Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, No "New Normal"
By Rebecca Gordon
Posted on November 20, 2016, Printed on November 20, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176212/ ;
At 72, I experienced election night with a 103-degree temperature, so it was
literally a fever-dream for me. And in a certain sense, its remained so
ever since. Now that a white supremacist has just been made the next
presidents closest White House adviser, and the president-elect has called
conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars to thank him and his followers
for their part in his election victory, we have reasonable confirmation that
we are indeed in a fever-dream America.
Hate incidents are on the rise. Its easy enough to imagine the Bundy
brothers being let loose in the West. A climate change denier is running
the Trump environmental policy transition. The candidate himself will
arrive in Washington with an enemies list already in formation (beating Dick
Nixon to the punch by years). The mainstream media have tied themselves in
apologetic knots for believing the pollsters on Hillarys victory and not
bothering to talk enough to the white working class voters who came out for
Trump (and whom Clinton abandoned for white millionaires and billionaires).
And the new president is being normalized by the old one, who previously
excoriated him in the name of democracy, while mainstream pundits and
journalists desperately look for signs that Donald Trump will be a
pragmatic, recognizable American president once he takes the mantle of
power.
Thanks to the Obama years (not to speak of the Bush ones), our new
pragmatic president will enter the Oval Office fully weaponized. He will
have expanded and expansive executive powers of death, destruction, and
coercion directly at his disposal when it comes to acts like assassination
by drone, surveillance, global kidnapping operations, the pursuit of leakers
and whistleblowers, and the torture of potential terror suspects, among many
other things. At his beck and call, he will have a private army of 70,000
elite troops -- the Special Operations forces -- already scattered across
the planet, and a private air force of CIA-run drones at bases ringing, or
actually in, the Greater Middle East. Put another way, Donald J. Trump is
not going to be the president of the Philippines. Hes going to be the head
of the single most powerful, most potentially destructive, most potentially
intrusive force on the planet and on many of the powers hell inherit there
are remarkably few restraints. That is, in fact, anything but normal.
In the meantime, the rest of us have ended up in the fun house. The mirrors
that line the walls are weird. Its truly hard to tell what world were
looking at. Were wandering in here lost and freaked out. Fears are
rising.
Whatever Donald Trump ends up doing, however, hes just a symptom. His
already certifiably bizarre pre-presidency was born of a long, grim history,
domestic and foreign. As Donald Trump leads an ever more extreme Republican
Party (and the American people) into a darkening future, it's probably
necessary to add that, if there were such a thing as national psychiatrists,
as a country we might now be diagnosed with some kind of personality
disorder. Today, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon takes us on a journey
deep into our already disordered and disorderly world (before the Trump
presidency even starts), offering -- surprisingly enough -- a little hope
along the way. Tom
Life Under Trump
Night Terrors and Daytime Hopes
By Rebecca Gordon
The night after the election, this long-time pacifist dreamed she shot a big
white man carrying an arsenal of guns. He was wandering around a room full
of people, waving a pistol and threatening to fire. Someone pushed a gun
into my hand and said, Shoot now, while his back is turned! I shot. Blood
seeped from a hole in his back. He fell. I woke up stunned.
And the election results had not changed.
Night Fears
More bad nights have followed, filled with dreams in which people who know
me well accuse me of terrible things I havent done or of failing to protect
people in my charge.
And there have been nights when my partner and I hold each other in the dark
and whisper our worst fears. Some of these are personal and selfish: Under
the new regime, will I still be able to get the meds that keep me going?
Will I have to work for money until I die to keep my health care benefits?
Because I turn 65 next year, will I miss the 2017 Medicare cutoff and fall
under Paul Ryans plan to turn that program into a voucher system?
Some fears are national: How can the two of us, and the organizations were
connected with, continue to shield the vulnerable in an era when a white
supremacist serves as the presidents chief strategist?
Some are global: Can we hold back the rising seas that are already closing
over island nations on a planet where Donald Trump promises to abandon the
fight against climate change and walk away from the historic Paris climate
accord?
And then, its back to the personal again: Just how vulnerable are we, two
middle class white lesbians in our sixties, during a Trump presidency? In
the 1980s and 1990s, we used to wonder why the two things our gay leaders
thought we wanted most in the world were to join the Army and get married.
Now, the question isnt what well be able to do, but what we wont be able
to do.
Admittedly, the two of us will never again need the right to an abortion
that a Trump-influenced Supreme Court will probably devolve to the states,
essentially abrogating the Roe v. Wade decision. But I did need it in 1975,
and I thank God I had it. On the other hand, such a court could easily
decide to revisit its 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which invalidated
sodomy laws. Its easy enough to forget now that, as recently as 1986, in
Bowers v. Hardwick, the court opined that no one has a fundamental right to
engage in homosexual sodomy.
But the terror thats shaken us the most is that, in the coming years, we
might witness the final collapse of the rule of law in this country. Ive
spent the last decade and a half writing about torture and other war crimes
committed in the global war on terror. First, the Bush administration
brought us two illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with enhanced
interrogation techniques and a permanent extralegal prison at Guantánamo
Bay. The Obama administration followed with its policy of extrajudicial
murder by drone, and undeclared but very real wars in Libya, Syria, and
Yemen. Between them, they twisted and warped and finally broke domestic and
international laws of all sorts.
But the past two administrations at least gave lip service to the rule of
law. In Donald Trump, we have a president-elect who has said he will simply
ignore the law if it gets in his way. In a primary debate last March, he
insisted that the military would follow any order he gave -- whether to
torture detainees or to take out the families of suspected terrorists.
When debate moderator Bret Baier pointed out that soldiers are prohibited
from obeying an illegal order, Trump answered, They wont refuse. Theyre
not gonna refuse me. Believe me. Im a leader. Ive always been a leader.
Ive never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, theyre going to
do it. Apparently he got some advice about saying such things in public;
the following day found him walking back the comments, acknowledging that
the United States is bound by laws and treaties and I will not order our
military or other officials to violate those laws. But its pretty clear
what he really thinks about the binding power of law.
Theres so much to worry about with a Trump presidency. Why does contempt
for the rule of law stand out for me? Part of the answer is that by making
laws we human beings both recognize and secure our need to live together. In
the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas defined a law as an ordinance of
reason for the common good, made by [whoever] has care of the community, and
promulgated. Its still a pretty decent definition: a reasonable rule made
for the good of everyone in the community, rather than for one particular
group, by those with responsibility for ensuring that good, and made public
so that everyone knows what the law is and how it operates. No secret laws.
No secret courts. A premature medieval democrat, Aquinas allowed for the
possibility that the one who has care of the community might, in fact, be
a body of elected representatives, or even the community as a whole.
The law is not sexy. Its not click-bait. But it can, for instance, be the
protective wall between a group of people designated as less than human and
those who hate them (though that is, of course, not Trumps idea of a useful
wall). Thats only true, however, if the law is enforced. International law
could also be the barrier, the wall, that protects the world from a country
that for the past 15 years has behaved like an angry two-year-old giant,
stomping around the world, waving missiles and smashing things with its
outsized feet. Or it might have been, had Barack Obama not begun his
presidency by promising that he (and therefore the rest of us) would look
forward as opposed to looking backwards when it came to the crimes of the
Bush administration.
That failure to respect the law made it clear that, in twenty-first-century
America, some people are exempt from it. Obama continued,
And part of my job is to make sure that, for example, at the CIA, youve
got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep
Americans safe. I dont want them to suddenly feel like theyve got to spend
their all their time looking over their shoulders.
I think people who have extraordinary power should spend a good part of
their time looking over their shoulders. And more to the point, we should be
able to look over theirs.
It appears that the International Criminal Court has finally been looking
over the CIAs shoulders. In its annual report, issued earlier this month,
the chief prosecutor indicated that she will likely open a full
investigation into war crimes of torture and related ill treatment, by U.S.
military forces deployed to Afghanistan and in secret detention facilities
operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. The report observes:
These alleged crimes were not the abuses of a few isolated individuals.
Rather, they appear to have been committed as part of approved interrogation
techniques in an attempt to extract actionable intelligence from
detainees.
This is the first move the ICC has made to investigate U.S. war crimes and
so to hold this country to the standards of international law. Well see how
far the effort goes. The courts jurisdiction here is murky indeed, because
the United States is not party to the treaty that created it.
Day Dreams
I teach ethics to college students. The Wednesday morning after the election
I threw out the lesson plan for the day (a lecture on institutionalized
state torture). Instead, we considered the election. We watched a few
videos: the live feed of Hillary Clintons concession speech, Trumps
victory speech, and CNN commentator Van Joness unfiltered reaction to the
election (this is a whitelash). Then I invited my students to discuss how
they felt about Trumps stunning victory.
A young white woman started the conversation by saying how angry she was at
the uneducated white men who voted for Trump. I asked my students what
percentage of people in the U.S. they thought had four-year college degrees.
(The answer is roughly a third.) That means, I said, that two-thirds of
the people in this country dont have the chance to go to college. If they
are uneducated, it is not entirely by choice. I went on to talk about the
real pain of watching your income shrink, and losing the work that defined
your place and your value in a society that measures everything in dollars
and cents. I suggested that even as we abhor the political choice to support
a candidate who openly declares his racism, misogyny, and contempt for
Muslims, disabled people, and the rule of law, we can still respect that
pain -- and the humanity of those who feel it.
An Asian American woman began to cry a little as she described her terror
not only for herself, but for African American and Latino friends who are
more vulnerable than she is.
I can understand her fear. Between the day after the election and Monday,
November 14th, the Southern Poverty Law Center had already logged 437
reports of hate incidents, many of them involving direct references to the
Trump campaign and its slogans.
Ive been remembering the times Ive been yelled at, contemptuously
addressed as sir, or chased down the street by people whod discerned that
Im a lesbian. Donald Trump has spent the last year telling people that
their hatred is a good thing, and to feel free to express it with physical
violence. Its no wonder some of us are a little scared.
In another class a few days later, an Indian American student told us two
stories. The first was about an African American friend of hers at the
University of California, Berkeley. She was walking away from a
post-election anti-Trump demonstration on campus, when she found herself
surrounded by a group of young white men. They began to taunt her. And then
they did the thing that Trump boasted his fame allows him to do. They
grabbed her pussy. She ran, and fortunately theyd had their fun and
didnt follow her.
The second story was about my student herself. I was on the BART [our local
subway] going to visit my grandmother this weekend, she began.
I noticed a group of white men around a very young woman, about 18, wearing
a hijab. They were making fun of her and calling her names. So I went and
sat down next to her and told her to ignore them. When we got to her stop,
she was afraid to leave, afraid theyd follow her. I had another five stops
to go, but I couldnt let her leave alone, so I got out, too. And so did the
boys. They followed us out of the station and stood near us yelling as the
young woman waited for her ride to come. They started to get closer, and her
ride still hadnt made it, so I called a Lyft, and rode with her to her
home.
My students courage humbled me.
No New Normal
The full-time faculty at my university has been working for months without a
contract. Weve had a change of administration, and the new regime is
fighting hard against a demand for a very modest salary increase. To put the
struggle into words, my colleagues have made buttons sporting a red circle
and the words new normal with a red slash through it. Ive been wearing
one to show solidarity with my full-time colleagues. Since Donald Trumps
election, Ive taken to wearing it off campus as well. It seems like a
particularly appropriate slogan these days for those of us who dont want
the new normal to mean a return to a very old normal. Having it on makes me
feel a bit braver and a bit more hopeful.
We need hope now, so we can face a world in which hopelessness, despair, and
the tears of my students could also become the new norm. Hope doesnt mean
pretending that the danger isnt very clear and very present. If your tastes
run to good left rhetoric, theres the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramscis
suggestion in his Letters from Prison that we should combine pessimism of
the intellect with an optimism of the will. In an article on The
Indifferent, he wrote, To really live means to be a citizen and to take
part.
Thats a sentiment not so different from what my students read in
Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics. Human beings, says Aristotle, are political
animals; we live best when we live as citizens. He also believed that our
best qualities are habits we get by practicing them. We become just, he
says, by doing just acts. So you might think of hope as a habit we build
in ourselves by doing hopeful things. Think of each of us as assembling it
like a rock wall from bumpy stones that dont necessarily look like theyll
ever fit together. Hope is the wall we can build, stone by stone, to fence
in a future Trumpian autocracy.
A few rocks in my personal wall of hope:
Its 1984. Im in Nicaragua traveling with 15 other people jammed into the
back of a tiny pickup truck, bouncing through dangerous territory. Its the
height of the war the Reagan administration has illegally funded against the
left-wing Sandinista government, which was installed after the ouster of a
U.S.-backed dictator, Anastasio Somoza. The road were traveling down goes
through territory controlled by the CIA-backed Contra rebels. Were heading
toward a town called San Juan del Bocay. We round a bend and the land
flattens out, revealing a barn standing in a field. Someone who has clearly
learned to read and write since the 1979 Sandinista revolution has painted a
slogan on the side of the building in careful block letters: Nosotro
vencimo Somo libre Nunca volveremo a cer esclavo.
The spelling is terrible; theres no punctuation; and since, like all
Nicaraguans, the writer doesnt pronounce the letter s at the end of a
word, he or she doesnt even realize that its there, as in nosotros --
we. But it doesnt matter. The meaning couldnt be clearer. We won. We
are free. We will never go back to being slaves.
When people decide that they are human beings and not beasts of burden, that
is a genie no one can shove back into the bottle. Over the last 50 years,
groups of people in this country have one by one fought for and claimed
their full humanity: African Americans, women, LGB and now T people, those
with disabilities, immigrants of whatever documentation status. Trumplandia
may not yet recognize our humanity, but we do. You cant shove that back in
the bottle either.
Its the Thursday after the 2016 election. Im riding my bike towards campus
when I see a phalanx of San Francisco police lining Valencia Street. Then I
realize that theres a mid-day, mid-week march coming down the sidewalk. As
I get closer, I see that theyre all middle school students, shouting and
carrying signs like Dump Trump and Love Trumps Hate! I stop and call to
them, Youre going to finish what people like me started. They cheer for
themselves and their own astonishing courage. You cant shove youth back in
the bottle. As the folksinger Holly Near sang decades ago, You cant murder
youth, my friend, youth grows the whole world round.
Its 7:45 a.m. on the Friday after the election. Im entering the building
where I teach my 8:00 class. On the door, someone has taped up a simple
black and white notice:
To all those hurt by
recent election
results:
Lets mourn and then
Lets organize.
Details follow about where people can meet to openly discuss methods and
ideas to sidestep this horrific election result. That meeting, says the
notice, is to last from 1:00 p.m. -- till whenever we come up with
something. It ends with this observation: We can be the change we wish to
see, we just have to embody it. There may be a comma splice in that last
sentence and an apostrophe missing from lets, but again the meaning is
clear. These young people are the inheritors of everything my comrades and I
have worked for so much of our lives.
The day after the election, I made a rare post on Facebook:
Bad enough we gave the world 8 years of G.W. Bush. Now this. We hadn't
figured on the depth of hatred and despair in this country. Now to pick
ourselves up and get back to work. No emigration for this woman.
Im an old dyke, a little ragged around the edges, and prone to the
occasional night terror. But Im too old and too stubborn to cede my country
to the forces of hatred and a nihilistic desire to blow the whole thing up
just to see where the pieces come down. Ive fought, and organized, and
loved too long to give up now. And Trump and the people who run him can't
shove me -- or any of us -- back in that bottle.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches in the philosophy department
at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg:
The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her
previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the
Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.
Copyright 2016 Rebecca Gordon
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176212
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, No "New Normal"
By Rebecca Gordon
Posted on November 20, 2016, Printed on November 20, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176212/ ;
At 72, I experienced election night with a 103-degree temperature, so it was
literally a fever-dream for me. And in a certain sense, its remained so
ever since. Now that a white supremacist has just been made the next
presidents closest White House adviser, and the president-elect has called
conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars to thank him and his followers
for their part in his election victory, we have reasonable confirmation that
we are indeed in a fever-dream America.
Hate incidents are on the rise. Its easy enough to imagine the Bundy
brothers being let loose in the West. A climate change denier is running the
Trump environmental policy transition. The candidate himself will arrive in
Washington with an enemies list already in formation (beating Dick Nixon to
the punch by years). The mainstream media have tied themselves in apologetic
knots for believing the pollsters on Hillarys victory and not bothering
to talk enough to the white working class voters who came out for Trump (and
whom Clinton abandoned for white millionaires and billionaires). And the new
president is being normalized by the old one, who previously excoriated him
in the name of democracy, while mainstream pundits and journalists
desperately look for signs that Donald Trump will be a pragmatic,
recognizable American president once he takes the mantle of power.
Thanks to the Obama years (not to speak of the Bush ones), our new
pragmatic president will enter the Oval Office fully weaponized. He will
have expanded and expansive executive powers of death, destruction, and
coercion directly at his disposal when it comes to acts like assassination
by drone, surveillance, global kidnapping operations, the pursuit of leakers
and whistleblowers, and the torture of potential terror suspects, among many
other things. At his beck and call, he will have a private army of 70,000
elite troops -- the Special Operations forces -- already scattered across
the planet, and a private air force of CIA-run drones at bases ringing, or
actually in, the Greater Middle East. Put another way, Donald J. Trump is
not going to be the president of the Philippines. Hes going to be the head
of the single most powerful, most potentially destructive, most potentially
intrusive force on the planet and on many of the powers hell inherit there
are remarkably few restraints. That is, in fact, anything but normal.
In the meantime, the rest of us have ended up in the fun house. The mirrors
that line the walls are weird. Its truly hard to tell what world were
looking at. Were wandering in here lost and freaked out. Fears are rising.
Whatever Donald Trump ends up doing, however, hes just a symptom. His
already certifiably bizarre pre-presidency was born of a long, grim history,
domestic and foreign. As Donald Trump leads an ever more extreme Republican
Party (and the American people) into a darkening future, it's probably
necessary to add that, if there were such a thing as national psychiatrists,
as a country we might now be diagnosed with some kind of personality
disorder. Today, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon takes us on a journey
deep into our already disordered and disorderly world (before the Trump
presidency even starts), offering -- surprisingly enough -- a little hope
along the way. Tom
Life Under Trump
Night Terrors and Daytime Hopes
By Rebecca Gordon
The night after the election, this long-time pacifist dreamed she shot a big
white man carrying an arsenal of guns. He was wandering around a room full
of people, waving a pistol and threatening to fire. Someone pushed a gun
into my hand and said, Shoot now, while his back is turned! I shot. Blood
seeped from a hole in his back. He fell. I woke up stunned.
And the election results had not changed.
Night Fears
More bad nights have followed, filled with dreams in which people who know
me well accuse me of terrible things I havent done or of failing to protect
people in my charge.
And there have been nights when my partner and I hold each other in the dark
and whisper our worst fears. Some of these are personal and selfish: Under
the new regime, will I still be able to get the meds that keep me going?
Will I have to work for money until I die to keep my health care benefits?
Because I turn 65 next year, will I miss the 2017 Medicare cutoff and fall
under Paul Ryans plan to turn that program into a voucher system?
Some fears are national: How can the two of us, and the organizations were
connected with, continue to shield the vulnerable in an era when a white
supremacist serves as the presidents chief strategist?
Some are global: Can we hold back the rising seas that are already closing
over island nations on a planet where Donald Trump promises to abandon the
fight against climate change and walk away from the historic Paris climate
accord?
And then, its back to the personal again: Just how vulnerable are we, two
middle class white lesbians in our sixties, during a Trump presidency? In
the 1980s and 1990s, we used to wonder why the two things our gay leaders
thought we wanted most in the world were to join the Army and get married.
Now, the question isnt what well be able to do, but what we wont be able
to do.
Admittedly, the two of us will never again need the right to an abortion
that a Trump-influenced Supreme Court will probably devolve to the states,
essentially abrogating the Roe v. Wade decision. But I did need it in 1975,
and I thank God I had it. On the other hand, such a court could easily
decide to revisit its 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which invalidated
sodomy laws. Its easy enough to forget now that, as recently as 1986, in
Bowers v. Hardwick, the court opined that no one has a fundamental right to
engage in homosexual sodomy.
But the terror thats shaken us the most is that, in the coming years, we
might witness the final collapse of the rule of law in this country. Ive
spent the last decade and a half writing about torture and other war crimes
committed in the global war on terror. First, the Bush administration
brought us two illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with enhanced
interrogation techniques and a permanent extralegal prison at Guantánamo
Bay. The Obama administration followed with its policy of extrajudicial
murder by drone, and undeclared but very real wars in Libya, Syria, and
Yemen. Between them, they twisted and warped and finally broke domestic and
international laws of all sorts.
But the past two administrations at least gave lip service to the rule of
law. In Donald Trump, we have a president-elect who has said he will simply
ignore the law if it gets in his way. In a primary debate last March, he
insisted that the military would follow any order he gave -- whether to
torture detainees or to take out the families of suspected terrorists.
When debate moderator Bret Baier pointed out that soldiers are prohibited
from obeying an illegal order, Trump answered, They wont refuse. Theyre
not gonna refuse me. Believe me. Im a leader. Ive always been a leader.
Ive never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, theyre going to
do it. Apparently he got some advice about saying such things in public;
the following day found him walking back the comments, acknowledging that
the United States is bound by laws and treaties and I will not order our
military or other officials to violate those laws. But its pretty clear
what he really thinks about the binding power of law.
Theres so much to worry about with a Trump presidency. Why does contempt
for the rule of law stand out for me? Part of the answer is that by making
laws we human beings both recognize and secure our need to live together. In
the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas defined a law as an ordinance of
reason for the common good, made by [whoever] has care of the community, and
promulgated. Its still a pretty decent definition: a reasonable rule made
for the good of everyone in the community, rather than for one particular
group, by those with responsibility for ensuring that good, and made public
so that everyone knows what the law is and how it operates. No secret laws.
No secret courts. A premature medieval democrat, Aquinas allowed for the
possibility that the one who has care of the community might, in fact, be
a body of elected representatives, or even the community as a whole.
The law is not sexy. Its not click-bait. But it can, for instance, be the
protective wall between a group of people designated as less than human and
those who hate them (though that is, of course, not Trumps idea of a useful
wall). Thats only true, however, if the law is enforced. International law
could also be the barrier, the wall, that protects the world from a country
that for the past 15 years has behaved like an angry two-year-old giant,
stomping around the world, waving missiles and smashing things with its
outsized feet. Or it might have been, had Barack Obama not begun his
presidency by promising that he (and therefore the rest of us) would look
forward as opposed to looking backwards when it came to the crimes of the
Bush administration.
That failure to respect the law made it clear that, in twenty-first-century
America, some people are exempt from it. Obama continued,
And part of my job is to make sure that, for example, at the CIA, youve
got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep
Americans safe. I dont want them to suddenly feel like theyve got to spend
their all their time looking over their shoulders.
I think people who have extraordinary power should spend a good part of
their time looking over their shoulders. And more to the point, we should be
able to look over theirs.
It appears that the International Criminal Court has finally been looking
over the CIAs shoulders. In its annual report, issued earlier this month,
the chief prosecutor indicated that she will likely open a full
investigation into war crimes of torture and related ill treatment, by U.S.
military forces deployed to Afghanistan and in secret detention facilities
operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. The report observes:
These alleged crimes were not the abuses of a few isolated individuals.
Rather, they appear to have been committed as part of approved interrogation
techniques in an attempt to extract actionable intelligence from
detainees.
This is the first move the ICC has made to investigate U.S. war crimes and
so to hold this country to the standards of international law. Well see how
far the effort goes. The courts jurisdiction here is murky indeed, because
the United States is not party to the treaty that created it.
Day Dreams
I teach ethics to college students. The Wednesday morning after the election
I threw out the lesson plan for the day (a lecture on institutionalized
state torture). Instead, we considered the election. We watched a few
videos: the live feed of Hillary Clintons concession speech, Trumps
victory speech, and CNN commentator Van Joness unfiltered reaction to the
election (this is a whitelash). Then I invited my students to discuss how
they felt about Trumps stunning victory.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1510703330/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1510703330/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20A young
white woman started the conversation by saying how angry she was at the
uneducated white men who voted for Trump. I asked my students what
percentage of people in the U.S. they thought had four-year college degrees.
(The answer is roughly a third.) That means, I said, that two-thirds of
the people in this country dont have the chance to go to college. If they
are uneducated, it is not entirely by choice. I went on to talk about the
real pain of watching your income shrink, and losing the work that defined
your place and your value in a society that measures everything in dollars
and cents. I suggested that even as we abhor the political choice to support
a candidate who openly declares his racism, misogyny, and contempt for
Muslims, disabled people, and the rule of law, we can still respect that
pain -- and the humanity of those who feel it.
An Asian American woman began to cry a little as she described her terror
not only for herself, but for African American and Latino friends who are
more vulnerable than she is.
I can understand her fear. Between the day after the election and Monday,
November 14th, the Southern Poverty Law Center had already logged 437
reports of hate incidents, many of them involving direct references to the
Trump campaign and its slogans.
Ive been remembering the times Ive been yelled at, contemptuously
addressed as sir, or chased down the street by people whod discerned that
Im a lesbian. Donald Trump has spent the last year telling people that
their hatred is a good thing, and to feel free to express it with physical
violence. Its no wonder some of us are a little scared.
In another class a few days later, an Indian American student told us two
stories. The first was about an African American friend of hers at the
University of California, Berkeley. She was walking away from a
post-election anti-Trump demonstration on campus, when she found herself
surrounded by a group of young white men. They began to taunt her. And then
they did the thing that Trump boasted his fame allows him to do. They
grabbed her pussy. She ran, and fortunately theyd had their fun and
didnt follow her.
The second story was about my student herself. I was on the BART [our local
subway] going to visit my grandmother this weekend, she began.
I noticed a group of white men around a very young woman, about 18, wearing
a hijab. They were making fun of her and calling her names. So I went and
sat down next to her and told her to ignore them. When we got to her stop,
she was afraid to leave, afraid theyd follow her. I had another five stops
to go, but I couldnt let her leave alone, so I got out, too. And so did the
boys. They followed us out of the station and stood near us yelling as the
young woman waited for her ride to come. They started to get closer, and her
ride still hadnt made it, so I called a Lyft, and rode with her to her
home.
My students courage humbled me.
No New Normal
The full-time faculty at my university has been working for months without a
contract. Weve had a change of administration, and the new regime is
fighting hard against a demand for a very modest salary increase. To put the
struggle into words, my colleagues have made buttons sporting a red circle
and the words new normal with a red slash through it. Ive been wearing
one to show solidarity with my full-time colleagues. Since Donald Trumps
election, Ive taken to wearing it off campus as well. It seems like a
particularly appropriate slogan these days for those of us who dont want
the new normal to mean a return to a very old normal. Having it on makes me
feel a bit braver and a bit more hopeful.
We need hope now, so we can face a world in which hopelessness, despair, and
the tears of my students could also become the new norm. Hope doesnt mean
pretending that the danger isnt very clear and very present. If your tastes
run to good left rhetoric, theres the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramscis
suggestion in his Letters from Prison that we should combine pessimism of
the intellect with an optimism of the will. In an article on The
Indifferent, he wrote, To really live means to be a citizen and to take
part.
Thats a sentiment not so different from what my students read in
Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics. Human beings, says Aristotle, are political
animals; we live best when we live as citizens. He also believed that our
best qualities are habits we get by practicing them. We become just, he
says, by doing just acts. So you might think of hope as a habit we build
in ourselves by doing hopeful things. Think of each of us as assembling it
like a rock wall from bumpy stones that dont necessarily look like theyll
ever fit together. Hope is the wall we can build, stone by stone, to fence
in a future Trumpian autocracy.
A few rocks in my personal wall of hope:
Its 1984. Im in Nicaragua traveling with 15 other people jammed into the
back of a tiny pickup truck, bouncing through dangerous territory. Its the
height of the war the Reagan administration has illegally funded against the
left-wing Sandinista government, which was installed after the ouster of a
U.S.-backed dictator, Anastasio Somoza. The road were traveling down goes
through territory controlled by the CIA-backed Contra rebels. Were heading
toward a town called San Juan del Bocay. We round a bend and the land
flattens out, revealing a barn standing in a field. Someone who has clearly
learned to read and write since the 1979 Sandinista revolution has painted a
slogan on the side of the building in careful block letters: Nosotro
vencimo Somo libre Nunca volveremo a cer esclavo.
The spelling is terrible; theres no punctuation; and since, like all
Nicaraguans, the writer doesnt pronounce the letter s at the end of a
word, he or she doesnt even realize that its there, as in nosotros --
we. But it doesnt matter. The meaning couldnt be clearer. We won. We
are free. We will never go back to being slaves.
When people decide that they are human beings and not beasts of burden, that
is a genie no one can shove back into the bottle. Over the last 50 years,
groups of people in this country have one by one fought for and claimed
their full humanity: African Americans, women, LGB and now T people, those
with disabilities, immigrants of whatever documentation status. Trumplandia
may not yet recognize our humanity, but we do. You cant shove that back in
the bottle either.
Its the Thursday after the 2016 election. Im riding my bike towards campus
when I see a phalanx of San Francisco police lining Valencia Street. Then I
realize that theres a mid-day, mid-week march coming down the sidewalk. As
I get closer, I see that theyre all middle school students, shouting and
carrying signs like Dump Trump and Love Trumps Hate! I stop and call to
them, Youre going to finish what people like me started. They cheer for
themselves and their own astonishing courage. You cant shove youth back in
the bottle. As the folksinger Holly Near sang decades ago, You cant murder
youth, my friend, youth grows the whole world round.
Its 7:45 a.m. on the Friday after the election. Im entering the building
where I teach my 8:00 class. On the door, someone has taped up a simple
black and white notice:
To all those hurt by
recent election
results:
Lets mourn and then
Lets organize.
Details follow about where people can meet to openly discuss methods and
ideas to sidestep this horrific election result. That meeting, says the
notice, is to last from 1:00 p.m. -- till whenever we come up with
something. It ends with this observation: We can be the change we wish to
see, we just have to embody it. There may be a comma splice in that last
sentence and an apostrophe missing from lets, but again the meaning is
clear. These young people are the inheritors of everything my comrades and I
have worked for so much of our lives.
The day after the election, I made a rare post on Facebook:
Bad enough we gave the world 8 years of G.W. Bush. Now this. We hadn't
figured on the depth of hatred and despair in this country. Now to pick
ourselves up and get back to work. No emigration for this woman.
Im an old dyke, a little ragged around the edges, and prone to the
occasional night terror. But Im too old and too stubborn to cede my country
to the forces of hatred and a nihilistic desire to blow the whole thing up
just to see where the pieces come down. Ive fought, and organized, and
loved too long to give up now. And Trump and the people who run him can't
shove me -- or any of us -- back in that bottle.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches in the philosophy department
at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg:
The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her
previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the
Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.
Copyright 2016 Rebecca Gordon
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176212
