It sounds official, like it has a bureaucracy and a headquarters with marble pillars. It sounds like it’s been around longer than you have. Still, when you hear it, you have absolutely no idea what it might mean. It has the effect of sounding like something but conveys no meaning.
Their broad-shouldered leader, Ammon Bundy, exuding the calm and steady manner of a high noon cowboy, announced the name on Fox news.
His heavily armed group, who up until that point had been called patriots, terrorists, activists, militia men and Y’all Qaeda, had taken over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters in Oregon as a blow against government “tyranny” a few days earlier on January 2nd.
Their storming of the federal building, it should be noted, was clean and lightning-quick; as it being January, the charming, cottage-like structure that gave out free maps during tourist season was entirely abandoned.
Nothing much has happened since their occupation began. Bundy’s men, some of whom who are not camera ready,
have been brandishing copies of the Constitution for the cameras and making YouTube videos from their trucks for their now abandoned families.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbGdMKpHDDE
All over Oregon, wives must have been rolling their eyes, just as they did when these same husbands took off for their annual paintball weekend. It all looked very much like a Fantasy Camp for revolutionaries, and it was clear nobody was taking them seriously.
If any group other than white men had done such a thing, well, it’s reasonable to expect a different response. Imagine what would have happened if a bunch of heavily armed campus radicals took over the headquarters, or to inch closer to armageddon, black protestors or some frustrated Muslims? What would happen then?
We have a pretty good idea, I think.
No matter, what seems to be happening now is that a long-simmering and predictable feud over grazing rights has morphed into a movie-of-the-week. The white guys want the government to hand over land it owns so that they—The People—may use it as they see fit, using it for grazing, mining, logging or opening up paintball camps. As far as I know, the First Nations of America have yet to be consulted.
The Citizens for Constitutional Freedom are not impoverished. They’re not persecuted, marginalized or threatened in any sort of coherent way. Frustrated by their perception of diminishing entitlements, they want to fight back against the forces that impede their ascent, even if they have no idea who or what those forces might be.
They’re easy enough to make fun, these men. Asunder in a rapidly changing and globalized environment, they try to live as heroes in a mythic past, a place where their big sky ambitions could blossom unfettered by government, minorities or environmental regulations.
It’s sunset in the only America these men have ever wanted to live, and so they tilt toward windmills, deserving of our pity as much as our scorn.
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He made this comment a couple of weeks ago after Kanye had said something Kanyesque about books. This was the quote:
“Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I am a proud non-reader of books.”
People, primarily white, middle-class people, as far as I could tell, rushed to their social media channels to denounce and mock Kanye yet again, portraying him as an illiterate, entitled child who lacked the intellectual capacity for long-form reading. However, in so doing they completely over-looked the fact that what he said wasn’t stupid at all, and could easily apply to the vast majority of the population.
Novels were once the castles in which everybody wanted to live. To write one was considered the highest artistic and intellectual aspiration, and all that was profound in culture and human experience was transferred– as if by holy passage– through them. Well, that’s simply not the case any more. The world has changed and we consume our culture and entertainment in very different ways than we did 50 years ago.
The experience I used to get reading a novel, I now typically get following specific TV shows. For me, the scope, intellect and cultural penetration offered in shows like Breaking Bad or Transparent (you could name dozens more), and the continued richness of experience and evolution of circumstance they present, simply outstrips what is available in novels. Other people will make similar arguments using graphic novels, Blogs, gaming communities, sports or more traditional forms like cinema, dance or music as examples. (I would also argue that we are much more participatory, almost partnered, in what we consume now and much less the passive receptacles we were in the past.)
Novels, particularly literary novels, have traditionally been written by a very specific group of people, and it’s never been a diverse group. The expression “Dead White Males” might pop to mind here, and although there’s much greater diversity in writing than there ever has been before, it still speaks loudest in the privileged, virtually aristocratic fields of MFA’s.
Naturally then, the experience of reading novels is an alienating one for the vast majority, and with so many other, and superior options available, why on earth would somebody like Kanye spend his time reading books that don’t speak to him, instead of creating art and pursuing his passions?
Earlier in the week a video purportedly made by bored hacktivist group Anonymous was released targeting Kanye. It was ridiculous– like a Prog Rock video from the 80’s. In it, a Guy Fawkes masked figure, in a condescending British accent, chided Kanye for all manner of untoward behaviour. It really sounded like the gripes of a 15 year-old who was angry with the cool kid in school who got all the attention.
What people want with Kanye, I think, is to keep him in line.
They want him to remember his place in the hierarchy, and every time they raise their voices to ridicule something he says or cry foul at a taboo he’s broken, they remind us not of his boundless ego, but of their inability to live in a world– now so different from the one they grew up in– where a man like Kanye might confidently assert himself and speak for an unheard majority that they’re no longer a part of.
]]>The team was stripped of federal protections for six of its trademarks, including that of their cheerleaders, the Redskinettes. Now this doesn’t mean that the team is going to have to change its name any time soon, but it is one more example of the ever-gathering disapproval that’s raining down upon them. Apologists can argue all they want about the true etymology of the word Redskin, or that the name is meant as an honorific rather than a slur, but it’s irrelevant.
The Native American community, a small and not particularly powerful minority in a vast and powerful nation, have made it clear that they find it an offensive racial pejorative, and that in and of itself should be sufficient motivation for Daniel Snyder, the white, billionaire owner of the team, to step into the world the rest of us live in, or at least the world we hope to live in, and change the name.
I have come up with a few suggestions, which I now offer:
1. The Washington Cherry Blossoms
2. The Washington Indigenous People
3. The Washington 1%
4. The Washington Spooks
5. The Beltway Snipers
6. The Washington House of Lies
7. The Washington Interns (Defensive line known as The Stained Blue Dress)
8. The Washington Anthrax Attack
9. The Washington Department of Doom (Defensive line known as Homeland Security)
10. The Washington Freedom Fighters
Cuba, I guess, was a bitter pill. Our frail efforts at visiting the “Real Cuba” as opposed to the “Tourist Cuba” only served to prove that we don’t like the real Cuba, and neither, of course, do most Cubans. We stayed in three different cities, two of which (Havana and Varaderos) are tourist centres, so the crippled, interior poverty of the country was absent from our experience but only hinted at as we took a cab from city to city, passing by thatched roof homes with working donkeys living on the front porch. Our time there was one guided by hustlers, zombies and dead-eyed bureaucrats. Of course they would hate us, seeing in us only a mythic, superhuman capacity– one that was randomly dealt– to change their circumstances without damaging our own in the least. There’s an obscenity to wanting to have a fine lobster dinner in such a context, a very obvious one, and that tension was everywhere, invisible yet humming. We were billboards from the west– white, covered in corporate logos and sufficiently arrogant as to not know a word of Spanish. You know, I wanted to feel some sense of gratitude for my “charity” but what I felt was resentment and entitlement, which is probably the way that it should be. But in each small moment when we encountered what we hoped was the milk of human kindness or just a native curiosity about another human, it quickly revealed itself to be a prosaic, economic transaction.
The world is unfair in many, many ways.
