Born Under a Bad Sign

Indented below under this introduction is the review of "TULIA: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town" that I submitted to Amazon yesterday. Under that in a separate post is the review that I did not submit to Amazon. In the review I submitted to Amazon I employed an unironic, unscornful, factual diction. The "un-Amazon" review attempts to get behind the facts to examine the New Model Conservatives' self-congratulatory tale about the end of racism, a phrase which some may recognize as the title of a book by Dinesh D'Souza, written in 1996.

It is indicative of the weightlessnes of much of conservative thinking that D'Souza would title his book "The End of Racism," a strategy also used in what may be a better known example, Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History." By acclamation alone it seems, D'Souza wishes to end those troublesome impediments to the hegemony of conservative doctrine. Unlike the Old Model Conservatives who naturalized the arrangements of previous periods as "traditional" in order to defend their reactionary politics, the New Model Conservative merely declares that racism has ended, that capitalism has won the battle of competing idelogies, that now a new more perfect era can be born out of the smoking wreck of misguided liberal policies, case closed, case closed, and finally, case closed!

I'm going over old ground here -- D'Souza's book was published in '96, which in today's hyperactive newsosphere is the eqivalent of the Iron Age. Every day we the American people are energetically reminded that there is a lot of news and that news is something we must be engaged in. The news, however, I would suggest has become a relentless recycling of conservative news hooks that always point back to conservative wedge issues -- abortion, homosexuality, law and order, religious values, etc. The wedge issues nowadays exist inside the larger construct of the War on Terror. Since there is a fundamental sameness to the news; I would argue that paying attention to the latest gyrations of the right wing propoganda machine and its many servants is to be recruited into conservatives' long-term program of coverting every American into a belligerent, intolerant bigot.

Let me suggest that what really might be useful is an exploration of the politics of resentment. This idea is not original with me, of course. The marvelous Culture of Defeat by Wolfgang Schivelbusch is a tremendous, pathbreaking achievement on this topic, and I'm sure there must be others. I was reminded of this work recently when reading The Abuse of Evil by Richard Bernstein (reviewed below). Bernstein refers to the politics of "humiliation" as being one of the driving forces of this century, and worthy of study.

The current administration has sharpened the politics of resentment into its main ideological weapon. This is one of the main reasons why the current regime is so redolent of Facism, the ne plus ultra of the politics of resentment. Importantly, resentment is intimately linked to humiliation. People resent being humiliated, and they seek to humiliate their enemies in return. This is an ever expanding and self-perpetuating cycle. In fact, recently, the mobilization of resentment to humiliate one's enemies has become so widespread and so vicious that many now take the ranting of conservative like Limbaugh, O'Reilly and Coulter to be what politics is.

Liberal politicians have yet to find an issue that can fan the flames of resentment to the extent neccessary to convert voters to their side. And it may be that they incapable of fanning the flames even if they can find an issue. Playing by Marquess of Queensbury rules, liberals still hope for a reasonable 'fact-based' dicussion, while conservatives simply go for the juglar. I mean that in a near literal sense. In fact conservatives never go anywhere else but straight at their enemies, favoring the ad hominen attack, or variations on the attack, nearly every time.

One variation of the ad hominen attack conservatives deploy is to attempt to set the "qualifications" for disputants. For example, Cindy Sheehan was deemed unqualified as a critic of the Bush administration's colonial adventure in Iraq because she held views conservatives identified with the "hard left." This immediately called into question her standing as a disputant by suggesting that she was a dupe of the "hard left" or, using older conservative language, a "communist dupe."

Conservatives also qualify disputants by setting up the terms of "authenticity." Cindy Sheehan was disqualified by conservative O'Reilly and his many friends because "authentic" grieving mothers were supposed to grieve either apolitically or to grieve but still support the Commander in Chief at the same time. Sheehan was deemed unqualified in the lowest, meanest manner possible by one attack pundit who said that her own son, Casey, would be ashamed of what she was doing. In one stroke both as a mother and as grieving mother was attacked. This attack suggested that she couldn't speak for her son because since she didn't support the President, she couldn't understand what her son really thought. Shame on her. Shame, shame, shame, bad Mom. In the shame-based universe of the New Model Conservative, liberals or anyone who questions the current regime should be made to feel ashamed of their beliefs. Shame, shame, shame, case closed.

This idea of authenticity and qualification occured to me when I posted the second review of TULIA below. Conservatives cannot accept that there might be more than one way to look at at anything. To them it is a sign of deceit that anyone could hold more than one view in mind at the same time, or that there might be more than one voice inside of an individual. Since they insist on absolutes, on the division of "us against them" they categorize thoughtfulness as weakness. They claim to have one view and are so intent upon forcing that single-minded view upon everyone else that they do not have the time or the patience or, perhaps the courage, to question their views or to listen to other points of view.

That is why democracy is under serious threat under the current regime. Critics are constatntly disqualified based on spurious conditions. The radical conservative "base" is stoked on a constant diet of resentment, and rewarded with the fantasies of their enemies' humiliation or powerlessness or exposure, etc.

Born Under A Bad Sign, December 17, 2005

"TULIA: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town" can be read any number of ways: as a legal thriller; a true crime tale; a sociological case study of a town and its people; an examination of the innerworkings of law enforcement across local, state and federal institutions; a hopeful tale of everyday American heroes coming to aid of victims of a renegade cop; an examination of the social and political arrangements that reinforces the interests of the powerful; as a troubling description of an increasingly repressive society reforging formerly blunt instruments of racist control into sharp new weapons of surveillance and incarceration that are guided and informed by a creed of punishment flowing out of hell and damnation readings of the Bible and law enforcement's "three strikes and you're out" ideological counterpart.

What "TULIA" shows most compellingly is the extent to which racism, which Blakeslee shows is nowadays most often expressed in economic terms, lies just below the surface in the everyday assumptions of life in small southern towns. While the town's elite knows that the "N" word is no longer acceptable in polite society, they have found ways to enforce the old status quo with a new rhetorical spin. For instance, the head of the Tulia Chamber of Commerce, Lena Barnett, speaking resentfully about county tax money being spent on court appointed attorneys for the 39 African Americans nefariously accused of dealing drugs, says, "If you can't afford insurance, then you don't go to the doctor... If you can't afford to hire a lawyer, then you go without" (page 183). This says much about what towns like Tulia and states like Texas are willing to pay to balance the scales of justice.

Blakeslee ties this observation to a larger critique of government spending, pointing out that while white Tulians resent their tax money being spent to defend the legal rights of blacks or on the poverty programs used predominantly by African Americans because of the economic discrimation they suffer under, they conveniently forget the welfare programs that are solidly in place for the white farm owners. Here's Blakeslee in one of his typically insightful examples of how the deck is stacked in favor of those citizens deemed important by the political classes:

"The total tax dollars invested in poverty programs in Swisher County, controversial thought it may be is dwarfed by the subsidies the county receives through the various federal farm programs. In 1990, farm subsidies totaled $28.7 million for Swisher County. Much of that money subsidized cotton and wheat grown for the export market, where U.S. farmers would otherwise be unable to compete with low cost operations in Latin American and Asia. The farms that keep the county alive would likely be gone in a generation if the government checks ever stopped arriving, which means that almost everybody in Swisher County, regardless of race, relies on a handout of some kind, either directly or indirectly. Most American taxpayers are unaware of the extent of such programs; if they were it would be a hard pill to swallow. Indeed, critics of farm programs have observed that in some counties (including many in the panhandle), the government could simply buy out most of the farms in the county--land, buildings, and equipment--for roughly what it will spend on subsidies over a ten- to fifteen-year period"(page 188).

Blakeslee shows elsewhere that these Federal dollars tend to find their way disproportionately into the pockets of those who have more money to begin with. Like the cocaine the 39 black Tulian's were accused of selling, it has been "stepped on" by a lot of people further up the line. In the case of the cocaine, the stepping on was done by the rogue cop who fabricated these cases so he could pocket most of the "buy money" he was provided. In the case of the government checks, the farmers keep as much of the money as they can by planting grass instead of crops under a government program designed to keep the next Dust Bowl at bay, as well as manage market prices. Day laborers, crews of cotton pickers just aren't needed for fields of grass.

For some readers, TULIA may seem to digress too far from its basic narrative thrust which is the story the unmasking of a crooked cop and the collusion of law enforcement, the courts and government in the enforcement of racism. But these "digressions" on political expediencies, on government spending, on the assumptions about human nature made by fundamentalist religion, on the vast new penal system that has been growing exponentially through politically motivated law enforcement programs and punitive, inflexible laws, all of these additional explorations are necessary to understanding the social and political arrangements that, regrettably, only prick nation's conscience on the rare occaions when concerned citizens and activists shine the light into the dark corners of America's latest, more sophisticated, disciplinary regime.