Your Feelings Materially Change Nothing, and Yay For That
The tired impotency of police abolitionists, the delusion that "political problems are solved with affective impulses," and activists yell "Fuck Ted Wheeler." Again. Plus: A clip from upcoming work
Just before hitting publish on this post, I learned that protesters this morning stormed into a Portland city council meeting yelling “Fuck Ted Wheeler!” Gee, where have I heard this before?
Or, as a friend just commented, “What a tiresome sporting event.” Agree! There are better ways to get ahead, in fact I’ll argue that such actions keep people from achieving their objectives, and maybe that’s by design. Shouting statements into the air is not about working for change but about releasing a bit of emotional effluvium, or what during the 2020 riots I called “a nightly spurt of relief.” But you cannot spoo into your sock and expect anything to grow. Maybe the shouters do not care. Maybe they are unserious people, or dilettantes, or as yet unsure how to apply themselves, or punks at least getting some art out of it. Work hard kids!
Speaking of work, the creation of a book is a long haul. Maybe not for Jim Harrison, who said he wrote A Good Day To Die (or maybe it was another of his novels) in 96 hours. (My favorite novel of Harrison’s is Dalva; I am also very very partial to the way he writes about food.) I guess I envy that which I know nothing about it, every book I’ve written (seven? I think seven) a process of abandonment and reclamation. Two examples: The Bad Mother, a tiny novel that I guess is categorized as a novella (a word I cannot hear without thinking of Nutella) took years, due to my not knowing how to do it or what to write. After a gazillion scrapped scenes, I stuck 100 or so pages in a shoebox and put it on a shelf in the corner of my office in Los Angeles. I was working on an article about a year later when I seized by the sense that I was being watched. I turned and saw that the characters in the 100 pages, teenagers all, had crawled out the box and were standing there, each about four inches tall, looking at me and wondering, “Are you going forget about us too?” I will add here the novel is about homeless kids in Hollywood, and that the bad mother of the title is Los Angeles.
The other start-stop book was To the Bridge: A True Story of Motherhood and Murder. I had no idea how to write this book, how to structure it, how to get people to talk to me about the hardest thing that ever happened to them: the murder of a child. I’d make good progress and then stall. I several times put the hundreds of pages of research and however-many possible-chapters in a filing cabinet and walked away. I did finally commit, and the book has sold 26,000 copies to date. There was a lot of serendipity involved in getting in published, though maybe not; we walk to where we find ourselves an all that.
I have been working on another project and predictably, it’s taking longer than I might like. But! This morning, I opened my emails to find Substack essays from both Jesse Singal and Freddie deBoer, about issues that animate what I am working my way through. Here’s Jesse, from “The Police-Abolition Zombie Shambles On”:
You can’t just shout “restorative justice!” in response to the very real question of how a policeless society would keep people safe. You really need to flesh out this argument if you want people to take it seriously. Restorative justice is certainly a nice ideal in certain circumstances, and my sense is it can be useful when, like, a society is trying to stitch itself together after a calamitous civil war — but none of that means it could serve as a complete alternative to any sort of policing or incarceration.
Jesse liberally quotes a police abolitionist and others who apparently feel no compunction to offer ideas. The method, which we see applied ad nauseam in the culture: talk about what you don’t like about the other side, quote iffy statistics, and shout the same things over and over and over and over. As I wrote in a recent piece, about Portland activists who claim that the only way to ensure peace was through violence:
I could not say whether activists believed this or if they felt it necessary to believe anything; they were blank by design, a faceless fighting force shouting, “WHAT DID YOU SEE? DIDN’T SEE SHIT!" and told not to speak, "peace through violence” a platitude kept up the black sleeves, to be whipped out when the question of responsibility came up.
DeBoer’s piece cut close to the bone, in a post entitled, “Politics, Not Apology, or What My New Book is Actually About.” He is addressing a statement made by Dan Cathy, CEO of Chick-fil-A, in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, and with regard to people needing to cultivate “a contrite heart, a sense of humility, a sense of shame, a sense of embarrassment begat with an apologetic heart.”
Cathy’s perspective was an exceptionally pure expression of an ideological position that’s inescapable in the 21st century, the assumption that political problems are solved with affective impulses, that the careful application of the right emotions can tear down any walls. This attitude embodies so many of the elementary pathologies of our approach to social problems: the marginalization of material inequality, the fixation on self-flagellation, the delusion that emotions can be controlled or would lead reliably to actual change… And yet Cathy’s unthinking attitude towards what constitutes identity progress reflects assumptions that are profoundly cross-ideological. Assumptions, as you know, that I find profoundly wrongheaded and self-defeating. As Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò says, “the way you change the world is by changing the world.”
When I read the quote from Táíwò, I thought, that’s it; that’s exactly what I have been digging at the past eight weeks/three years/whole lifetime. You cannot talk about changing the world and have your entire solution be to blame other people. As my late father-in-law used to say, “Do it, then talk about it.”
A few months ago I learned the word “captious,” which in addition to having a great sound and great letters - I am partial to the letters “c” and “t” - encapsulates a position I have no respect for, a captious person being a fault-finder, a caviler, a personality, according to Merriam-Webster, “marked by an often ill-natured inclination to raise objections” and “calculated to confuse, entrap, or entangle in argument.” I further like the word because it so well characterizes people I overlap with in my work and personal life, people who default to blaming others, people whose skill sets had not matured past adolescence, if that.
I don’t have to imagine people seeing the above video and saying, “Nancy, they’re young, they’re in the heat of the moment, it doesn’t matter.” I disagree. When a city is forced to make room for such actions, it leads to a corresponding corrosion of civil society, which, sure, for hardcore anarchists is the very point. (Trust me when I tell you, these were not hardcore anarchists.) As I stress in the upcoming work, a section of which you can read after the break, it can also lead to murder.