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Editor:
This is a meaty read n’ heed of major proportions. I’d say that it’s worth a reread… Brother Cornel speaks some home truths here. To revisit Chernyshevsky and Ilyich… What is to be done?
BMD
We live in one of the darkest moments in American history… a bleak time of spiritual blackout and imperial meltdown. Exactly 25 years ago, in my book Race Matters, I tried to lay bare the realities and challenges to American democracy in light of the doings and sufferings of black people. Back then, I reached heartbreaking yet hopeful conclusions. Now, the heartbreak cuts much deeper and the hope has nearly run out. The nihilism in black America has become a massive spiritual blackout in America. The undeniable collapse of integrity, honesty, and decency in our public and private life has fuelled even more racial hatred and contempt.
The rule of Big Money and its attendant culture of cupidity and mendacity have so poisoned our hearts, minds, and souls that a dominant self-righteous neoliberal soulcraft of smartness, dollars, and bombs thrives with little opposition. The escalating military overreach abroad, the corruption of political and financial elites at home, and the market-driven culture of mass distractions on the internet, TV, and radio push toward an inescapable imperial meltdown, in which chauvinistic nationalism, plutocratic policies, and spectatorial cynicism run amok. Our last and only hope is prophetic fight-back… a moral and spiritual awakening that puts a premium on courageous truth-telling and exemplary action by individuals and communities.
The distinctive features of our spiritual blackout are threefold. First, we normalise mendacity and naturalise criminality. We make our lies look like the normal order of things. Moreover, we make our crimes look like the natural order of things. We too often say Wall Street is a good servant… rather than a bad master… of the common good. Then we look away from the criminal behaviour of big banks because they’re too indispensable to prosecute. We deny that drone strikes kill innocent people abroad. Then, we overlook killing lists on Terror Tuesday at the White House, when a president and his staff can decide to kill people without any legal procedure, including, sometimes, US citizens.
Second, we encourage callousness and reward indifference. We make mean-spiritedness look manly and mature. Moreover, we make cold-heartedness look triumphant and victorious. In our world of the survival of the slickest and the smartest, we pave the way for raw greed and self-promotion. We make cowardice and avarice fashionable, and compassion an option for losers. We prefer market-driven celebrities who thrive on glitzy spectacles and seductive brands to moral-driven exemplars who strive on with their gritty convictions and stout-hearted causes.
Third, we trump the moral and spiritual dimensions of our lives and the world by applauding our short-term gains and superficial successes. This immoral and brutal disposition reinforces… and, in part, is a result of… the all-encompassing commoditisation of a predatory capitalism, running out of control in our psyches and societies. The pervasive violence in our domestic lives and military policies abroad are inseparable from the profit-driven marketisation of our spiritually impoverished capitalist civilisation. Our civilisation rests upon an American empire in decline and decay.
Imperial meltdown is at the centre of our catastrophic times. Our ecological catastrophe is real. The Anthropocene epoch engulfs us. Human practises… especially big business and big military operations… now so deeply influence the Earth’s atmosphere that extinctions loom large. The potential for nuclear catastrophe remains urgent as USA-Russia tensions escalate and other nuclear powers, like the DPRK, China, Pakistan, India, and Israel, are expanding and restless. Our economic catastrophes proliferate along with grotesque wealth inequality. Our political catastrophes deepen as oligarchy triumphs from governmental dysfunction. Our civic catastrophes deepen as big money undercuts the public interest, common good, or even rule of law. Our cultural catastrophes are often hidden… the vast and sad realities of trauma and terror visited upon vulnerable fellow citizens who are disproportionately poor people, LGBTQ people, peoples of colour, women, and children.
The political triumph of Donald Trump is a symbol and symptom… not cause or origin… of our imperial meltdown. Trump is neither alien nor extraneous to American culture and history. In fact, he’s as American as apple pie. He’s a sign of our spiritual bankruptcy… all spectacle and no substance, all narcissism and no empathy, all appetite and greed and no wisdom and maturity. His triumph flows from the implosion of a Republican Party establishment beholden to big money, big military, and big scapegoating of vulnerable peoples of colour, LGBTQ peoples, immigrants, Muslims, and women. It also flows from a Democratic Party establishment beholden to big money, big military, and the clever deployment of peoples of colour, LGBTQ peoples, immigrants, Muslims, and women to hide and conceal the lies and crimes of neoliberal policies here and abroad; and from a corporate media establishment that aided and abetted Trump owing to high profits and revenues.
The painful truth is there’s no Donald Trump without Barack Obama, no neofascist stirrings without neoliberal policies… all within the imperial zone. Obama was the brilliant black smiling face of the American Empire. Trump is the know-nothing white cruel face of the American Empire. Obama didn’t produce Trump, but his Wall-Street–friendly policies helped facilitate Trump’s pseudo-populist victory. Obama’s reluctance to confront race matters in a serious and substantive manner didn’t cause the ugly white backlash, but Obama’s hesitancy didn’t help the opposition to white-supremacist practises. More pointedly, both Obama and Trump… two different faces of the imperial meltdown… supported military build-ups, wars against Muslim-majority countries, drone strikes, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people, illegal imprisonments of innocent people, night raids on poor Muslim families, and inhumane detention camps. These war policies and war crimes came back to devour what’s left of America’s democratic soul.
So how do we respond to our dark times? The greatest tradition of the prophetic fightback in the American Empire is the black freedom struggle. The greatest tradition of moral and spiritual fortitude in the American Empire is the black musical tradition. The artistic excellence in the best of black music… including the magnanimity and majesty of the sound… sets the standards for the black freedom struggle. These standards consist of radical freedom in love and radical love in freedom… the freedom to tell the truth in love about one’s self and the world, and the love of the truth as one freely speaks and lives. The Movement for Black Lives is a grand sign of hope. It is an exemplary collective effort to put the prophetic fight back in our bleak moment of imperial meltdown and spiritual blackout. The prophetic vision and social analyses of the Movement for Black Lives begin with the most vulnerable, such as the precious LGBTQ people subject to massive trauma and terror.
In this way, the terror and trauma suffered by the people in Gaza, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and India (especially with Dalit peoples) are inseparable from the trauma and terror in Baltimore, Ferguson, Oakland, and Chicago. Another sign of hope is Rev William J Barber II, the most Martin-Luther-King–like figure in our time. His Moral Monday movement and now the Poor People’s Campaign is, alongside people such as Fr Michael Pfleger and his great ministry at St Sabina Church in Chicago IL, Rev Katie M Ladd at Queen Anne United Methodist Church in Seattle WA, and Rev Michael McBride at the Way Christian Center in Berkeley CA, the last hope for prophetic Christianity in America.
Like the Movement for Black Lives, the 8 March 2017 women’s mobilisation was a grand sign of hope. It shattered the neoliberal hegemony of the Women’s March of 21 January 2017 over the “feminist” label. In stark contrast to the fashionable corporate feminism, boss feminism and top-down feminism of the corporate media, the 8 March women’s mobilisation put class matters, gender matters, and LGBTQ matters at the centre of race matters and empire matters. The historic moment of Standing Rock, in which indigenous nations came together in a struggle for sacred lands, self-respect, and control over resources was another grand sign of hope.
Race matters in the 21st century are part of a moral and spiritual war over resources, power, souls, and sensibilities. There can be no analysis of race matters without earth matters, class matters, gender matters, and sexuality matters and, especially, empire matters. We must have solidarity on all these fronts. As we fight back, we remember the great visionary and exemplary figures and movements of the past. These precious memories focus our attention on things that really matter… not spectacle, image, money, and status but integrity, honesty, dignity, and generosity. This focus locates and situates us in a long tradition of love warriors… not just polished professionals or glitzy celebrities… but courageous truth-tellers that fell in love with the quest for justice, freedom, and beauty.
14 January 2018
Cornel West
The Guardian
Voices from Russia 
Trump’s Vulgarity Points to a Painful Truth
Tags: Barack Obama, Donald Trump, political commentary, politics, United States, USA
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As if to open up the New Year in a blaze of controversy, the man who now sits in the US presidential office is said to have made some of his most flammable comments yet. No stranger to controversy, the Commander-in-Chief allegedly described Haiti and certain African countries as “shithole countries” in a meeting held to address immigration reform. Spontaneously, and almost as one, the world’s media erupted in a firestorm of outrage and rebuke, not, of course, without good reason. The UN condemned US President Donald Trump’s alleged comments in the strongest terms, as Patrick Gaspard, the US ambassador to South Africa under Barack Obama, reflected mournfully:
One can empathise with Gaspard’s shock, in particular, as it is hard to imagine his former paymaster, Obama… a poised and polished speechmaker and an ardent and vocal advocate of global equality and integration… ever giving life to such vulgar and atavistic utterances. yet … whilst it’s safe to assume Obama would never describe other countries as “shitholes”, the briefest perusal of his international record suggests he didn’t have much of a problem in treating them like it. For every hour in his last year in office, he dropped on average of nearly three bombs on other countries. He expanded by 130 percent the number of military operators who were active internationally during the Bush administration. He launched attacks or military raids in country after country… Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. Under his watch, the use of drone technology became endemic.
Indeed, there’s something rather fitting about the use of the drone in the time of Obama.. a smooth, efficient, and utterly clinical form of murder and destruction which was, at the same time, eerily abstracted from the source, the people who had set it into motion. No longer soldiers on the ground, but professional analysts working in pristine sanitised offices, gazing into the hypnotic glow of gently flickering screens, thousands of miles removed from the stench and spatter of exploded bodies and shredded bones. The outrage towards the obscenity of the real visceral acts of mass slaughter in the Obama era seems strangely muted when compared with the recent response to the words of obscenity said to have been sputtered by bellicose, blundering, and tantrum-prone President Trump.
Perhaps, this is key… under Obama, all the routine murderousness of the Establishment… whether it be overseas in impoverished countries or the judicially sanctioned murder of so many disproportionately black youth back home… all of this was to some degree ameliorated by Obama’s progressive image. His smoothness, his intellect, his thoughtful charisma, that practised and polished bourgeois sense of respectability… not to forget, of course, the obligatory and subtle nod he gave to the great civil rights movement so some of its lustre might transfer itself to him.
Trump, on the other hand, brings all the ugliness to light in one vomitous belch after the next. To put it in Freudian terms, it’s as if he has come to represent the “id” of ruling class power, and it seems to me that liberals of the Obama-Clinton stripe despise him for this. They hate him not simply because he’s such an awful specimen, but because with heavy-handed arrogance and crass vulgarity Trump reveals naked truths about the political Establishment, about the deployment of its power, and the everyday racist, misogynistic, and murderous implications of that power. He represents the darkest, most atavistic “id” of the political ruling wing, bubbling up from the underbelly, breaching the progressive veneer; he embodies the ugly narcissistic rabid self-interest of a deformed minority… the very same thing liberalism expends all its powers on rendering invisible.
However, the liberal tradition has always been adept at keeping two sets of books. The man whom many consider its founding father, John Locke, would argue, with his breathless idealism, that the individual was “free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another”. At the same time, this paragon of liberty was himself an investor in one of the most grotesque and horrific projects of inhumanity and anti-freedom, that of the African slave trade. Less than a century later, the Founding Fathers drafted the 1787 constitution as a way by which they could consecrate “the blessings of liberty”. When the document is scrutinised in detail, various questionable sub-clauses, secreted away within the broader text, emerge. One sentence reads, for example:
Surely, this is the language of liberalism par excellence… there’s no mention of race, nothing overtly racist in it, and the dull precise legalese seems unobjectionable, almost snooze-worthy, when taken at a glance. However, when placed in the context of the time, the same words seem to curl and writhe like snakes once you realise the blackness which lies behind them; that person “held to Service or Labour” is, of course, the slave, and the “party” who claims such “service”… the slave owner. Such language is more than cynical; it’s horrific, in terms of its banality and bloodless emotion. Of course, it never uses the word “slave” itself, for that’d be too sharp, too vulgar, and too uncouth. Indeed, it’d point to the truth.
30 January 2018
Tony McKenna
al-Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/trump-vulgarity-points-painful-truth-180129113833746.html