. Moving from the setting of synagogue interior to an exterior garden scene, Raquel appears in the same clothing, now alternating between a seated position writing in a notebook on a bench, and wandering through a thicket of bamboo. Her spoken words and costume provide continuity between the intercut scenes. And Soloway has announced the season’s core theme: quests for new beginnings and personal freedom.

Raquel’s sermon, spoken onstage in improvisational posture, evokes notions of performance and rehearsal as foundational elements of institutional religious practice. Sermons don’t just happen; they are drafted, revised, vocalized, and gestured. The garden scene, by contrast, presents performative action that expresses individual contemplation through meditative writing and movement. Raquel’s rehearsal for the public performance of a sermon and her practice of individual contemplation both work to articulate her sense of identity. Soloway’s sound design shifts the symbolism of this brief scene towards the articulation of identity, and initiates a profound reflection on the role played by religious practices in constructing and articulating selfhood.

Mixed behind Raquel’s voiceover sermon, Nina Simone’s recording of the song “Ne Me Quitte Pas” plays in background. “Don’t leave me,” cries the song’s titular line. The quality of Simone’s voice and the content of her words call attention to Raquel’s motivation. Not only does she seek to guide her congregation in contemplation of Passover’s themes of release from suffering and discovery of liberation, but Raquel’s words are also self-directed. As Soloway reveals in later episodes, Raquel is struggling to harmonize her sense of womanhood with her role as a religious leader in progressive Judaism, and wrestles with the place of sexual desire and spiritual experimentation in the work of maintaining Jewish traditions.

The multiple performances of Raquel’s Passover homily allow her to resist and reconfigure Judaism as she resists and reconfigures her unfolding sense of self-identity. The desire not to be left alone tugs at the anxious possibility of finding her identity marked as illegitimate or undesirable. By lifting up this conflict in Raquel’s character, Soloway begins the work of representing disidentity through resistance against normative constructs of Judaism, femaleness, and heterosexuality. Raquel carries traces of her publicly performed Judaism and her individually practiced meditation back and forth between one another, re-figuring each in relation to the other.

Soloway accomplishes this representational work in the episode’s first minute, and the opening titles immediately follow. As such, Raquel’s performance functions as the narrative pretext for the representations of disidentity disclosed through the remainder of the episode and season.

The episode continues after the credits with Maura’s morning routine. Through the first and second seasons, Maura has secured acceptance from her family and stitched herself into a small community of fellow transfolk. Undertaking the beginning of a new day with fresh clothes and a full cup of tea, she engages in polite tableside conversation with her trans* housemate over breakfast. Reflecting on family relationships and her new role as a volunteer at the Los Angeles LGBT Center, Maura observes: “I’ve got everything I need. So, why am I so unhappy?” Soloway presents a narrative opening through which to continue the development of Maura’s emerging identity.

Cutting to the offices of the community center’s trans* crisis help-line, the episode initiates its principal action with Maura’s answer of a call from a trans* person named Elizah, who mentions their contemplation of suicide. Stumbling through a boilerplate script, Maura connects with Elizah by expressing her shared identification as trans*, and calming Elizah with a shared breathing exercise. After establishing what seems to be an authentic emotional link, Elizah abruptly ends the call and Maura panics. In desperation, Maura leaves the call center in search of Elizah, who had mentioned that they were in the waiting room of St. Christopher’s Medical Clinic in South Los Angeles.

In Elizah’s experience as a trans* person, the quotidian experience of waiting for a medical appointment had become an experience of rupture, of disidentification with a normative construct of medical care. It seems that, rather than a space of healing, the clinic became a space of trauma to be resolved either through a search for solidarity or through flight and escape. The solidarity of a help-line call proved too insubstantial, and Elizah opted for flight. As Maura arrives at the South L.A. clinic, she learns that Elizah has departed, heading to the nearby Slauson Swap Meet, and Maura follows.

In her swap-meet search, Maura discovers her incongruence with Elizah’s context and is forced to confront the vulnerability of her own position as a transgender person. While seeking Elizah from storefront to storefront, Maura stumbles over her own unrecognized white privilege. She misperceives the racial and class connotations of an interaction with a group of trans* Latinx women. She disregards the instructions of an African-American clerk who scolds her after she is unable to pay for a bottled drink, but takes it anyway. These encounters combine with Maura’s anxiety in searching for Elizah and overwhelm her. Collapsing, either from the intensity of her concern for Elizah or from wafts of toxic fumes drifting from a nearby nail salon, Maura succumbs to stress and faints.

While paramedics help Maura onto a gurney, Simone’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas” resumes in background. The medics explain to Maura that they must transport her to the nearest hospital, Los Angeles County–USC Medical Center. Once again confronting the dissonance between perceived and experienced identity, Maura resists being treated at a public hospital: “You have to take me to Cedars Sinai. I’m Jewish. My name is Pfefferman. You understand? Pfefferman.” The religious, economic, and racial implications of Maura’s plea evoke Simone’s call not to be left; they articulate the anxiety felt in the potential for abandonment and denunciation.

As the episode draws to a close, Raquel’s sermon also resumes in voiceover: “You’re waiting for a miracle, you’re waiting for the sea to part. Well, that’s an old miracle. So what about this? What if the miracle was you? What if you had to be your own messiah? Then what?” This finding of messiahship in oneself surfaces as a prominent meditation for the entire third season. Raquel inverts the traditional understanding that messiah will arrive from outside to protect and save what is inside. The reconfiguration of miracle is the reconfiguration of self.

By reprising Raquel’s sermon and Simone’s song during Maura’s crisis, Soloway establishes direct links between the religious practices of sermon preparation and individual meditation, and the experiences of trauma and solidarity that trans* people undergo in the conduct of social life. Through the duration of the episodes that follow, Maura will learn strategies for self-preservation and self-articulation, just as Raquel struggles to integrate her senses of gender, spirituality, and sexuality with her position in Judaism.

Soloway’s characters each improvise complex individual and collective identities through practices of resistance and reconfiguration that open spaces for their distinct understandings of selfhood. Through their manufacture and improvisation, religious practices of disidentification work both to resist and reconstruct identity when formulaic or traditional elements are made to vary. Through their disidentificatory performances, the Pfeffermans and those close to them build strategies to cope with the queerness of dislocation, as individuals and as a family. In this, Soloway’s characters once again open new angles of vision on dissonant experiences of identity and sociality through their cries not to be left alone in a complicated twenty-first-century world.

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Geoffrey Pollick, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Sweet Briar College, teaches and researches the history of religion in the United States. His work emphasizes religion’s entanglements with political radicalism, the role and dimensions of religious liberalism, critical theory of religion, and the cultural history and historiography of religion.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post “Don’t Leave Me”: Resisting, Reconfiguring, and Representing Identity in Jill Soloway’s “Transparent” appeared first on The Revealer.

September 4th, 500 people gather after the bulldozing of a sacred site. via http://www.nodaplarchive.com/

By Sarah Dees

The struggles and subsequent successes at Standing Rock are trending. Following the #noDAPL hashtag yields updates from people who are present at the encampments and news from international outlets publishing details about the development of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Stories have covered the way it was re-routed to avoid a river-crossing north of Bismarck, the pipeline company’s nominal assessment of the pipeline’s potential impact, and what Energy Transfer Partners—the company that owns the pipeline—stands to gain from its development. As of Sunday, December 4, the Army Corps of Engineers denied the permit that would have allowed Energy Transfer Partners to route the pipeline under the Missouri River near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. People around the world are now aware of the resistance that has been offered by the “water protectors,” members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their allies. But it took a while for this story to reach such a wide audience.

After the Army Corps of Engineers obtained a final fast-track permit for the project in August, members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe sought to block construction on the project and started to develop three encampments. Support trickled, and eventually poured, in from diverse allies including musicians and veterans. Early on, the protesters at Standing Rock were concerned about the lack of media coverage of the pipeline construction. But mainstream media finally tuned in in September after the situation escalated when employees of a private security agency attacked protestors with dogs. By the end of October, millions of Facebook users were virtually “checking in” at Standing Rock to demonstrate support after police presence increased. In November, police used rubber bullets and water cannons in sub-freezing temperatures, raising humanitarian concerns. As December began and winter set in, political and police pressure increased and the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies continued to stand their ground. This week, people at the camps and their supporters have been celebrating the announcement that the pipeline would be re-routed. Still, uncertainty persists about how the future political environment may affect the present victory.

As the situation continues to unfold, it’s important to understand that, while the struggle taking place at Standing Rock is historic, it is not unprecedented. In tense moments like these, in which decisions can have monumental effects and outcomes are uncertain, looking back on the past can be instructive. Yet the task of understanding the long history leading up to the pipeline controversy is not a simple one. While mainstream media coverage of the resistance at Standing Rock has increased, news stories focusing on specific happenings at the camps often cannot capture the longer history and context that has led to the creation of the camps and the outflow of support from Indigenous nations and non-Native allies throughout the United States and beyond. At the same time, seeking to understand the past creates its own difficulties, as many of those who created the documents that we now turn to for facts and answers often wove their own prejudices and preconceptions into the historical record. In what follows, I consider what past events can tell us about the present moment and explore the fundamental difficulties of this task due to colonial sources and narratives that frame mainstream understandings of history.

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Last month, as the snow began to fall over the camps at Standing Rock, police threatened people bringing supplies to the camp and political leaders began calling to evict the water protectors. There are ways in which this militarized response to the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies calls to mind eerie similarities with the Wounded Knee Massacre in late-nineteenth century in South Dakota, a widely cited event in which the U.S. military surrounded, and opened fire on a group of Miniconjoiu Lakota (Sioux) people involved in the Ghost Dance. Officials justified the military intervention because some Euro-Americans found the Ghost Dance, otherwise known as spirit dances, threatening. (I have written about this history here.) We can learn from the ways in which what is happening at Standing Rock resembles what happened to the ghost dancers more than a century ago. Again today, corporate interests, the cultivation of fear, the blurring of lines between religion and politics, and media responses have been taking shape in dangerous and historically recognizable ways.

First, by comparing these two events, we can see that the privileging of corporate interests over Native sovereignty is not new. In 1868, agents of the federal government and Sioux leaders signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie. This treaty established most of western South Dakota, and a small part of North Dakota, as tribal lands, “set apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians herein named.” But only a few years later, in 1874, Euro-Americans discovered gold in the Black Hills and the U.S. government went back on its word, allowing white prospectors to illegally set up mining camps, stationing George Custer on treaty land, and then by eventually seizing the Black Hills in 1877. Corporate and financial interests fueled the disregard for the 1868 treaty, and the Lakota people who engaged in the Ghost Dance were experiencing the repercussions from that loss of land. Economic interests—which directly threaten Sioux lands—are being similarly privileged in the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. (For an excellent historical overview of the federal government’s prior efforts to control rivers in ways that have affected Sioux lands, see Nick Estes’s essay “Fighting for our Lives: #noDAPL in Historical Context.”)

There are also similarities in how violence is being framed in Standing Rock and how it was framed back in the 1800s. In the weeks leading up to the massacre at Wounded Knee, the media did take some interest in the Ghost Dancers, but coverage was framed in terms of the “Messiah Craze”—a phrase that specifically sought to de-legitimize the tradition by suggesting that followers were deranged or irrational. After the massacre occurred at Wounded Knee Creek on December 29^th, 1890, interest and news coverage increased dramatically. At Standing Rock, early on, water protectors were concerned about the lack of news coverage that the encampments at Standing Rock were receiving and, like in 1890, the mainstream media did not offer extensive coverage until after violent events occurred. Numerous public and private police forces from within and outside North Dakota have been called in to monitor the protectors. Police have maintained that their violent responses are justified based on the protestors’ actions, while the water protectors themselves articulate a defensive rather than offensive position. Again, the media response increased as the sense of confrontation escalated.

In this historical example, and in the recent struggle at Standing Rock, there are also blurring lines between the categories of “religious” and “political” activity. Outsiders initially described the encampments in North Dakota as part of a political protest, while the protectors maintain that the camps are ritual spaces. Posted rules entreat those visiting or staying in the camps to maintain their ceremonial integrity. At the same time, the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies are concerned with policy and economic decisions that will directly affect land that they hold to be sacred. The situation requires us to see the way that land is, in different ways, both religiously and economically valuable, which forces the Standing Rock Sioux to use both spiritual and economic terms to describe their motives and goals. Sovereignty and sanctity, the material and the spiritual, are thus deeply entertwined imperatives and tactics of resistance. These movements each challenge efforts to neatly categorize “religious” and “political” activities, illustrating a prominent point in the academic study of religion: that religion, culture, and politics are intimately connected. These realities require hard, deep analysis and both this history and the present situation belong in our classrooms, something that those who have developed the #StandingRockSyllabus have recognized and worked toward. (I will take this topic up further in my next piece for The Revealer.)

Considering these historical moments is important because communities still ache from the effects of long-ago losses, and racialized assumptions prompting inhumane treatment still stubbornly linger. Yet significant changes do distinguish the present moment from the assimilation era. One of the key developments has been the rise of Indigenous activism and self-determination since the Red Power movement in the 1970s. Indeed, a distinct feature of the gathering of water protectors at Standing Rock is the way that many Native nations have united to supporting the cause. Reports indicate that Standing Rock is one of the the largest single gatherings of Native American nations ever. In addition, many tribal governments have released official statements outlining their solidarity with Oceti Sakowin, the Great Sioux Nation. There has been a long history of inter-tribal cooperation, but accounts from the camp indicate that this is a historic gathering on a new level and an important emerging moment for coordination and solidarity.

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The present commonalities and common causes coming together in Standing Rock have a long and painful history. Over the course of centuries, Native communities changed and adapted as they encountered European and Euro-American newcomers, just as they had prior to 1492. Since 1776, the U.S. government has been engaged in different forms of diplomacy with sovereign Native nations, at some times seeking to dictate separate spaces for Native communities, and at others seeking to incorporate Indigenous people into mainstream American citizenry. (See a brief overview of federal Indian policy here.) In the late nineteenth century, leading policy makers explicitly stated their goal of destroying Native American cultures using the tools of assimilation. Thus, despite their unique histories, languages, forms of material culture, and systems of governance, there is one element that Indigenous communities throughout the present-day United States share: they have engaged, in one way or another, in some form of resistance to colonialism. Even as this is the case, one of the biggest challenges when discussing U.S. empire and the colonial efforts targeting Native Americans is to resist the narrative of the inevitable demise of Native American individuals, communities, and cultures.

Photo by Rob Wilson via The Sacred Stone Camp’s Facebook

It is essential to note, though, that documenting histories of violence is not equivalent to saying that any of the outcomes we study were inevitable. Historically, outside commentators on Native American culture crafted and sustained a declension narrative—a narrative of the supposed decline of Indigenous peoples. In the nineteenth century, anthropologists and government agents concerned about Indigenous societies posited that contact with Europeans and Euro-Americans eroded essential features of Native societies, launching them into a spiral of decline. Even official government documents, which some historians turn to as objective sources, include subjective accounts that were produced within and reify this way of thinking. For example, a 1890 federal census of Native Americans contributed to the narrative of decline by including racialized commentary and subjective accounts with its statistics of residents of reservations. For example, the author of an historical overview preceding statistical tables in the census claimed that Indians were already “exterminating themselves” prior to contact with Europeans (H.Rep. Mis. Doc. No 340, Part 15, 1894, 53). This notion about the inevitability of the decline of Native American cultures served to justify some of the policies that attacked and undermined Native cultures and ways of life. Furthermore, because Euro-Americans were convinced that Native cultures were doomed do decline anyway, policy makers did not have to worry about being held accountable for the harms they inflicted on individuals and communities.

It wasn’t just census officials and policy makers who engaged in this kid of colonializing “expertise.” Early proponents of humanistic and social scientific academic disciplines also contributed to narratives of decline. In the late nineteenth century, scholars working in the academic study of religion also sought to gather knowledge about Native American cultures and spiritualties. This knowledge not produced for the sake of the communities that they studied, however. It was initially used to uphold narratives about the superiority of Euro-America civilization. Their process involved the devaluation of Indigenous ways of knowing, rendering Indigenous knowledge and systems of sharing knowledge as illogical and untrustworthy. In addition, gathering knowledge about Native practices identified important aspects of culture that the government could then seek to change. The decade leading up to the massacre at Wounded Knee was a period in which the government and mainstream Americans were learning more than they had ever known about Indigenous cultures. But knowledge wasn’t enough to prevent the tragedy at Wounded Knee from occurring. In fact, it may have helped lead to it, just as increased knowledge about the Sun Dance was followed by its prohibition in the 1880s. Wielded by outsiders, knowledge about Indigenous religious traditions was used not to illustrate significant features of Native lifeways and traditions, but as evidence that Native American cultures were incompatible with modern life.

Some commentaries on the current situation at Standing Rock have suggested that what is needed to solve the issue at hand, and prevent future issues from occurring, is more knowledge and understanding. This view assumes that gathering more information, uncovering more facts, and hearing more perspectives will automatically remedy the situation. Yet the production of knowledge, in and of itself, does not automatically “help.” If we are going to find ways to resist narratives about the inevitable decline of Native American cultures it is vitally important that we not only recount violent colonial histories but also understand how historians have, at times, relied on and furthered violent ideas.

Furthermore, we seem to be at a moment in which some historical atrocities are serving not as warnings but as precedents. Historically, the notion that Indigenous cultures would “inevitably” decline was used as justification for policies that sought to hasten that assumed decline—to change facets of Indigenous cultures that either challenged Euro-Americans’ ways of life or stood in the way of Euro-American interests, especially access to land and resources. Rather than framing our historical comparisons within a paradigm that is based on assumptions about the inevitability of violent outcomes, we might otherwise consider the past, present, and future in terms of eventualities—many different possible outcomes. 

A protester holds up a mirror during a protest of the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation near Cannon Ball, North Dakota November 6, 2016. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Reuters)

Those who seek to think critically about these histories—and consider their legacies—should replace narrow ideas about the inevitability of particular outcomes with openness to bigger, broader eventualities. Considering colonial histories is necessary, as is recognizing the devastating effects of colonial policies—but care should be taken to avoid replicating the narrative of decline. In the face of corporations and politicians who seek to impose externally-dictated outcomes, the Indigenous communities who are engaged in protecting natural resources, sacred spaces, and Indigenous sovereignty at Standing Rock seek to determine their own powerful, meaningful eventualities. Those who seek to support these efforts might consider how to cultivate the conditions in which the communities with a stake in the land and water are able to articulate and pursue their own visions of the future.

The process of colonialism takes many forms. U.S. colonization of Native American communities has involved physical acts of violence and the governance of communities. At the same time, colonial projects have involved the production of knowledge about the colonizers and colonized, a process through which ideas are crafted that legitimate those physical forms of violence. Yet, at every step of the way, Indigenous communities have resisted and responded to colonialism and shaped their own narratives. At times, colonial mechanisms have even created conditions that facilitated new forms of inter-tribal communication, exchange, and solidarity. This was true in the nineteenth century during the institution of boarding schools and during the twentieth century when termination and relocation policies placed Native peoples from many nations in cities. And this is true in the present moment, as Native American nations join together in challenging environmental racism and resisting the will of authorities who would force them to bear the brunt of environmental degradation. Today—at the convergence of sacred rivers, and at the intersection of historical, political, and religious narratives—the world is watching as new eventualities are taking shape at Standing Rock.

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Resources:

Standing Rock Sioux Tribe: http://standingrock.org

Oceti Sakowin Camp: http://standwithstandingrock.net

Sacred Stone Camp: http://sacredstonecamp.org

Standing Rock Syllabus:  https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/

Indian Country Media Network: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com

Indigenous Environmental Network: http://www.ienearth.org

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Sarah Dees is a scholar of American and Indigenous religions. Her work examines scientific, political, and popular ideas about religion, race, and culture. She received her PhD from Indiana University in 2015 and is currently the Luce Postdoctoral Fellow in Religion, Politics, and Global Affairs at Northwestern University. She is at work on her first book manuscript, which is tentatively titled The Materialization of Native American Religions: Cultural Science in an Era of Assimilation. You can follow her on Twitter or visit her online: www.sarahedees.com.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Resisting the “Inevitable” Narrative: Standing Rock’s Anti-Colonial Eventualities appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Readers,

We have been putting these links roundups together for a while now, and this one has been by far the most daunting yet. This last month, so many people have had so much to process and, thus, have written so much. We have spent the weeks since our last issue swinging between a compulsion to click every headline, read every word, reach for every life raft of critique or insight and just wanting to shut it all down, close the laptop, click the big red circle with the “x” in it, and clear our heads — sometimes selfishly, and sometimes just to get it ready to keep processing, keep getting ready for what’s next. Also, you know, we had some editing to do, some of our own contributions to add. And we had a blog to launch and a new channel to open, but that’s not the point right now. The point is that we always want our “In the News” feature to be useful, and now, we really, really want it to be useful. So this month, we’re not just including articles, lots of brilliant, brilliant articles, but also a couple of guides made by other folks of things to do and advice on how to do them. Because if all this reading has convinced of us of anything, it’s that we have a lot of work to do, it needs to be done right, and reading will always be a big, crucial, part of it. Also, GIFS. We don’t want to be a part of any revolution that doesn’t have GIFs.

Sincerely,

The Editor/ Link Hoarder in Chief/ Most Grateful Servant of Our Lord The Evernote

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THE ELECTION: WHAT HAPPENED & WHAT NOW?

There are a few clarion voices whose work we especially rely on for clear and incisive thinking. Fortunately, these writers have rallied and shared with us some crucial insights in the last few weeks. Here is a selection of work from them.

Published just a few days before the election, Scott Korb wrote about Baldwin in the Obama Years for Guernica.

And yet, as I consider teaching Baldwin again this fall—in the wake of a new election—he once again advises, in ways I’ve realized I’d long ignored, against assuming that white Americans are “in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want.” Yet not too long ago, I scratched the name “obama” alongside the very example Baldwin offers of how this assumption “is revealed in all kinds of striking ways,” including “Bobby Kennedy’s assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years.” The same “obama” appears in the margins a few lines above there, as well, alongside this line: “He is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his.”

That is a terrible reading, exactly the opposite of what Baldwin says. And it only became clear to me as I taught the book over the past few years—Niebuhr now nowhere to be found—following the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland,Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, as we discussed the protests in Ferguson and the renewed vigor and revolutionary moment captured by Black Lives Matter, that Obama is not the key figure in this country. I had been wrong: the American future is precisely not as bright or as dark as his.

Diane Winston published this valuable statement at Religion Dispatches first thing on the morning of November 9: Might, Right, and White Privilege: It’s Morning in America, The Sequel.

The 2016 election will be sliced and diced for years to come. We will debate whether the outcome was due to sexism, racism, economics, health care, anti-globalization, Clinton’s campaign decisions, anti-incumbency, and a host of other reasons. But let’s not forget the role of religion. And let’s not assume religion, in its evangelical Christian form, is a Sunday-only, simple piety, scripturally unsophisticated business. Conservative evangelicalism, like all other forms of religion, is entwined with all aspects of human existence.

It is unlikely that we are the first in your online world to tell you that Masha Gessen‘s perspective is indispensable. Even if you’ve already read it, though, maybe reread her two recent essays for The New York Review of Books.

Autocracy: Rules for Survival:

Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable.

And, Trump: The Choice We Face:

Realism is predicated on predictability: it assumes that parties have clear interests and will act rationally to achieve them. This is rarely true anywhere, and it is patently untrue in the case of Trump. He ran a campaign unlike any in memory, has won an election unlike any in memory, and has so far appointed a cabinet unlike any in memory: racists, Islamophobes, and homophobes, many of whom have no experience relevant to their new jobs. Patterns of behavior characteristic of former presidents will not help predict Trump’s behavior. As for his own patterns, inconsistency and unreliability are among his chief characteristics. …

We cannot know what political strategy, if any, can be effective in containing, rather than abetting, the threat that a Trump administration now poses to some of our most fundamental democratic principles. But we can know what is right. What separates Americans in 2016 from Europeans in the 1940s and 1950s is a little bit of historical time but a whole lot of historical knowledge. We know what my great-grandfather did not know: that the people who wanted to keep the people fed ended up compiling lists of their neighbors to be killed. That they had a rationale for doing so. And also, that one of the greatest thinkers of their age judged their actions as harshly as they could be judged.

Similarly, Kelly J. Baker is an expert on an horrifyingly relevant phenomenon, The Ku Klux Klan. Here are three articles in which she shares her critical knowledge:

Nice, decent Folks on her blog Cold Takes:

What I struggled with book after book was the apparent shock that racists could appear nice and decent. Why did these ethnographers not realize that niceness doesn’t equate with anti-racist? Someone can appear nice and still be a bigot. Someone can claim that they are decent and good and still be racist. Nice and decent don’t preclude bigotry. Smiles and small talk are very good at hiding (masking?) it. …

What I realized was how tired I am of hearing how “nice” and “decent” the people are who voted for Trump. I’m so damn tired of this particular excuse because so-called nice and decent white voters put bigotry in office. “Nice” and “decent” don’t necessarily negate racism. Klan members can seem nice and still be racist. And “nice” and “decent” is often only extended by white people to other white people. This is pretty much only a shock to white people.

White-Collar Supremacy in The New York Times:

While it might seem newsworthy that today’s alt-right members wear suits and profess academic-sounding racism, they are an extension of these previous white supremacist movements, dressed up in 21st-century lingo, social media and fashion. We ignore that continuity at our peril: Focusing on their respectability overlooks their racism, but more pressingly, by convincing ourselves that they are taking a new, mainstream turn, it makes white supremacy appear normal and acceptable.

And The Klan Never Ends for Killing the Buddha:

And yet, the reaction to my Klan book suggests to me that white readers often make that mistake again and again. White supremacy is a structure of our lives. The Klan, at least, tends to admit that crucial fact as they fight to maintain it. So, yes, you be upset, angry, or heartbroken that folks are Googling the Klan, but also recognize that white supremacy is not contained in these movements. White supremacy never was. The Klan might seem to end at certain historical moments, but racism doesn’t go away simply because the Klan does. The targets, victims, and survivors of Klan terrorism know this.

Photo by Duardo Munoz/ Reuters)

Likewise, Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Raphaële Chappe went in depth on The Supermanagerial Reich for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

With the global rise of demagogues of the far-right like Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban, Narendra Modi, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, “fascism” is on the tip of everyone’s tongues. Water-cooler conversations turn around these strongmen or strongmen-in-waiting and their potential to tower over the political landscape of the 21st century. Second- and thirdhand versions of Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno have become a welcome addition to the American media landscape. We are all deeply invested in the ideology and psychology of fascism.

Yet, for all this talk of fascism in the air, it’s remarkable how much we have come to accept predominantly ideological and psychological — as opposed to formally political and economic — frames for our arguments. Few people want to talk about how fascist societies like Nazi Germany actually functioned, how they were built, who made them work, and why. But when we do, a much sharper image emerges, in which an idiosyncratic economic and political structure is more clearly visible.

In Nazi Germany, economic history shows us a rapid change in the distribution of income and the emergence of a managerial elite who obtained an outsized share of national income, not just the now-proverbial one percent, but the top 0.1 percent. These were Nazi Germany’s equivalent to today’s so-called “supermanagers” (to use Thomas Piketty’s now famous term). This parallel with today’s neoliberal society calls for a closer examination of the place of supermanagers in both regimes, with illuminating and unsettling implications.

With Chaudhary later going on to articulate What a Proper Response to Trump’s Fascism Demands:  A True Ideological Left at Quartz:

Are you thinking: This is not the America I know? We have always been getting better? The Obama years were all grace and beauty? If you are someone who—in earnest—thought about Clinton’s experience in government as anything other than part of all that the immiseration above? Then it is you who are in a bubble. Put down your screeds about rural whites or minority turn out. There is more than one kind of class politics; class does not always mean “working class” and race is also sometimes class. If you were under the strange impression that life has been getting better for the past 40 years, you must understand that neoliberalism—in all its already existing racist glory, with its vicious class warfare against the poor and working class—was working for you. It is your class politics; it is your race politics. And those politics—barely sputtering through the Obama years—have finally crashed. …

Every liberal commentator and political actor must understand that even the slightest inch given to Trump helps legitimize and normalize not only him but the acts that will come in his name, just as their feckless collaboration with George W. Bush in the Iraq War and Obama’s drone campaigns and deportations made those gross crimes part of “acceptable” everyday life. Instead, even ideologically committed liberals should hope for something that they can barely seem to stomach: a true Left. The time is now.

And Katherine Franke takes up the work of critiquing liberals and liberalism in her scorchingly on point rebuttal to Mark Lilla, Making White Supremacy Respectable. Again, for the Los Angeles Review of Books Blog:

Let me be blunt: this kind of liberalism is a liberalism of white supremacy.  It is a liberalism that regards the efforts of people of color and women to call out forms of power that sustain white supremacy and patriarchy as a distraction.  It is a liberalism that figures the lives and interests of white men as the neutral, unmarked terrain around which a politics of “common interest” can and should be built.  And it is a liberalism that regards the protests of people of color and women as a complaint or a feeling, ignoring the facts upon which those protests are based — facts about real dead, tortured, raped, and starved bodies.  The liberalism Lilla espouses reduces these facts of human suffering and the systems of power that produce that suffering as beside the point.  What matters are liberal values and the idea of America as a “shining city on a hill” that deserves our allegiance, not our protest.  The ways that racial inequality has been baked into liberalism through the structural disadvantage of black people found in the GI Bill, discriminatory lending policies, redlining, inferior education for people of color, and — oh right — the refusal to provide reparations to formerly enslaved people, are just glitches and not actual features of the splendors of liberal governance for the likes of Lilla.

And they don’t come any sharper or smarter than Kathryn Lofton who wrote:

Trumping Reality for The Immanent Frame:

Power is a discourse, and Trump wields it like the boss of bosses, like the infant Jesus, like you if you get to be unhinged from the rules of engagement. In the wake of Trump’s candidacy, we could do better in examining accounts of this unhinged authority—however fantastical, however absurd—to understand the story of his ascent rather than to obsess about supporters’ self-delusion. We might also reflect on the strange circulation of strange ideas. If the history of religions teaches us anything, it is that a dose of absurdity does nothing to diminish the potency of a call to power. If anything, it is the missing ingredient, the yeast of effervescence.

And Understanding is Dangerous for The Point Mag:

To be a scholar of religion is to participate in a hermeneutics of the incomprehensible. That isn’t exactly right: what scholars of religion do is account for why groups of people consistently agree to things that other people think are incomprehensible, irrational, even senseless. Images illegible relative to contemporary notions of geometry or perspective; abstractions so abstract they twist the brain; doctrines so specific they seem impracticable; myths so fantastic they seem extraterrestrial. Through documentary engagement, linguistic specificity, historical and sociological and economic analysis—scholars of religion make those things legible as human products of human need.

It is therefore unsurprising that I, a scholar of religion, am invested in an account of Trump that renders his absurdity less so.

Image via The Washington Post

We also wanted to share two critiques from within the world of religious studies. The American Academy of Religion, the main scholarly association for academics of religion in the humanities, met last month for its annual meeting. The Revealer was there, hosting a panel on Writing Religion Online (video forthcoming). The theme this year was “Revolutionary Love.” Two scholars we respect published responses to the conference in the Bulletin of the Study of Religion (which had hosted a year-long forum on the theme, all of which is worth checking out).

Revolutionary Love, and the Colonization of a Critical Voice: An Outsider’s Reflections by Laura Levitt:

If this is radical love, I want no part. Here in the words of this most compelling social critic [Michelle Alexander], I no longer felt welcome. The universal proclamation of this session and its revolutionary love had no place for Jews or Muslims, for Hindus or Buddhists, and certainly not for the many atheists and agnostics of any and all stripes who are part of this scholarly organization. In our bounded differences from these well-meaning and progressive Christians, we were, it seems no longer welcome.

And, Why I was scared to attend the AAR this year by Hussein Rashid:

The AAR’s theme this year is belied by their actions. There is no love. There is not empathy. There is no compassion. It may not be the academic way, and I am happy to say that I am doing academia wrong. I believe in a mission of the humanities that allows students to see the worth in themselves and in other people; to be curious and to explore. When I hear from students from the various institutions I have taught at that they want to talk about the recent election of Donald Trump, but none of their faculty are talking about it, I believe they have been failed. What they are being taught does not match up with their experiences.

We also appreciated this all too relevant Public Statement from the Society for Classical Studies Board of Directors:

The mission of the Society for Classical Studies is “to advance knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of the ancient Greek and Roman world and its enduring value.” That world was a complex place, with a vast diversity of peoples, languages, religions, and cultures spread over three continents, as full of contention and difference as our world is today.  Greek and Roman culture was shared and shaped for their own purposes by people living from India to Britain and from Germany to Ethiopia. Its medieval and modern influence is wider still. Classical Studies today belongs to all of humanity.

For this reason, the Society strongly supports efforts to include all groups among those who study and teach the ancient world, and to encourage understanding of antiquity by all. It vigorously and unequivocally opposes any attempt to distort the diverse realities of the Greek and Roman world by enlisting the Classics in the service of ideologies of exclusion, whether based on race, color, national origin, gender, or any other criterion. As scholars and teachers, we condemn the use of the texts, ideals, and images of the Greek and Roman world to promote racism or a view of the Classical world as the unique inheritance of a falsely-imagined and narrowly-conceived western civilization. 

And, because truly no one is immune from Godwin’s law, we should all read this clipping that BoingBoing dug up, Hitler’s Only Kidding About the Jews:

“Several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.”

“You can’t expect the masses to understand or appreciate your finer real aims. You must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-Semitism. It would be politically all wrong to tell them the truth about where you really are leading them.”

But please do read it along side Dania Rajendra‘s important call in: Max Goldberg’s “Would you Hide Me?” Gets it Wrong at Jewschool.

This a moment where we, as Jews, must harness our legitimate concern to do better, in public and in private, than gatekeeping new friends.  It is both a moral and practical imperative that we open ourselves, our communities, our lives to our non-Jewish friends and family.

Lastly, our good religion-publication-editor-friend Brook Wilensky-Lanford wrote a list we probably all dream of writing and enforcing in her piece, Election History, Second Draft, at Killing the Buddha:

When I was in seventh grade, my English teacher forbade us from using the words “very” and “interesting” because they were meaningless, and worse–because they took up space that could be used actually trying to explain the thing in question.  In that spirit, I humbly offer a list of words and phrases that I would like to see eliminated from the election story in favor of more evocative constructions.

Want more lists in your list? Great! Keep reading.

FORUMS

Not done yet? Good. There’s a lot more, The New Yorker (Aftermath: Sixteen Writers on Trump’s America), n+1 (The Election: Responses to the 2016 presidential election), and The Boston Review (Trump Says Go Back, We Say Go Forward) each published forums on the aftermath of the Election. We recommend all of them.

RESOURCES 

Okay, now you’re really probably done reading about the election. (Thank you for sticking it out. We promise, there are memes at the end!) Here are a few action guides we thought were especially useful. We’d love to hear about others if you have any to recommend.

A Time for Treason a reading list compiled by the editors of The New Inquiry.

The Trump Syllabus 2.0 at Public Books

The Oh Crap! What now? Survival Guide an epically extensive collaborative effort

Wall of Us  which offers “four concrete acts of resistance delivered to your inbox each week”

And hollaback! has created a very useful and important collection of Bystander Resources

NON-ELECTION RELATED

Much as there is happening here, it’s probably a good idea to check in some other places every once in a while, because, for instance, this is happening: China Takes a Chain Saw to a Center of Tibetan Buddhism by Edward Wong for The New York Times.

The chain saw, wielded by workers demolishing a row of homes, signaled the imminent end of thousands of hand-built monastic dwellings here at Larung Gar, the world’s largest Buddhist institute.

Since its founding in 1980, Larung Gar has grown into an extraordinary and surreal sprawl — countless red-painted dwellings surrounding temples, stupas and large prayer wheels. The homes are spread over the walls of this remote Tibetan valley like strawberry jam slathered on a scone.

Larung Gar has become one of the most influential institutions in the Tibetan world, the teachings of its senior monks praised, debated and proselytized from here to the Himalayas. In recent years, disciples have popularized a “10 new virtues” movement based on Buddhist beliefs, spreading its message across the region.

A Buddhist nun with a prayer wheel in Larung Gar, a monastic camp where thousands of nuns and monks live and study, in Sichuan Province, China. Credit Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

A good bit closer to home, Kiera Feldman did some remarkable reporting for Harper’s, With Child: The right to choose in Rapid City.

“Getting doctors is the number-one problem everywhere,” Alexander Sanger, the president of Planned Parenthood of New York City, told the New York Times in 1992. The restrictive laws that have swept the country since then have exacerbated long-standing issues of access. Today, many secular hospitals are merging with tax-exempt religiously affiliated facilities, many of which refuse to do abortions even in cases of nonviable fetuses. In a Catholic hospital, the termination of a fetus without a brain, for example, is still deemed an elective procedure.

And, right here at home in Manhattan, Whores and Hell Beasts: An Earth-Shaking Treatise Is in New York.

New Yorkers can choose from dozens of cultural institutions when they want to lay their eyes on exquisite antiquities and masterworks of art. But a case could be made that, right now, a single sheet of paper in a room on Madison Avenue is the most compelling object in the city.

The room is at The Morgan Library and Museum. It is host to an exhibition with the lackluster title, “Word and Image: Martin Luther’s Reformation.” But the artifacts and manuscripts are sublime, especially those that illuminate the lengthy print war between the German monk and Pope Leo X. Each party commissioned artists to portray the other as a whore or hell beast, the smear of choice among Christian believers in the years after 1517, when Luther first publicly charged the Pope and the Vatican with corruption.

Meanwhile, Ann Neumann and James Sprankle traveled to Pennsylvania to report on Faith and Its Limits for  The Virginia Quarterly Review.

Amish and many Mennonites don’t have insurance. It’s theological; when your history, your belief, is shaped by a marauding government that slaughtered—martyred—your ancestors, chasing your founders across the ocean on ships (what are ships to farmers?), you foster separateness. You know there are no absolutes; you vote sometimes, you avoid the military, you pay some taxes. Still, you’d prefer to take care of your own.

Photo by James Sprankle for the Virginia Quarterly Review

Something we definitely need to talk about: Can Television Be Fair to Muslims? by Melena Ryzik for The New York Times

Less than two weeks after Election Day, five showrunners gathered in New York to discuss the representation of Muslims on TV. Howard Gordon, the showrunner and executive producer of “24” and “Homeland,” has faced these issues the longest; after “24” emerged as a lightning rod for its stereotyped depictions, he engaged with Islamic community groups to broaden his understanding. (Mr. Gordon is an executive producer of the rebooted “24: Legacy,” debuting in February.) Joshua Safran is the creator of “Quantico,” an ABC series about F.B.I. operatives.

Aasif Mandvi, an actor and former correspondent for “The Daily Show,” is adapting his comedy “Halal in the Family” for an animated series. Zarqa Nawaz is the creator of the Canadian series “Little Mosque on the Prairie” (available on Hulu). Cherien Dabis, a filmmaker known for her 2009 indie “Amreeka,” about a Palestinian single mother who emigrates to the United States, was a writer on “Quantico” and now works on “Empire.” She took part via FaceTime from Los Angeles.

The conversation was thoughtful, anxious and determined. All seemed well aware of the stakes. “It’s really popular culture that impacts how people feel about one other,” said Sue Obeidi, the director of the Hollywood bureau of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which works with networks and studios to promote Islamic voices.

Also urgent: The refugee crisis and religion: Beyond physical and conceptual boundaries edited by Erin K. Wilson and Luca Mavelli at The Immanent Frame.

What seems to have been forgotten in the dominant narratives around the refugee crisis is that, to put it simply, refugees are people. Commentaries that overly emphasize religious identity or focus predominantly on whether someone is a “genuine refugee” or an economic migrant—a distinction that is largely meaningless on the ground—willingly or unwillingly neglect the complexities that make up human beings who are currently displaced. They are not just Muslims or refugees—they are parents, children, brothers and sisters, doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, citizens, activists, friends. Their identities are complex and cannot be reduced to simplified categories of Muslim or refugee.

Scholars and public intellectuals must continue to stress the diverse nature of Islam, de-link Muslim, refugee, and terrorist in broader public consciousness, and remind people of the humanity of those who are currently displaced. And, we must push our politicians, policymakers, and media to do the same. We must contribute to the creation of safe spaces for difficult conversations and encounters with “others.” Most crucially, we must ensure that the advice and experiences of refugees themselves is a central component of these public conversations. Shifting focus from religious identity to solidarity with fellow human beings whose survival is at stake would be a significant step in shifting dominant discourses and attitudes to the crisis, generating greater space for alternative political and societal responses.

And we’d be remiss if we didn’t tell you that The Baffler has a beautiful bunch of religion writing for you in its thirty-second issue, Muzak of the Spheres:

Rare it is that the careworn American public casts its collective gaze heavenward—unless in desperate prayer for debt relief, affordable housing, non-extortionate college instruction, or any of the other fugitive comforts that our grand neoliberal consensus has catapulted into the unreachable empyrean. In the hushed and reverent darkness of the Baffler observatory, however, we hew closely to the counsel of that great socialist bon vivant Oscar Wilde: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Lastly, seriously, Leonard Cohen’s death was just the absolute last thing we needed this year. At least we have these perfect eulogies.

My Friend Leonard Cohen: Darkness and Praise by Leon Wieseltier for The New York Times:

Eliezer was his Hebrew name. We sometimes read and studied together, Lorca and midrash and Eluard and Buddhist scriptures and Cavafy. We could get quite Talmudic, especially with wine. In Judaism there is a custom to honor the dead by pondering a text in their memory. Here, in memory of Eliezer ben Nisan ha’Cohen, is a passage on frivolity by a great rabbi in Prague at the end of the 16th century. “Man was born for toil, since his perfection is always being actualized but is never actual,” he observed in an essay on frivolity. “And insofar as he attains perfection, something is missing in him. 

Traveling Light: Farewell to Leonard Cohen by Anahid Nersessian in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

I grew up in a secular household, but my family had two saints: Freud and Leonard Cohen. Both my parents are psychoanalysts, so we believed in self-scrutiny, the diagnostic power of dreams, and that nothing is more universal than perversion. To explain the almost scriptural role Leonard Cohen’s songs played and still play for me, I have to say something about New York City in the 1980s, as it sounded to a girl with orange-yellow skin and, in that pre-Kardashian era, an unintelligible name.

COMIC RELIEF

You made it! We thank you for your faith, even if it is faithless, like these Atheist Shoes, which are a real thing:

And we’re not done laughing at Joe Biden and Barack Obama Memes:

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-Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

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You can find previous “In the News” round-ups here.

The post In the News: What Happened & What Now? appeared first on The Revealer.