Unpossible Outcomes

I've been trying to write this entry for a week or so now. It's hard to even know where to start. Disloyal Jews? Rounding up the mentally ill until "we know what's going on"? The Epstein connections and scandal? The continued refusal to specifically address the wanton violence committed by the adherents to patriarchal white supremacist ideology? A president referring to himself as "The Chosen One"? The Justice Department sending out a newsletter that links to an avowed white supremacist organization? The act of ordering US businesses to end any relationship with China or Chinese companies, as if he were some kind of king? 

This is just the past few weeks. We could go all the way back to standing on a podium at a campaign rally and using their disability to insult a journalist. We could also go back to the multiple sexual assault and rape victims who've come forward. The joyful expression of sexual assault in "... grab 'em by the pussy." The bragging about walking into dressing rooms to see teen girls in a state of undress. "Very fine people..." Inviting police brutality on the campaign trail? Inviting political violence on the campaign trail. Shithole countries. The suggestions about how "the blacks" should be grateful for employment numbers? How do we keep up or begin to quantify it. 

Probably even worse in the long run, the Republican Party has openly embraced the ethos that power is its own ends. It doesn't take more than 48 hours for them to formulate some variety of "yeah, that's not something someone should say, but..." It's easy to say history is going to judge them harshly, but it seems more and more plausible each day that a future which includes anything like an attempt to portray history realistically is less and less probable. Considering how much trouble we've had even when there have been institutions and individuals dedicated to doing their utmost, it certainly seems we've turned to fantasies about our past ahead of the reality of our failings. At best, they've been undermined at every turn by the consensus of the "reasonable." We've taken personal umbrage as our compass instead of a moral basis in human well being. If the likes of Thomas Jefferson were capable of such terrible things as history suggests, our own personal legacy will only ever be so tainted, so we've chosen to see the worst ramifications of our history as "unpossible." Not impossible, per se, but rendered as never having been possible. As if to say that because there is no letter between A and B, the space can only ever be blank. It's not that we created the space because we never considered it. It's that it can't exist, because we never considered it as we were creating the architecture of this social and political alphabet. 

Attempting to look at history as clearly as possible means understanding the space between the letters was always there and American politics has always had some individuals and/or organizations to attempt to manipulate that space. They exist in that space, and still doggedly refuse to admit it exists. 

Consider the establishment of patriarchal white supremacy as the law of the land from the beginnings of an American legal tradition, where legality is really just an expression of how the state desires to use power. Patriarchal white supremacy is to America what concepts like "I before E, except after C" are to the English language. It's the rule which can be formally accepted in a broken or altered version when those who make the rules decide it's acceptable to break or an overwhelming mass of the people from whom they derive their authority decide some particular aspect of that formality doesn't matter anymore. 

Now, we have a personification of the white masculine id as president, as he's ignoring, remaking or unmaking the rules. He's going to do what he wants with I, E, C and everything else. The rest of the appointed authorities are trying to figure out what the new rules are, but are failing to grasp that there is only one rule, and it is, "He wants power, unquestioned." 

It's true to say focusing solely on Trump is ignoring the fact that patriarchal white supremacy has been the rule of the land since day one, whether it was written or overwritten. It's also true that he is the personification of the white masculine id in American culture and at least currently, presents a threat which is unique in our moment in time. These things can both exist as true whether or not we have embraced the version of history which embraced the unpossible. 

We haven't embraced the history which suggests our greatest accomplishments, our greatest achievements in human well being, have always come from the collective efforts of humble individuals who sought to better their common well being. We have little to no grasp on the history of the movements driven, founded, given stability and material reality by those who've been at odds with patriarchal white supremacy. We know the names of a few leaders, a few significant moments and achievements. We know nothing of how all of that came to be. We study the histories of the victories of patriarchal white supremacy to the letter. We study the challenges to its hegemony by the names on the libraries in which that history is most thoroughly documented. 

We know Rosa Parks. We don't know that there is little to no truth to the idea that she was yet another Black laborer, who on a particular day just became too tired to move to the back of the bus. That she had already been active for some years in attempting to find some justice for Black women who habitually experienced sexual harassment and assault at the hands of white men has long been left out of the narrative. It's preferred that we think of Rosa Parks act of resistance as if it were the divine beginnings of a movement destined to achieve victory, not the next step in a process involving law, social norms and racial animus refusing to be moved by basic humanity or even the next logical attempt to secure justice in the journey of a person who had been dedicated to the endeavor for a long time already. For the narrative to work, Rosa Parks couldn't be a rabble rouser, trouble maker, radical or whatever else we usually call people engaged in efforts like hers. We certainly couldn't admit that there was a direct connection between her struggle for civil rights as a Black person and her struggle for civil rights as a Black woman. I before E, except after C, unless previously authorized. It serves patriarchal white supremacy better for someone like Rosa Parks to have been an obedient servant of a masculine God than it does for her to have been an intelligent, shrewd, thoughtful and methodical agent acting on her own sense of morality. The absolute truth is between the two. She was an intelligent, shrewd, thoughtful and methodical agent of her sense of morality which she believed was derived from her dedication to God. Think carefully about which of those characteristics most needed to be made unpossible when it came time to construct the popular historical narrative. 

Its preferable that we believe in these victories of human dignity as divine intervention or as the only logical outcome of history, instead of seeing them as "attempt number 63" or "resistance effort number 4,624." It's also preferable that we see people like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X or any of the other recognized exemplars of any social movement as either being mythically imbued or as in the right place at the right time, but never as someone chosen by people as a leader after they had already been engaged in efforts which were far less centralized. Even in the Civil Rights Movement, that Rosa Parks had learned from her years of community work in specifically trying to address systematic abuses based on her skin color and her gender, the patriarchal aspect of patriarchal white supremacy was there to protect what power and controls it could still exercise. She could be seen to be fighting for her Blackness, but not to have come to it in her fight for her Black womanhood. Bayard Rustin is another example of the same. Being gay, his existence challenged patriarchal rules by virtue of his self respect and sense of masculinity. He was set aside in the historical narrative and had his gayness set aside in the drive for civil rights. He's come to be more prominently known in recent years because attitudes about being gay have changed, but be clear, it's not that they have changed amongst the most reactionary. It's because they changed amongst the rest of the spectrum. It's not the most extreme bigots who prevented this change for so long, it's the middle, compromising with the most extreme bigots which prevented it. 

The same was true of the fight for women's right to vote. Frederick Douglas was one of the keynote speakers at one of the earliest conventions organized for the purpose of women's suffrage. Not long after, he'd leave the suffrage movement because the majority of its leadership had decided they would disentangle the right for women to vote from the right of Black people to vote. It wasn't even as if suffrage was taking up the right of white and Black women to vote. It was clear, very quickly, that the movement was about white women. Where patriarchal white supremacy was fighting suffrage on the front of gender, it maintained its power in the realm of race. 

Let's also disabuse ourselves of the notions that these movements presented such watershed moments that they undid patriarchal white supremacy. Where the Civil Rights Movement is concerned, the Voting Rights Act was just recently stricken down by the Supreme Court. Voter suppression efforts have gone into overdrive since, and the arguments surrounding it are an exact replay of those which preceded the necessity of The Voting Rights Act in the first place. Take a second and think about what would happen if women's suffrage were rolled back and large percentages of white women found themselves unable to vote in some states. We've learned in the last few years that redlining, supposedly ended by the Fair Housing Act, never really stopped. What stopped was the research and monitoring which made it possible to determine whether there was discrimination at work in housing. Generational wealth among Black families suffered immeasurably, because it was unpossible for housing discrimination to be as bad as it was "back then." Surprise! In some ways, it's worse now, but we're still not seeing many headlines dedicated to this revelation.  

As gender equality goes, #MeToo and #TimesUp are what they are, in the 21st century. It's pretty clear Jeffrey Epstein was operating a network trafficking in young women for the gratification of the wealthy and powerful, until very recently. His reach and influence wasn't diminished by his having to register as a sex offender in what was one of the most oddly lenient plea deals ever granted to a sex offender, by the then DA Alex Acosta, who went on to be the Secretary of Labor for one Donald J. Trump. At least one Ivy League institution is undergoing near revolt by staff and students as a result of their willingness to continue a relationship with a known sex trafficker. 

For Trump, and now the Republican Party, the practice Americans have had at making things unpossible is key. We've rendered the entire history of the American Civil War unpossible. Aside from the war for US independence, the American Civil War was the most formational event in the nations history, and we've rendered the reality of it unpossible. Mitch McConnell says there won't be hearings for a Supreme Court nominee in an election year, and he's reaching into that history of unpossible things, knowing our capacity for it. Weapons of Mass Destruction and the entire war in Iraq were drawn directly from our capacity to render things unpossible. The entities who sold the nation the invasion of a country which had nothing to do with 9/11, were inextricably connected to the understanding that there is a sizable population who can not allow themselves to believe a war was fought by half of the nation because they were afraid they might lose their right to own other human beings as livestock. 

The same is true of our inability to believe we have given material and financial backing to the kinds of murderous, tyrannical dictators American politicians are constantly accusing domestic activists of wanting to become. We have concentration camps on our southern border because we have spent decades refusing to acknowledge the barbarity we backed, trained and armed in Latin America, the very proof we've been inclined to some deeply fascist inclinations. We rendered that reality unpossible. It's unpossible our activities in Latin America could have been what they were and that they contribute to the current situation. Now, those who have been the victims of the same barbarity, who've demonstrated a belief in the American Dream deep enough to travel thousands of miles on foot are themselves accused of being criminals, terrorists and rapists. On this last count, being accused of being a rapist, this seems to only carry weight when the identity of the person accused isn't that of one of the wealthy elites who can further the careers and political desires of the very same people who've invited a terrorist ideology into the mainstream. Being an accused rapist seems to only slow you down when you're not a wealthy, white, male and don't have a knack for convincing other white people that poor brown people fleeing violence and degradation want nothing more than the blood of white people and sexual conquest of white women. Let's not discount that there's an attempt underway to categorize those who've been attempting to defend their communities and cities from the exact ideologies who've been consistently cranking out terrorists as "the real terrorists" as well. At this moment, the effort to render an idea like community or communal self defense as unpossible. 

Under the guise of being civil, the American political landscape has become a kind of limbo. The unpossible is always possible, and the plainly realistic is always controversial, and rarely reasonable. Oddly, even with the fact that American politics has always had certain fascist sympathies, antifascist organizing has never drawn enough support to be recognized as existing until recently. Somehow, there seems to be no recognition that the arrival of dedicated fascist groups is exactly why antifascist organizing has drawn so much support. We can't even seem to be able to agree how many of these groups are fascist when they march around with a bunch of people carrying swastikas. Okay, maybe they're not all Nazis, but we're being asked to make these distinctions by people who've made their careers in politics, media and government by refusing to acknowledge the gulf in the politics of say Barack Obama and Stalin. To suggest Nancy "We are capitalists" Pelosi is akin to Trotsky or Lennon is a daily a occurrence for people now begging us to make the distinction that the people running around next to the guys carrying the swastikas aren't Nazis, and to really dig deep into their proclamations about whether they're fasicsts, of course this is aside from the number of them deeply invested in not being replaced by Jews and other lesser beings. 

Some of this has to be laid at the feet of status and respectability obsessed liberal institutions and "leaders". The world is not a college debate competition. As soon as you've let your opponent on the stage, you've indicated they deserve to be debated. A good deal of the liberal intelligentsia has continued to be dedicated to the idea that Nazis need to be debated into obscurity, which fails to take into account that you need to keep finding Nazis to debate, which keeps them from fading into obscurity. Again, it's an odd turn of events that those of us who've been fully supportive of a campaign to deplatform fascists are now watching the central political institution of American liberalism refuse to have a debate amongst it's own candidates about the best ways to attempt to address climate change. The feeling is deeply consistent with that of being told to debate Nazis by people who are going to be at the bottom of the list of targets when fascists gain enough support and momentum to start acting on their agenda en masse, as opposed to the ad hoc implementation happening now.  Deplatforming climate change actions is fine, but deplatforming Nazis is a threat to all that is free and American. That these are the chosen actions of "leadership" should tell us everything we need to know really. 

If the United States is going to in any way prevent the slide into fascist rule, it's not going to be due to the leadership which has been at the helm of it's political, social and economic institutions. As much as the repetitive chant is for us to be reasonable, the state of affairs that is reality suggest those who've been in charge of deciding what is and isn't reasonable have failed in that endeavor, spectacularly, and systematically. 

This doesn't mean we're going to recognize these realities. Of course, we have been turning to the unpossible specifically because we would rather not have to address realities which are either too uncomfortable or would require too much sacrifice or discomfort on our part. I'm certainly not immune to enjoying entertainment about the glory of righteous battles and all that. Give me a great story about Spider-Man punching it out with some outlandishly costumed super villain who wants to turn the inhabitants of New York into scuttling rats he or she will use to power some cosmic ray to call in an army of multi-dimensional squid people. It's great fun, and I enjoy it. With great power comes great responsibility and all that. 

Individually though, we don't have great power. We know this. We experience it daily. Going through the slow grind and slog of existing in this surreal, unpossible reality. Power for the majority of us comes directly from the fact that we do exist in the unpossible reality. We are the grind and slog. The filling that makes the sausage, the grease on the gears and the gears. This unpossible reality is established specifically so we continue to be those things no matter what else happens. It's exactly this which makes the creation of the unpossible necessary. If we understood the truth of how Rosa Parks came to make the decision that she was not moving to the back of the bus, we'd understand better how our own journeys and our own grind and slog could be used to create a different possible. If we understood the lessons she learned before making that decision were what lead to that decision, we might understand that we could all be making different decisions about the how and when and where we acquiesce. When we understand that Bayard Rustin being pushed into the unpossible history because he was gay did an enormous harm to the generations of LGBT Black children in the name of patriarchal white supremacy, we understand that these are not the separate matters reactionary forces have always used to divide and conquer. When we begin to learn the lessons they have to teach us, we begin to understand where our strength comes from and where our responsibility lies. 

Our strength comes from our refusal to sacrifice each other and it is our responsibility to each other to act in accordance with that reality. These are the avenues to new possibilities. Unlikely as it is to ever come to pass, we should remember that throughout our history, our real history, people like us, who have had little access to the levers of power, have done what was considered impossible. It's our decision to make at this point, as it is plainly clear all of those who we may have looked to for leadership are absolutely incapable of providing anything like the leadership we need.