Sermon on Racism

It isn't up here yet, but it soon will be. Within the week, probably. Here's the blurb about the sermon:

Questions of Power: Race, Class, and Privilege
Presenter: Antonia Won, Ministerial Intern

UUs espouse equality and diversity, yet our congregations remain overwhelmingly white and middle class. Stories from New Orleans and New Mexico help to define the factors that perpetuate racism, and to find questions we can ask of ourselves.

The sermon was good, a remarkably well done handling of a thoroughly uncomfortable topic. How uncomfortable? It was a white female Canadian minister giving a sermon to white educated upper middle class Americans, and added to that setup is the dimension
of New Mexico and racism (White privilege in a climate of more marked skin gradations, the whole Latin America bit about class and race before the American dimension was added on, and the nature of indigenous/Hispanic cultures, as opposed to the more clear cut white/black dynamic). Finally adding to this is New Orleans as a catalyst for anti-racism, and New Orleans has one of the more complex histories of the white/black dynamic (free creole blacks, slave port, Ruby Bridges, and the white exodus/surrounding suburbs following desegregation). The sermon did not, as is almost certainly best, address this whole range of experience, but it touched upon some of it, and it was a remarkably skillful handling of a topic and message that, by its very nature, is designed to make people uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable, depending on the goal. This being a sermon, the discomfort was appropriate; anti-racism training and activism can make things uncomfortable on an unforeseen level, designed so that every day you wake up thinking "hey, I need to change things because this system of power and privilege is really, really messed up".

This was not anti racism training. But I'm hoping it sparked some anti-racism impulse, and I'm hoping that translates to anti racism work.

Soundbite quickie

Much has been made of Barack Obama's statement that he would talk with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The spin varies, saying that this proves antisemitism, that this is a sign of weakness, that this is part of some weird conspiracy. All the spin ignores the single most important part of this issue - As President of the United States, Obama would talk to Ahmadinejad because Obama would be a world leader, and his job description requires interacting with other internationally significant figures.

I'm waiting for someone to say this publicly and bluntly.

Two Quick Things

The first is an excerpt from Cory Doctorow's article on the risk of rare events:

The rare – and the lurid – loom large in our imagination, and it's to our great detriment when it comes to our safety and security. As a new father, I'm understandably worried about the idea of my child falling victim to some nefarious predator Out There, waiting to break in and take my child away. There's a part of me who understands the panicked parent who rings 999 when he sees some street photographer aiming a lens at a kids' playground.

But the fact is that attacks by strangers are so rare as to be practically nonexistent. If your child is assaulted, the perpetrator is almost certainly a relative (most likely a parent). If not a relative, then a close family friend. If not a close family friend, then a trusted authority figure.

And yet we continue to focus our attention on the meteor-strike-rare paedophile attack instead of protecting our children from the real, everyday dangers they face from the familiar. This has the twin effects of making our children less safe, and of making adults less free, because we are all subjected to scrutiny on the grounds that we may be hunting children.

The second thing is Budget Hero, which is an awesome game that's been keeping me from more regular summer blogging. It's awesome, no really.

Five Quick Musings

While being trained to be an XCORP daycamp counselor, my mind wandered a bit. Here's where it ended up:

• Social Contracts & Youth: Unlike the social contract that is formed by consenting adults at the moment of codification (in, say, a constitution) or with implied consent (via immigration), youth age into an existing social contract. This partly explains the tendency of the young towards discontent in any and all systems, but there's a bit more to it than that. Youth transition into citizens, at which point they take on the burdens and are granted the rights associated with citizenship (can vote; must pay taxes and become eligible for military service). The citizen/state social contract is clear at this point, but the prior contract of non-citizen youth residing in a sovereign state is more anomalous.
  

• Consent Politics, as Regards Sex: there's an editorial cartoon that ran yesterday in the Albuquerque journal that bothers me fundamentally. I'll be writing a letter to the editor about it later, but the point for now is that it looks favorably upon the quaint and hetero-normative polygamous cult, while frowning upon two adults engaging in BDSM. The trick with all this is that the quaint cult raped girls below the age of consent, and that adults engaging in BDSM do so consensually. I frown upon any demonization of consensual sex between adults (taking into account the condition that some decisions cannot be made by sane people, and so are invalid; "Rousseau also argues that it is illogical for a man to surrender his freedom for slavery"), and things that condone rape are, to put it lightly, evil.
  

• Consent Politics, as Regards Governance: Social Contracts, as established, are between consenting adults, and later are between consenting adults and their institutions of governance. How does this contract apply to those unable to consent, either by youth or by some other standard of being mentally unfit? How is mental fitness determined, and how do definitions that have standards of mental fitness explain those standards?
  

• Nanny State: I'm going to be working at a day camp, and fresh from a semester heavy on political science there is a striking contrast between how rules work for adults and how rules work for children. The structure, guidance, and explanations that make day camps and childcare and schooling work for young children would be rejected in full if forced upon adults. The rules for such institutions hinge upon the accepted fact (which I have no intention of challenging) that adults know what is needed to keep kids safe, and that adults have as an overriding concern the safety of children. Everything is secondary to this fact, but there is leeway - safety does not mean forcibly keeping kids away from everything scary; I've advocated quite the opposite here before. And camps that are nothing but knee protectors and padded walls would be no fun. But it does mean that, when safety comes into conflict with things like the freedom to act of children, safety takes priority. Adults hate this in their lives, as angst about smoking bans in bars (for this generation) and mandatory safety belts in cars (for a previous generation) prove. But with children, rules are different, and especially with children, the obligation of a caregiver is towards the safety of another adult's child, which will be enforced by the state.

• State Allocates Responsibility: This came up partly during an episode of Boston Legal, and partly during a discussion over the cardboard gun fiasco. I was happy to see the student suing the school, as everything that was done seemed to demonize him, way out of proportion to an incidence that (I feel) needs no response, and has a kid screwed by horribly planned zero-tolerance policy and poorly executed APD action. Suing to me seemed appropriate, but Lia felt differently. She argued that the student had been at fault for making a stupid mistake (walking around and playing with the cardboard gun as though it were a gun), and that the police and school were also both at fault for how they handled the incident (poorly and with over-reactions everywhere). Rather than arguing which side was more at fault, her point was that the situation could only be rectified by all sides admitting their appropriate faults, accepting appropriate consequences, and then moving on, once everyone was in right relationship with each other. The legal system in the United States does not operate in this fashion.
• Responsibility means liability means fault, and to claim responsibility is to accept the fault of an action, and especially the cost of that action
• Having clear lines of responsibility allows an organization to punish the wayward individual and to operate in a legally safe bubble.
• Admitting fault in any part of a case is close to admitting fault in all of it, and makes it much easier for the other parties to foist their guilt onto the admitting party
• Day camp counselors exist in the legal limbo of protecting other people's children, who are sort of legally anomalous (sort of citizens? guardian law might evolved from property law? responsibility of the state to the point where they will punish abuse but not to the point where they will actually provide the day camp?), while working for a private employer (but a non-profit one), and all of this is overseen by a government. If a day camp counselor screws up, that makes at least 3 outside sources to which they are responsible.
• This is the real reason why I never want to go to law school, despite living and breathing politics.
  

Golden Age Satire

My dad and I just listened to a recording on cassette of a radio drama. The play was The Investigator, and it aired on May 30th, 1954, at the height of the McCarthy hearings. It is absolutely brilliant political commentary, and it is fortunately online. It half-exists in bits and pieces: .ram files which don't work are here, a partial clip is available here, and a New York Times review behind some gate here. Frustrating, certainly, and I'll do my best to update with a complete version recorded from the tape later.

Still, the whole thing is interesting, especially in the style of McCarthy's attacks on his opposition and his absolute denial of the significance of anything except that which is explicitly said. It is the art of the political hack job being exposed, and while it's nice to think we've moved past that, the horror is that now this is news technique and not satire.

Deliberate Community and Social Contracts

Obnoxious as it may sound, I want to spend a good part of this summer analyzing social contract theory. Step one in doing that involves strange travel advice as a dancing lesson from God.

Two weeks ago, I was standing outside Z'ots, a sort-of 245 hour coffee shop within walking distance of Tulane. While standing with my drink, a man in his young 30s came up and started a conversation. He was all about Burning Man, with a sort of evangelical fervor. He runs a bar in Black Rock City, and upon finding out I was studying political science, he tailored he summation of the experience towards the ear of a political observer.

His important points:

• Burning Man, as a money-less society, runs on an
• "economy of personality", where interactions with other people overshadow the movement of goods and services
• The city is a spontaneous creation
  
• Black Rock City is an autonomous community of roughly 30,000 people that exists for one week out of every year...The city is constructed anew at the beginning of the week by the returning residents, and torn down entirely, leaving not a single trace that human beings were ever there, at the end of the week
• The city, as an independent organic entity, self-corrects
• BURNING MAN CHANGES FROM YEAR TO YEAR. Here are some of the changes that have warranted complaints from the folks who attended Burning Man when it was 100 people on a beach in the Bay Area: You can no longer bring guns and fire them off into the sky. You can no longer detonate explosives without warning to your neighbors. You can no longer drive your car at high speeds through the city. The city now has roads allowing citizens and Emergency Services to find things.

That's the gist of what made Black Rock City a politically fascinating entity for him to observe, but it wasn't the main point of politics in his conversation. The politics he talked about and felt a part of were the politics of running his camp/bar.

The camp is nominally run by an oligarchic council, of which Ari is the head. This is a position similar to whatever name Russia's autocrat* holds, where the other organ of power offers suggestions and gives consent to policy, but really has no say in ultimately deciding how things are run. He described a power struggle with other oligarchs; two of them wanted to change the system into a formal and not de facto monarchy, and another wanted Ari to allocate funding differently and would gladly change governments to do this. The nature of the power struggle was complaints through a free and open listserv that the camp using to communicate when not in Nevada, and the nature of the struggle was one where the people at the top battled, with the revolting leaders claiming a mandate from the disaffected masses while Ari knew that the disaffected masses didn't care so long as there was a government. Ari, in describing this, said he felt like Stalin as he gave those revolting the choice of leaving his camp or falling in line. Ari elaborated, claiming that had the scale been a nation of millions instead of a camp of 60, the result would have been to order executions. (It is worth noting tat someone who knew Ari was skeptical of this fact as he related it). The end result of the struggle was those revolting quit the camp, rather than go along with Ari.

The point is not the details of this internal struggle - what matters is that in a deliberate community (the camp), which has established its own governing board (Ari and the oligarchy), a struggle over resources (the funds people contribute to be part of the camp) was resolved by having people simply leave the community. This is the first time in recent memory I've heard of a situation where "love it or leave it" actually counts as a valid choice.

Ari went on to say that he is avowedly anti-democracy, that his anarcho-libertarian philosophies don't allow him to trust the masses to think for him, and that democracy is an organ (especially in Louisiana, he made sure to point out) for collective disenfranchisement. His camp, temporary as it is and dependent upon outside factors for its existence, functions as a voluntarily entered into governed body, where people can opt out or make a stab (through the economy of personality) of influencing the autocrat. This was a social contract consented to, not by necessity, but because that is how people would prefer things. Ari's cynicism attributes his perpetual rule to the fact that people don't really care about whose governing them, but I think it has more to do with the fact the people would rather care about other things. For many, politics are something they only think about when terrible things are happening or when they are upset. It's not quiet cynicism, but I think that people don't care about how government functions when they are content with it. One of the tricks with democracy is that it makes people have to think about government fairly regularly, and not everyone wants that.

That's a side note - what matters is that there are situations where people can willingly enter into governance, establish and codify social contracts, and then chose to leave society when the feel the social contract isn't to their benefit. I've written about deliberate communities before, often UU affiliated - YRUU, Church Camp, and in general UU congregations all function as groups people willing enter, and leave or work to change when discontent.

Nations, however, are different. This is a bigger issue, and this is why Social Contract theories exist. People are born into social contracts with their nations of residence, and people have an elaborate series of obstacles in their place when they want to change the relationship between themselves and their government. Emigration is perhaps the simplest, but it requires another nation consent to housing the emigrant, and that can be quite tricky, as US/Mexico relations show. The more challenging but still civil procedure is to run for government offices, to support candidates and to actually try to enter into and change a political system. Reform has, at its heart, the idea of renegotiating the social contract. Lastly, there is open revolt, in the form of either succession or revolution, and that is contentious and violent and has the most uncertain results of all.

Just leaving, finding a new place, and starting a new thing, as valid an option as it is for small deliberate communities, stopped being a valid technique for nations over a century ago, when the Boers went into the African interior, trying to displace the Africans and be free of the British. Now, the nationless spots on earth are international waters and the Western Sahara. It's fitting that Black Rock City, too, finds itself existing in inhospitable conditions. This winds itself back to Frontier theory, where in the US the option was tolerate the rules of the cities or go off into the hinterland. A dual social contract existed then within the same nation, and the choice was available. Today, the option is gone, more or less.

The only exception I can see is the internet.**


*Tsar and easily-dismissed Duma, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, Stalin and the Communist Party Congress, Putin and modern Russia's Duma. The mold is the same, and Ari presented his camp oligarchy using specifically the Stalin metaphor.
** Expect a post on that soon, inspired in part by this.

Iran and Russian and Film Adaptations of Graphic Novels

A few quick thoughts, partially inspired by seeing Persepolis, partly by Russian history, and partly by having not had tiem during the semester to put this all down:

1. Revolutions are really good at making loyal yet less competent people into winners. This is a flaw, but it makes sense: a degree of competence in running a system is put in place only after the system has been around for a while and fixed.

2. Revolution can be way, way less sexy than punk makes it seem.

3. Nihilism parallels reactionaries/conservatives in a crude breakdown of outlook: both want to go back to the beginning. Nihilists just think we need a fresh start because any system is better than what exists, while Reactionaries (Khomeini or the slavophiles) want to go back to the beginning when everything was perfect. These attitudes work great together for destroying, but they are a terrible combination in figuring out a solution. This is another pairing that I see fitting in with Cory Doctorow's progressive/regressive apocalypse bit, which is increasingly my favorite frame of reference.

4. The horrors of a revolution only legitimize a revolutionary government for one generation, which is often exhausted and unwilling to live through another bitter struggle with the potential for things to get worse. In any period of stability, no matter how repressive, later generations will become discontent, and appeals to the sacrifice of a revolution will fall flat.

5. Repression can pay for itself through bribery or fines. If it doesn't do that, it has to actually be carried out consistently, which makes it much harder to sustain.

6. Marxism is appealing because it is about social justice and hard work being justly rewarded. It's persistent because it addresses the economics affecting injustice, and economics can be a huge, impersonal, and terrifying thing. It is flawed because economic systems and arrangements have to be entered into willing, or they will be subverted by what people are more willing to do. For all its praise of social justice, the very nature of forcing this concept on people invalidates all its moral backing, and for all its talk of sane economics, it is both time-limited and often wrong.


7. That said, it makes sense that young Marjane Satrapi has God and Marx as her moral basis, but only as a rare backdrop to the much more relevant and situationally appropriate advice of mortals.

8. Eye of the Tiger will always be the best montage song: