The Problem With Being Right

What makes William Shakespeare so great? I remember asking myself this as an undergraduate. Having double-majored in English and Theatre (do you want fries with that?), I took several courses in Shakespeare, theatre literature, and theatre history, and all repeatedly concurred that William Shakespeare was the greatest English-language playwright ever, if not the greatest of all languages, or even the greatest all-around writer.

But somehow, we never talked about why Shakespeare merits these superlatives.

The closest we ever came to discussing what defined Shakespeare’s supposed preëminence, basically consisted of describing his works. We identified the moral contradictions which brought Macbeth to destruction, or how Hamlet’s lingering indecision reflected a collision between Medieval virtues and Renaissance learning. But this only consisted of identifying Shakespeare’s traits from Shakespeare himself. The inherent reasoning was circular.

And we didn’t even consider Shakespeare’s entire body of work. Throughout undergraduate studies, we repeatedly circled onto the Five Great Tragedies, with occasional forays into comedies like Much Ado About Nothing. I didn’t get a mentored walk-through of non-standard plays like Titus Andronicus until graduate school. When I did, I felt ripped-off in my previous education, because it set everything I knew about Shakespeare in an entirely new context.

(Don’t get me started on anti-Stratfordianism. I had a professor who taught that theory as serious critical scholarship. But what he actually showed us existed on about the same level as Sovereign Citizen politics or the “science” of crystal healings: supposed scholars overhyped minor inconsistencies in the historical record, and insisted that, unless mainstream academia was airtight, every counter-hypothesis deserved equal treatment. I rolled my eyes.)

Only after graduate school did I contemplate how much of what I learned followed this pattern. How much of art, philosophy, and social science actually explained anything, and how much did they just describe? How much history looks inevitable, and free from contingency, because we already know how it ended? And how often do we apply “explanations” to important controversies that simply make moral ambiguities go away, without resolving anything?

Obviously this doesn’t apply to every subject. In science and engineering, for instance, when two different explanations exist for why reality behaves in certain ways, we can conduct experiments or build prototypes to determine which explanation really works. Even when we cannot experiment directly, useful heuristics exist to reconcile gaps. Scientists find evolution more persuasive than seven-day creationism, for instance, because it requires fewer leaps of faith.

But most disciplines, and the most exciting fields within those disciplines, aren’t subject to direct experiment or binary heuristics. For instance, in economics, a field often taught as science, much of the debate we embrace, as between capitalism and socialism, reflects not objective reality, but the values each adherent honors. Is justice more important that freedom from limit? May we prevent some people becoming poor, if it also prevents others becoming rich?

We see this unfold in daily life around us. Employers make important decisions about hiring, investment, and organization based on “theories” that merely describe what’s worked in the past, or what appears to work within thought experiments. Young people looking for work continue flocking to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, not because there’s actual work waiting, but because that’s where everybody goes looking for work. The patterns simply continue.

In politics, Republicans have flourished by making broad appeals to voters’ perceived values, particularly their love of stability and fear of change. Donald Trump’s apparent contradictions go away when you reëvaluate him as simply preserving voters’ illusions about themselves. Democrats, meanwhile, focus on “centrism” and “electability,” phantoms that describe what they think the American median looks like, often without talking to actual Americans.

They all perpetuate the Shakespeare fallacy: we already know Shakespeare is the best, and therefore anybody who challenges Shakespeare’s primacy automatically fails, because Shakespeare is the best. The conclusion is already found in the premise, and can therefore never be disproven. So rather than dispute the premise on its merits, those who’d refute Shakespeare instead cast aspersions on the man himself. Because they, too, accept he’s the best. Whoever he is.

I don’t have a better counter-offer, not yet anyway. At this point, I’ve only identified a problem I haven’t yet resolved. But hopefully, by placing it outside for everyone to see, we can work together to address the ways our cultural myths preserve themselves against scrutiny and challenge. Because, as economics and climate and international tensions threaten to crush ordinary citizens where we stand, somebody should barbecue our sacred cows.

Insult Wars and the End of Politics

Trump's original offending tweets.
Click to enlarge.

If you follow Blue Facebook, or other left-leaning social media, you caught the kerfuffle last week when President Trump quoted conspiracy theorist and radio pundit Wayne Allyn Root. Trump attributed Root as saying “the Jewish people in Israel love [Trump] like he’s the King of Israel… like he is the second coming of God.” The President’s use of two explicitly messianic self-descriptions in quick sequence netted him widespread mockery in the social media universe.

One piece of mockery I shared included a front-page image from the New York Daily News, a tabloid newspaper famous for its pointed front-page illustrations. It rearranged Leonardo’s iconic painting The Last Supper with Trump as Jesus Christ, and filled the Apostles’ seats with noted hangers-on, including Mike Pence, Betsy DeVos, and Jared and Ivanka. I thought this image was pointed satire, making literal the message implied by Trump’s self-aggrandizing tweets. I thought it was spot-on.

However, my friend Kristie, whose politics run significantly more conservative than mine, described the image—and not, I noticed, Trump’s tweets—as “beyond disgusting.” Placing anybody in the role intended for Jesus Christ was a bridge too far for her. I thought, not unreasonably, that Trump’s tweets had done exactly that, since they used language copied directly from the Prophets and Gospels to describe the President. But for Kristie, only the image went too far.

This forced me to reconsider. I still believe Trump’s tweets were the inciting action in this rhetorical war, and Kristie closed her eyes to them because her politics coincide with the President. But by extension, didn’t I close my eyes to the crudeness and escalation in the Daily News image in exactly the same way, for exactly the same reason? Didn’t I blind myself to the implications, so I could congratulate myself for being right?

Insults and jibes can be powerful rhetorical motivators, helping create both in-group and out-group identities. They can bring populations together in identifying what needs confronted, from opposing ideologies to national enemies. But scholars of classical rhetoric will also tell you that insults can make it impossible to win debates, because once you’ve insulted your opponent, there’s no way those opponents can extricate themselves peacefully without losing face. So apply insults as rhetorical tactics only sparingly.

The responding Daily News cartoon.
Click to enlarge.

Clearly I’d forgotten this precept. The picture ratified what I already think, so I found it easy to disregard how others, who didn’t already agree with me, would receive it. By sharing this image publicly, underneath my own name, I tied my ideological position to that opinion. But Kristie, whose conservative politics derive from her Christian beliefs, saw me appearing to mock Jesus, because she approached the image with a different preceding context than hers.

That’s the problem we face in today’s political environment. Our President sees anybody who disagrees with him as beneath his contempt. Refugee seekers are an “invasion;” cities with majority Black populations are “infested,” MS-13 are “animals.” This language means anybody who’s progressive, non-White, immigrant, or otherwise on his hit-list, cannot resolve the debate peacefully without losing face. We must hope against hope to defeat the entire federal government, which he heads, or accept political humiliation.

Every political discussion today quickly becomes an exchange of insults. It’s no longer progressives versus conservatives, it’s Communists versus Fascists. (And sometimes it is, but not as often as those words get flung about.) We even see this shift of extremes within the President’s personal language: he went from describing Kim Jong-Un as “Little Rocket Man”—and don’t forget, “little” is a racial term—to describing them as being “in love.” There’s no center path.

Don’t misunderstand me. I still think Donald Trump is the principal agitator using rhetorical cherry bombs to worsen political discourse. Given the context, it’s hard not to think that. But when we who disagree with Trump answer his insults by getting into the mud with him, we make it more likely that his supporters will double down on their support. Without our escalation, Trump would, like any schoolyard bully, find himself with few remaining allies.

Bullies, tyrants, and kleptocrats always destroy themselves eventually. From Richard Nixon and Ken Lay to Nicolau Ceausescu and Nicolás Maduro, those who gain power and wealth illegitimately always self-destruct. But engaging in insult wars actually props the bullies up, as we’re seeing with Maduro now. We need to stop matching Trump’s rhetorical awfulness, because it gives his base strength. Instead step back, watch his tantrums quietly, and give him just enough rope to hang himself.

Greenland, the Administration, and You

President Trump’s stated desire to purchase the island of Greenland has met everything from laughter and ridicule, to serious discussions about what his resulting tantrum with Denmark means for the future of NATO. But it has set me thinking about what our current government believes about national sovereignty, and how that will impact us ordinary citizens. After all, America hasn’t gained territory through purchase since before the Civil War.

Clearly our President, thinking he can purchase sovereignty over occupied territory through financial transaction, has his ideas of state authority stuck in the early 19th Century. Between the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Gadsden Purchase of 1854, America repeatedly expanded its territorial claims through cash transactions, almost entirely without consent of the people residing on that land. Then, almost as quickly, the practice stopped.

There are significant differences. Though Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase virtually doubled America’s land-area claim, the only meaningful European settlement in that area was New Orleans; to secure the claim, America prosecuted a number of Indian Wars. It also secured massive land grants from Mexico at gunpoint, though again, the territory was mostly unoccupied by Europeans. Even the tiny, arid Gadsden Purchase became populous only after the railroad came through.

I already anticipate someone mentioning the Alaska Purchase of 1867, which transferred nearly as much land as the Louisiana Purchase. This is sophistry: besides it not being contiguous, Russia was actively looking to unload Alaska, which it couldn’t settle or govern while conducting expensive wars with England in Afghanistan and Crimea. Besides, both Russia’s and America’s claim to Alaska was purely nominal until serious investment during the Cold War anyway.

So basically, America hasn’t attempted to purchase territorial sovereignty, except in purely ceremonial fashion, in 165 years. It’s almost like territory purchases represented the dying gasps of European feudal oligarchy in a land too large and diverse to govern that way. A disinterested observer might suggest that territory purchases occurred to give aristocrats a face-saving maneuver to retire politely from government without the indignity of being overthrown.

No wonder that a President who identifies himself with Andrew Jackson, whose insults for opposing politicians reference colonial times, whose awareness of American history in short appears to have stopped in high school, wants to revive the practice. The man literally regards himself as a modern-day aristocrat, somebody whose wealth and breeding entitle him to rule his country—and, by extension, to purchase rule over others from a fellow monarch.



This isn’t a personal slam at Donald Trump, however. It’s a serious challenge to how ordinary citizens like us use and occupy the land we nominally own. It’s important to understand that the word “real” in the phrase real estate doesn’t mean, in Oxford’s definition, “Actually existing as a thing or occurring in fact.” This version of “real” comes from the Latin for “Royal.” To speak of real estate references the royal patent to occupy tracts of land.

Let me rephrase that, in case you missed it: in the most fundamental sense, real estate means “the king’s permission to live on and use the land.” You and I don’t own the land we occupy, no matter how long our families have lived on and worked our tract. No matter what you’ve done to improve the territory, what you’ve grown or built or worked to sustain ecologically, that land isn’t really yours. You only own the state’s permission on that land, permission the state could revoke.

In attempting to resurrect the feudal practice of uti possidetis, the Administration wants to enable the state to renegotiate its royal patent on anybody’s land claims. This as opposed to the current practice of uti possidetis juris, that all territorial claims are sovereign and immutable without an intervening treaty, one of the founding principles of the United Nations. Under this apparent Trump Doctrine, money makes all sovereignty negotiable.

Given the history of European colonialism, this isn’t incidental. Without the UN’s precepts of sovereign governments within sacrosanct borders, uti possidetis allows states to take claims away from other states, particularly weak or chronically impoverished central governments forced to delegate regional authority. World history shows what happens when strong governments think state authority is something they can purchase or take.

If governments can purchase territorial control from one another, literally nothing stops strong states taking land from weak states, as James I and VI took North American colonial claims from Spain and the Netherlands. And nothing stops strong states taking land from citizens, as James regularly took from Catholics. There’s nothing stopping him taking land from, well, from you.

Small Town Murder in Black and White

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 98
John Ball, In the Heat of the Night

The richest man in a small South Carolina town lies murdered beside the main highway. This town’s police force is completely unprepared to investigate a murder, particularly one where the victim has national connections outside the South. So the frightened police chief orders a mass roundup of likely-looking suspects. His best patrolman brings in a traveling Black man guilty of nothing worse than being Black. Only it turns out he’s found an off-duty homicide investigator.

If you’ve seen Norman Jewison’s Oscar-winning movie of the same title, you’ll recognize the broad strokes of John Ball’s most famous novel. Police chief Bill Gillespie, wracked with the prejudices of his time, doesn’t want detective Virgil Tibbs’ help, but he needs it. Tibbs doesn’t owe Gillespie anything, but feels honor-bound to solve a crime once it’s been identified. But the town would rather let the guilty go unpunished, than accept a Black man’s help.

But don’t think they’re the same story. Where Jewison shows the tension between Black and White in a South structurally resistant to change, Ball’s story is much more internal, driven by characters’ private motivations, which they struggle to acknowledge, even to themselves. Chief Gillespie’s sense of order collides with Virgil Tibbs’ faith in justice. This collision happens in Wells, South Carolina, a mountainous village that hasn’t changed in years, and isn’t ready to change now.

Most importantly, the characters are drawn differently than the movie. Unlike Rod Steiger’s middle-aged, gum-chewing cynic, this version of Bill Gillespie is young, only thirty-four, and inexperienced to the brink of incompetence. He botches the early stages of his investigation because he hasn’t read the correct textbooks yet. He begrudgingly accepts Tibbs’ help because he needs it, but an angered city councilman admits Wells hired him because they expect him to uphold generations of segregation.

This Virgil Tibbs, meanwhile, differs from Sidney Poitier’s screen depiction. Where Poitier intones “They call me Mister Tibbs!” with the suppressed rage of a man ready to resist unjust authority, this Tibbs simply speaks that line. He doesn’t actively resist South Carolina’s systems of bigotry, an action he knows would likely get him hanged. Instead, he quietly stays just inside the rules, giving unreconstructed bigots just enough powder to shoot themselves. Which they inevitably do.

One trait this novel shares with the movie is that the mystery isn’t the most important part. Though the murder of a small town’s most prominent resident starts the story, it becomes secondary to the character interactions. Because of history, these characters can never completely trust one another, and constantly scrutinize each other’s actions, hoping for a critical misstep. Yet somehow, socialized to their various social roles, nobody ever truly goes one step too far.

1967 cinema poster for In the
Heat of the Night

Author John Ball shifts his story among several viewpoint characters, mostly but not exclusively Chief Gillespie and Patrolman Sam Wood. Both men are racists, among their multiple failings, and view Tibbs through racialized lenses. Even when Tibbs proves his competence enough to earn their grudging respect, they still consider him through their own prejudices, and consider him “almost a white man.” As readers, we understand and appreciate these characters. But we can never like them.

One viewpoint we never get is Virgil Tibbs. He remains the one character we observe entirely from outside. Unlike Gillespie and Wood, whose bigotry we see in such detail that it almost clings to us, Tibbs’ anti-racism remains private to himself. Instead, we see him act. He uses others’ narrow bias against themselves, turning the intolerant into their own worst character witnesses. It’s no surprise to discover Tibbs is also a fairly advanced Judo practitioner.

Through his Judo-influenced investigation techniques, Tibbs forces several retrenched South Carolinians to acknowledge the blinders they’ve worn so long, even they forget they’re wearing them. Simply by remaining present when White people talk, he makes them uncomfortable enough to reveal long-simmering truths. By the end, Tibbs probably hasn’t cured anybody’s racism. But he forces people to admit, to themselves if nobody else, that they are, indeed, bigots.

Nobody likes to face hard truths about themselves.

Even by genre novel standards, this book is remarkably short: under 160 pages in the Penguin Classics edition. Yet it never feels short. Ball’s language is terse yet detailed, convincing us to sympathize with characters without ever liking them… and making us question why we like or dislike anyone. By the final page, we feel we’ve undertaken a journey. And like Chief Gillespie, our journey isn’t over yet; the next step is up to us.

Who's Responsible For the Mass Shootings? We Are

Is the President responsible? Think carefully.

In the days following this weekend’s El Paso and Dayton shootings, media professionals have struggled to assign blame. Full-time opinion-havers cast aspersions in ways that have grown familiar and tiresome. And as I’ve watched the responses unfurl, I’ve noticed patterns: the force held responsible is always “someone else.” We never find responsibility in the mirror.

Conservatives, including the President, present a laundry list of problems: insufficient access to mental health, the only health care Republicans consider mandatory (and only when it’s expedient). Violent video games and movies. Criminals bringing drugs and guns across the border from Mexico. Never mind that plenty of nations play video games without concomitant real-world violence, and guns are more likely to cross into Mexico than out.

Progressives, meanwhile, have remained steadfastly unified in blaming one source: President Trump. The President’s rhetoric, they insist, has inflamed racist sentiment, reflected in the fact that the shooters in El Paso, and Gilroy, California, echoed the President, sometimes verbatim, in their online manifestos. Except again, this doesn’t withstand scrutiny: President Trump holds majority approval among all White voter demographics except college-educated women, and most white people don’t conduct mass shootings.

Which explanation makes sense apparently depends on which position you already hold. Conservatives see the laundry list of culpability they’ve floated as supremely reasonable. Progressives find Trump’s favorite words and phrases repeated by shooters as ironclad proof. Yet I suggest both sides are showing themselves short-sighted. Whether it’s video games, guns, or electoral politics, these forces have one thing in common: us.

Let’s set aside “mental health” arguments, first. They’re a complete canard. Whenever people describe someone violent as “deranged” or “a madman,” they’re using slanted words loosely connected to mental health, but they’re really passing moral judgement. They rely on Nineteenth Century standards of mental illness, the kind which made lunatics morally equal to criminals, and turned prisons into insane asylums. “Mental health” is a crap argument, and deserves discarded.

Keeping guns and video games, however, we see our own culpability displayed. These products exist because people keep buying them. They exist as a market, and as free-market libertarians love reminding us, markets are comprised of liberated citizens satisfying their desires. If people buy guns or violent video games, it’s because they have some desire to own these things. These products fill some marketable need, for which people willingly pay their hard-earned money.

As for President Trump, let’s recall together, he was elected. Yes, his critics love reminding us he came second in the popular vote, by a significant margin; but his voting base, unlike his opponent’s, was sufficiently large and geographically diverse to win the procedure. As noted above, he holds commanding leads in nearly every White demographic, and at least for now, Whites still hold the majority in America, so yes, we’re responsible for him.

The President probably does provide systemic permission for certain people to do certain things. I witnessed vaguely left-leaning people adjust their views when President Obama conducted unprecedented numbers of drone strikes internationally; anything becomes permissible when we consider the Executive Branch to be “one of us.” So President Trump certainly offers a focusing lens for people whose behavior would’ve otherwise been strident but amorphous.

But if Trump provides permission for America’s worst elements to enact their vision, it’s because we Americans already provided Trump permission. Maybe you didn’t vote for him; I certainly didn’t. But we live in America, benefit from its economic and military protections, and accept his presidency as part of our participation in America. Even if we dislike him, President Trump is inextricable from the system we enjoy, so we’re responsible for him.

Whether we comprise the market, the electorate, or whatever, we created the conditions which made this violence possible. If we oppose the stockpiling of military weapons in civilian hands, but lose our sense of urgency between high-profile killings, we’ve contributed to the system. And saying “I don’t vote, it only encourages the bastards,” doesn’t exempt us from responsibility if we continue benefiting from laws and economic structures which make this situation possible.

Perhaps you and I, like most Americans, didn’t pull the triggers. Perhaps we didn’t directly perform, or encourage, this violence. Perhaps we voted for the other candidate in the last election. But we cannot hold ourselves aloof from responsibility—and that definitely includes me. We haven’t shown ourselves willing to thwart the system and do anything about the structures that make this violence possible. Which means, willingly or not, we’re part of it.

Trapped In an African Dreamland

Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf

The mysterious bounty hunter known only as Tracker sits awaiting execution. We don’t know what he’s done, or whether his condemnation is justified. We only know a holy man named Inquisitor has come to take his final confession. Weary of life and steeped in blood, Tracker has only one power left: to tell his story in whatever way pleases him best. So Tracker launches into a lengthy, detailed yarn of violence in colonial East Africa.

Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Marlon James’ fourth novel, and first fantasy, brims with promise. His mix of realism and magic, of pre- and post-colonial influences, of this world and the next, promises a story rich in symbolism, commentary, and wizardry. You can appreciate his tale of struggles in the early African diaspora, or if that’s too political, you can enjoy his cool monsters. But you can’t help noticing it takes forever to make any progress.

Born between city life and country tradition, Tracker straddles two worlds, occupying neither. Without a sponsor versed in his people’s customs, he’s never undergone adulthood rites. Thus his kinfolk see him trapped in perpetual adolescence; he sees himself unhindered by laws and superstition. (He’s an unreliable narrator, so decide for yourself.) He works for whoever can afford his highly specialized services, and has become highly skilled in rationalizing away his complicity in his employers’ crimes.

James’ storytelling possibly reflects his Caribbean upgringing, steeped in the same storytelling heritage also visible in Edwidge Danticat or Diane Wolkstein. One suspects, reading Tracker’s confession, that there’s a kernel of truth beneath his windy legerdemain, but that he’s spinning a tale, seeking to thrill and horrify an audience. Tracker clearly dislikes Inquisitor, and the official authority of state and religion that he represents; but he’s also desperate for this perceived father figure’s overdue approval.

Tracker’s story begins with a lengthy novella of his youth, his initiation into tribal warfare, and his relationship with the shapeshifter Leopard. Tracker learns his people’s ways later in life than most, and explains his lessons to Inquisitor. These lessons include myth and ritual, but also ceremonies of blood purity which Tracker, prematurely cynical, regularly disrupts. When his people discover he’s been preserving the impure and the tainted, his own kinfolk drive him violently away.

Marlon James

After this purge of delayed innocence, Tracker gets into his real confession. Residing in a city reminiscent of mythical Timbuktu, Tracker survives by on wits and his preternatural ability to find anything lost. Kings and potentates hire him to prevent wars, while princesses and concubines manipulate him to start wars. He rushes profligately through successions of lovers he doesn’t love, mostly but not entirely men. His shield of cynicism doesn’t entirely conceal his pervasive self-hatred.

A slave trader hires Tracker to recapture an escaped boy he considers particularly valuable. This isn’t Tracker’s first time working with slavers; he takes particular care to avoid ever doing anything that would require him to think about the morality of his actions. These aren’t his people, after all; he has no people, not really. But mounting evidence begins to suggest that this slave trader, both despised and admired, has connections more than merely natural.

On the one hand, James pushes Tracker though situations which reveal that Africa, the homeland Tracker partially longs for, is riddled with moral compromise and venality. (James, who has written about Bob Marley and Rastafarianism, reputedly left Jamaica to escape omnipresent homophobia.) Tracker desperately wants Africans’ approval, even Inquisitor’s, even the rich, corrupt slave trader’s. But, working for the people’s richest, most desperate citizens, he’s seen wickedness he cannot ignore, sins which burn his soul.

On the other hand, James has created such a rich, detailed backstory that he needs to share all of it. Eager to keep Inquisitor present and listening, Tracker keeps spinning his tale in degrees of detail that quickly go from lush, to overgrown, to tedious. I found myself hundreds of pages into a very thick book, pushing through yet more picaresque scenes that go nowhere much, and realizing: holy cow, he’s still engaging in exposition!

Apparently James crafted an opulently detailed story bible, then felt compelled to include everything in the text. Everything he’s written is so beautiful, but there’s so much that the beauty becomes an impediment to motion. I wanted to love this book, but nothing keeps happening, and I’d set down the book frustrated, again. One day I set it down and couldn’t bring myself to pick it up again. Maybe that’s everything you need to know.