Two articles that I’ve read on the internet have reminded me of the notion of authority and the dignified part of government:
The first: “An Interview with the most hated man on the internet” by D.D. Guttenplan at The Nation:
But if you’re based on an agreement to a set of ideals, then surely immigration becomes different because you don’t object to people because they’re of different stock as long as they subscribe to your ideals.
No. You object to people because of values, which is why Trump’s values test was so popular a few weeks ago. That’s exactly what his voters want. They don’t care about skin color. They want somebody to come over and believe in America. They want the kind of immigrants that came two, three generations ago who came to participate in the American dream, not the kind of immigrants that are coming now to destroy it.
Do you think that’s really true? I’ve talked to Trump voters in Florida and South Carolina.
By the time you’re talking about policy positions, you’ve already lost the war. By the time you get down to elections, I lose interest. I like Trump because he’s a cultural candidate for president and because Trump represents an existential threat to political correctness. I will put up with almost anything that he does because of that.
Why are you so infuriated by political correctness? Why not just laugh it off?
Because it’s deadly.
The second: “Waiting for a young pope” by Matthew Schmitz at First Things:
Upon his election, the young pope takes the name Pius XIII to signal a return to the past. When he addresses his cardinals, he lays out his anti-modern program: “Tolerance doesn’t live here anymore. It’s been evicted. It vacated the house for the new tenant, who has diametrically opposite tastes in decorating.” Diametrically opposite, and much improved. “The liturgy will no longer be a social engagement,” he declares. I confess that when I heard him say, “The Vatican must immediately buy back the papal tiara,” I let out a whoop.
Paolo Sorrentino, who wrote and directed the series, does not seem to be a traditional Catholic. As with most recent treatments of faith, a little more religious literacy would have gone a long way. Nonetheless, The Young Pope reveals the exhaustion of attempts to make the Church attractive by conforming it to the world. Reveling in supposedly old-fashioned garments like the papal red shoes and wide-brimmed saturno, it shows how attractive an unapologetically traditional Catholicism can be.
…
As a filmmaker, Sorrentino is particularly alert to the power of images. “In the 60s,” says Pius, “the young people that protested in the streets spouted all kinds of heresies. All except one: power to the imagination. In that, they were correct.” He vows that his first public appearance will be a great visual event, a “dazzling image, so dazzling it blinds people.” For Sorrentino, the Church is most eloquent in its pomp and dumbshow.
Race: There's Nothing To Blur
Although I address race in this post, I’m not going to write about the recent act of terrorism in Charleston. To discuss it would require discussing it at length and I don’t have that length in this post. I can only hope readers can understand that my chosen task here is something different entirely. With that aside, in “Blurred Lines” at Democracy in America, Will Wilkinson yesterday commented on the recent scandal (I don’t really know if the word fits but I’ll use it anyways) that after Rachel Dolezal was exposed for identifying as black. In doing so, Mr. Wilkinson draws a direct parallel between with Ms. Dolezal’s identification as black with Bruce Jenner’s identification as a woman:
Mr. Wilkinson’s parallel between Bruce Jenner and Rachel Dolezal is troubling. There was an actual border for Bruce Jenner to cross over. That border is certainly not a strict bifurcation, even in a biological sense, and there is certainly a strong cultural component to the particular border that Mr. Jenner crossed over. Where that border will exactly fall will be different for different people across different cultures. However, our nature as a mammalian species does mean that there will be a border to cross over and that it will require a good amount of resources and medical, both pharmaceutical and surgical, knowledge to cross over.
With race, there are no boundaries to cross over. At least no lines that exist outside of man's imagination. The pigmentation of human skin isn't discrete, but already blurred across a spectrum. What is already blurred can’t be blurred. Speaking about race as something to be crossed over is to breath life in the antiquated notion that races are discrete entities. Unlike the notion of sex, race is biologically bunk, so if Ms. Dolezal was crossing over anything, it wasn’t racial boundaries in the sense that Mr. Jenner crossed over the boundaries of sex.
How not to think about race.
The boundaries that Ms. Dolezal crossed over had to do with culture alone. Let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that culture is artificial and therefore plastic to human desires. Cultural identities do matter and there is a tangible reality to them. Much like the boundaries of sex, it can be costly to cross over cultural identities, which corroborates the existence of such boundaries. Someone identifying as culturally French without living at length in France and learning to speak French fluently is mockable. Similarly, if one is to identify as culturally black in the United States comes having to deal and generally have first-hand experience with racism. Cultural borders exist. Race does not. The problem that Mr. Wilkinson addresses is, therefore, not a problem with Ms. Dolezal changing her race, but changing her culture.
It’s a very similar problem as someone changing her accent. Learning that someone is faking their accent does often feel like the person is lying about their identity, yet learning an accent can be part of becoming part of a cultural group, as many Britons of old, like Margaret Thatcher, can attest to with their learned posh accents. Are they lying about who they are by using a learned accent? No, at least if they actually live out the cultural identify associated with that accent. Whether Ms. Dolezal crossed over to the cultural group that she led others to believe she was apart of isn’t something either I nor Mr. Wilkinson know. All we know is that there is a cultural boundary between black America and the rest of the country.
For instance, an expression of that the boundary is the question: Is Juneteenth for everyone? Can everyone really celebrate with real joy the end of slavery in the United States? I’m not so sure. Myself, I shall wish those who celebrate today with joy the best jubilee, but I will admit that the day doesn’t touch my soul as it would touch the soul of somebody who day-in, day-out deals with the lingering effects of slavery. My knowledge of racism is, really, pure book-learning. I wouldn’t want to cheapen an anniversary as surely important as Juneteenth is to many people by pretending that I’m overjoyed to see ‘June 19’ on the calendar today.
For many, the sense that we don’t all share the same holidays is perturbing. Instead, I think that’s something that we should understand as part of living in an open society: Not all cultures will have the same cultural focal points. For some, Juneteenth will be an anniversary of something that touches their lives, for others it won’t.
Posted by Harrison Searles on 06/19/2015 at 06:58 PM in Commentary, Culture | Permalink | Comments (0)
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