The Daily: 30 July 2024

The last two weeks have been an object lesson in the embarrassing subconscious bigotry of white men. First, I encountered an essayist that said he didn’t read much written by women, even as he admitted that women write more than half of the printed words. He excused himself by claiming that most of the writing from women is fiction — and apparently therefore not as legitimate as the equally subjective “non-fiction” words of men — and then he implied that women needed to remedy his shortcomings by sending him suggested readings (though probably not fiction…).

Then there was Elon Musk and his “My trans child is dead” proclamation after a week or two of escalating Twitter nastiness levied at anyone who is not a straight, white and preferably wealthy male. How do you even internalize this? How do we make room on this planet for an ego this hugely disgusting? Can we shoot him off to Mars…

Then came Biden’s withdrawal. And while a Republican apparatchik felt obliged to publicly warn off Party members from sneering at Kamala Harris’s gender and race (because apparently that’s a compulsion?), it was the “liberal” media that was most offensive. It took them days of flailing around to finally come to terms with the fact that they were not now facing an election between two old white men.

(I wanted to assign the whole country a 60 hour course of Scene on Radio… augmented by Ibram X Kendi and everything written by Nell Irvin Painter… at least.)

“Oh you mean a brown-skinned woman is really really going to head up the Dem ticket? Is she at least going to have a white guy VP?” When they stopped spluttering about her “softness” and “inexperience” (code words for stupid female), they started trotting out the one word that they fling at anyone who shows the least inclination to put human lives over elite preoccupations. She’s a radical.

(It occurs to me that radical might be code for anyone who does not think like a bigot.)

Well, goddess below, let’s hope she is.

What is a radical? It literally means “root”. A radical is grounded, someone who lives in reality. A radical is tied to solid earth. A radical does not live in elite fantasy land.

In its more recent shades, radical has come to mean someone who thinks outside the box. When novel thinking conforms to the projects of wealth-extraction, it is called innovation and praised. The innovator is rewarded with fawning and large bank accounts. However when there are questions raised about this culture, then the questioner is labeled a radical and generally shunned.

I take this label as a compliment. A radical is by definition a person who thinks different, who dreams different, who believes different. And it seems to me that a person who thinks differently might be able to come up with a few good ideas merely because they aren’t the same damn thing that has been raining down on us over and over and over again, despite never once working in ten thousand years.

But radicals are verboten in the mainstream media. We wouldn’t want to say anything to bruise delicate elite self-conceit with mirrors and exposure under the harsh light of reality. The mainstream media depends upon those elites for ad revenues, for insider scoops, for its continued existence. Without elites there is no media. It’s all just normal average lives telling their own stories through living. Radicals represent the potential for undermining the walls around wealth concentration, the potential for leakage, the potential for wealth to spread, allowing more of us the freedom to live as we wish. Because yes, it’s almost always novel ideas regarding egalitarian distribution of the world’s resources that most offends the media and most often gets slapped with the word radical.

(It also occurs to me that bigotry is at root an economic problem.)

I highly doubt that Kamala Harris is a radical. For one, it is simply impossible to be in politics and not be at least tacitly in favor of the socioeconomic status quo. But she might be different enough to have questions. She is apparently different enough to be suspected of having questions anyway. Let’s hope the difference is more than seeming, but let’s not get too depressed when it turns out that she’s not particularly radical. Just female… and brown. And so, possibly open to ideas that open doors to more than white males. That, at least, is a beginning…

And then maybe some true radicals might be able to insinuate their roots into fantasyland… and bring it back down to earth.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024