A boat made from human fingernails

I am standing on stage pointing to a picture of Richard Nixon shaking hands with Chairman Mao. I point to the man on the left, and ask my students what they think of him. A good guy. Then I point to Richard Nixon on the right. They also think he was a good guy. I chose the slide because we are doing a class on culture and the person writing the text talks about how her students reacted negatively to the the way Chairman Mao was portrayed in a movie about Richard Nixon. In the US there would be a variety of perspectives on these two world leaders: Conservatives would say good things about Nixon and bad things about Mao, Liberals would probably see them both as power-hungry, and there are still some leftists who might say good things about Mao and bad things about Nixon. Most of my students are fairly apolitical, and I have met people in China who voice grudges against Mao for family reasons. And this is not a secret, discussion of this is kept out of public forums, but no one seems to worry that their attitudes will contaminate the greater number of families who remember Mao positively. Nonetheless I think it is significant that among politicized people in the US, few would take the attitude of my students, generally favorably disposed to global leaders from both countries. It reminds me that one of the hangups of the left, the need to renounce American power, is not necessarily a big deal to all foreigners. When some one like Sharon Stone starts talking about the bad karma foreign governments have accumulated the Chinese may question whether it is the place of a blonde in California to second-guess Chinese decision-making. But I think people like my students are only interested in confronting Americans to avoid the pot calling the kettle black, and object to the Chinese government being held accountable to a standard no other government has demonstrated it is possible to achieve. I'm not sure my students would accept criticism of Chairman Mao and his successors just because it comes from some one who spews equal opportunity criticism against Nixon or other Western leaders. I actually had one student, an adult, who chose the name Nixon, as his English name, in tribute to the man who opened a door between the United States and what at the time was the second-most powerful nation ruled by the Communist Party. People are aware of Watergate, but the way it transformed Western attitudes toward the American government, and governments in general, is something most Chinese have been insulated from.


Later during a break between periods, one of my students commandeers the projector to show a video from American idol. It is interesting to me to observe that ideas from Hollywood and Madison Avenue about entertainment have penetrated China so thoroughly, while ideas from Washington about governance have not. Chinese movies are different from Western ones, in terms of the portrayal of sexuality, deference to authority, and familial relationships. Chinese pop music also tends to shy away from the exuberance of Rock and Roll, and sounds more like the 80s pop music I grew with. But it is interesting to see how at least college students show so much interest in imitating American pop culture, while showing much less interest in imitating American elections. People are interested in Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton just as they are in people who rose to the top in fields of sports and music—but they show less interest in importing the political game they play, than basketball and music videos.


My family were liberals in a very conservative town. I remember that in Middle School once we had a mock election in which only six or so of 300 people voted for Walter Mondale over Ronald Reagan. I was one of those six. In High School, I learned that the best way to get along with my classmates involved not discussing politics much.


When I got to college I was in a much more politically liberal environment—however I ended up with a conservative roommate. Every so often I would try to tell him about some horrible thing Reagan or Bush had done, and was honestly amazed when he refused to act ashamed. I would shout some sort of consciousness-raising slogan about “How can you think that...” and would refuse to give an inch. Now that I have been on the receiving end of that sort of easy sloganeering, I realize that communication with some one who assumes they understand what's inside your head better than you do isn't really possible. When some one assumes they know both what you are thinking and what you should think it has ceased to be a relationship between human beings and my roommate's response is the only way I've ever figured out to handle someone exhibiting the attitude I did in those moments. No one's opinions can be summed up in a single sentence, and anyone who thinks that the type of slogans you shout at political rallies contribute anything to personal relationships with people who go to other sorts of rallies is not some one it is not worthwhile to engage with. At those moments, I wasn't treating my roommate as a fellow human being, but more the way a dog barks at some one who has stepped over the line. And what really matters in a situation like that, isn't the content of what comes out of the mouth, it is whether the dog is chained up. And looking back now, I can see that, like most American leftists, I was on a leash, and it wasn't Reagan supporters like my roommate who were holding the other end.


My parents taught me a certain set of things to be ashamed of. They certainly hadn't all stuck, but in the political arena, one of the implications of those values was that Reagan was wrong. My roommates' parents had not taught him to be ashamed of Ronald Reagan. They had taught him manners: like most conservatives I met in college he was far more polite and considerate in personal interactions than I was. His parents had not inculcated the same level of self-doubt and attendant neuroses. Avoiding war, or reaching the fabled point where bombers are financed with bake sales, was not a goal he saw himself as beholden to—during the first Gulf War he helped organize students at our University to make a public display of support for our servicemen and women. I was stuck in a series of arguments with people on both sides and unable to figure out what I actually believed was the right policy either for myself or for the government. I remember going to an antiwar rally and being frustrated by the messages I heard, most of which seemed to be preaching to the choir rather than the sort of outreach to people like my roommate or the people in my hometown which would be necessary to actually stop the war. I thought it would be good to stop Saddam but wasn't sure a war was the way to do it, and I thought it would be good to stop the war, but I wasn't sure shouting “No blood for oil” was the way to do that. And if I was second-guessing the president, it didn't seem too big a step to second-guess the people organizing a political rally. I knew anything I did would be basically symbolic, and I wasn't particularly satisfied with the type of symbolism I saw my side displaying. I understood the purpose of chants, but after they died down, I stood there, listening to the people directing the meeting and thinking “We're never going to stop it this way.” There is a glass ceiling to how far up the pyramid of decision-making certain ideas will rise, even when it is men voicing them.


In addition to political values, I also picked up certain lifestyle and environmental values. In the 1990s in Boston, I saw myself as a bicyclist and public transit user standing against the plague of cars. Once I was talking with an older man, a member of a generation when it was perfectly reasonable to support both public transportation and Ronald Reagan. Riding bicycles in Greater Boston you sometimes get harassed. People in vans pull up and yell insulting things, I had a fast food coke cup thrown at me while bicycling in subzero weather. It is also true that bicyclists, including me, often flagrantly disregard traffic laws—more regularly than we get harassed. The older man had a business counting cars so that engineers and planners like I was at that point in my life could figure out how to redesign traffic intersections. He and his wife rented me a small room in a Roxbury triple decker which other than acquiring his and hers Macintosh computers hadn't changed much since the 1940s. Over dinner he once expressed the feelings which seeing my vehicle in the downstairs entrance aroused.

“You cannot watch an intersection for fifteen minutes in Boston without seeing a cyclist violate the law in a way which would get them immediately arrested in Amsterdam. They are arrogating the privilege of using a vehicle without the sense of responsibility toward others on the road which should come with it. I would like to use a bicycle here the way I do in Europe, but I cannot bring myself to identify with them. Your people need to learn lessons about responsibility from motorcycle riders. It is not a prejudice—it is a postjudice.”

My immediate reaction was to blurt out something about the guys in the vans—but I was living in his house, and I do not remember whether I bit my tongue, or began to speak and was cut off. He was my elder, a Boston native, and some one who lived his life without owning a car. His response forced me to consider that whether one is harassed and whether one should flaunt the law are separable issues. While living under his roof I actually did engage in acts of civil disobedience, organized by elder cyclists, and coordinated with Boston police officers. But that meant something different than speeding by cars who obeyed traffic laws while congratulating myself on not causing air pollution. I also recognize that his hostility towards Boston cyclists, like a hostility towards Boston drivers, was a hostility to an attitude, not to the mode of transportation as such. He wasn't saying it was wrong to identify with a lifestyle alternative, just pointing me to a European model rather than the American one—or motorcyclists, who, unlike bicycle users, often vote Republican. The phrase: “It is not a prejudice—it is a postjudice” stays with me. Living with both of these Reagan supporters forced me to recognize that some of my own attitude towards conservatives—not the ones my parents had taught me, but the ones I picked up from my peers--were prejudices. That despite the slogans we shouted back and forth at each other, there was thought, consideration, and lived experience involved in their attitudes. I was often more ignorant of their beliefs and arguments than they were about mine.


Both the younger man and the older man had working class parents. I remember talking with another student from California about why people like this supported Ronald Reagan. She had worked a year on the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign and assured me there was no need to trouble my pudgy liberal head about that. “You see, that's just false consciousness.” It is true that children of the working class who attend Harvard may not be completely representative of broader working class attitudes, but it seems odd to believe that some one else who attends Harvard and only visits those neighborhoods for political rallies understands those attitudes better. The attitudes people exhibit, and the types of decisions you see them make are different if you watch them over seventeen years solving problems related to work and family, than if you are trying to solve a different set of problems involved in creating political pressure over the course of a single year for a preacher no one expects to exercise executive power. The long-term impact of that campaign was to change certain primary rules so that the 2008 Democratic nominee was some one of African blood rather than the representative of the Clinton machine. Another time she talked about how awful it was that people had to pay their way through college doing manual labor. My roommate cleaned bathrooms in the dorms and I cleaned dirty plates in the dining hall, but she never inquired what either of us thought about the jobs, or what we thought about her implicit assumption that there could be a society in which no one had to do dirty work. The ideas she had picked up allowed her to claim the role of “voice of the oppressed” without bothering to listen to the people she claimed to be opening space for. When college-educated folks talk condescendingly about the false consciousness of working class people with conservative values, I tend to wonder if a tool of Marxist analysis designed to fight against bourgeois hegemony has instead ended up buttressing the traditional assumptions of folks with fancy resumes about the ignorance of the working class. The blue-bood of the aristocracy is often guilty of voicing proprietary attitudes about how the working class should behave, but I sense a different sort of proprietary attitude when a different sort of blue talks about how the working class should think.


Here in China, I teach about the Red State/Blue State divide our two-party system has created back home, and I think about its parallels in other countries, Likudniks in Israel, Ahmedinijad in Iran. In any multi-party democracy there are going to be some people who feel comfortable being identified with devil-may-care rhetoric, and some people who feel that more responsible language is the order of the day. These are simply different aspects of the human personality, and without an external threat, people in a representative democracy will gravitate around different poles. In a system with two political parties there are going to be highly skilled political operatives looking to corral as many people as possible into their respective herds by all sorts of means. This centrifugal force means that the search for a unitary, “authentic” political voice, actually detracts from understanding the polyphonic nature of political thought in a Republic with multiple political parties. Using wedges to splinter the general will is the point of political parties. So that the true search is not for what attitude everyone in the Republic should have, but for what stance children of families like your own should have. And, as in the West Bank and Northern Ireland, part of that struggle is for the fruitfulness which will produce those who will take their stands in the next generation. When I lived in Guatemala, I accepted the idea that politics were less advanced because there were so many political parties, and many came into being around a single politician. But I also consider that the shorter lifespan also reduces animosity a generation later. It may be a good thing that no one in Guatemala will grow up as I did, with a familial obligation to feel hostility to the successors of Nixon and Reagan thirty years after the fact.


If Francis Fukuyama was right that liberal democracy was the end of History—not in terms of events for journalists to write about but in terms of a need for novel thinking on the part of political scientists, then it seems likely that deadlocks like Bush v Gore in 2000, and similar occurrences in Mexico in 2006, Germany 2003, and Minnesota 2008 are the end of liberal democracy. The rise of men like Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee suggests that the next step may be a politician who can count on a bloc less by dint of party affiliation and more by ethnic or religious ties, that perhaps that political history will now head backwards towards the politics of the eighteenth century. It is also interesting to think about what these two men represent. Both evangelicals and left-progressives have a tendency to moral superiority and divisive rhetoric, being the most embarrassing part of their respective party coalitions. The holier-than-thou attitude derives in part from their roots, in the one case in ideas from Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell and the white evangelical church, in the other case from Dr King, Jesse Jackson and the black evangelical church. Huckabee and Obama show a possibility of retaining a continuity with the best of their respective traditions with slightly less moral smugness.


My parents taught me that Reagan was wrong—and I followed up by reading books and listening to songs written by people who took the same view to Reagan and Thatcher. For me phrases like the Dole and police brutality were words rather than personal experience, but listening to Punk and Oi music I internalized the hostility toward the government, police, and Tories which resounds in those words: “The Tory party still stands for, mass unemployment and poverty, a them and us society.”

I have met several foreign teachers from the UK: more than a decade younger than me and too young to remember the eighties. Their parents taught them to remember what Thatcher did to their people: to the working class, to the North of England, to Catholics in Northern Ireland. As my friend from Northern Ireland put it, it wasn't that Thatcher was evil, it was that she was looking out for a different group of families. Because of these bases of tribal solidarity, a generation later they view Thatcher with stronger negatives than most US citizens in view Ronald Reagan. Air Traffic Controllers are not mineworkers, what James Watt did to federal lands is different from English industry, and although Central America was much bloodier than Northern Ireland, it does not exercise the same influence over the minds of people in the fifty states. The conflict there did not get the press you achieve with tube bombings and hunger strikes in the Maze. We have also only been interfering in Central America for a century and a half, far less history than the Brits have in Ireland. Thatcher was able to hold a line, both against the IRA, and against her political opponents in her own nation, and many of the boundaries she fought to preserve on the island endured even after she and her party fell from power. I think about this reading about the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo in Cuba, who drank the same cup as Bobby Sands.


Teaching English Composition and British History I have come to reconsider Thatcher. I identified with people who attributed their suffering to her. But looking back at the alternatives, I have come to realize that people who looked at her the way my roommate looked at Reagan also had some grounds for their perspective.


The Queen of France, Marie Antoinette famously said “Let them eat cake.” It is generally understood that this was not meant as cruelly as it sounds. She lived in a world in which cake was the ever-present alternative to bread—that others might face a more limited set of options was something she never considered. It was an unrealized assumption, which we all make. Like the ones I made when consciousness raising prompted me to confront my roommate with the prejudices I projected into his head.


A similar phrase for Margaret Thatcher is “There is no such thing as society.” And I think it is instructive to compare the significance of these two phrases in both the short and the long term.


Even before political parties there were always people advocating for the needs of the dispossessed. There are also people enforcing the boundaries of the established order, who must ration things and say “no.” Within this class based functional analysis the words of Thatcher, and of Marie Antoinette have the same significance, a justification for saying no to the demands of the representatives of the disenfranchised.


But as arguments and contributions to the long-term political dialog, these words mean something different. I studied Emile Durkheim and and I know very well that there is such a thing a society—rates of suicide, crime and teen pregnancy are stable enough that it makes sense to talk about society in much the same way that it makes sense to speak about a herd of sheep or a body of water, and the recurrent patterns one notices with long-term observation. There are laws of human society which get enforced by statistically consistent population-wide behavior regardless of the laws police officers are told to enforce.


On the other hand, it it also true that the word “society” or “I blame society” was being used in a very irresponsible way in the 1980s. If an individual cannot be held responsible for his actions, it makes even less sense to hold society responsible—society cannot be given a talking to, slapped on the wrist, or sentenced to jail. There is no such accountable moral actor as society. Moreover, the very statistics which show that society is a stable quantity also show that it cannot be easily reshaped by legal fiat—changes in society are gradual and involve changes in the individuals who make it up. There is such a thing as social science, but it has not developed the level of predictive power of chemistry or physics. Thatcher had a degree in Chemistry and worked on methods for preserving ice cream. Like anyone doing practical research, she had to test and discard several mistaken ideas about the nature of ice cream, and she may have recognized that people talking about blaming society as a whole for things they did not feel comfortable blaming the individuals composing it did not understand the properties of the mixture well enough to successfully preserve it. When you describe your own culture as monolithic, external, and wholly malevolent you are not contributing to the sort of dialog necessary to successfully transform it.


Statements about society in the 1980s were often employed for political ends rather than for analytical coherence. Like “spontaneous generation” and other theories prevalent in physical science circles in the nineteenth century, it was a type of explanation, but one which actually made people less likely to find an answer. Because “society” was an incoherent concept, it was in a certain sense like the cake which Marie Antoinette thought working class families could eat, a logically reasonable extrapolation based on limited experience, but demonstrably unwarranted to people whose experience was wider. Both Thatcher and her opponents can be usefully compared to Marie Antoinette: Thatcher from a standpoint of class and power relationships and her opponents in terms of logic and analysis. Which conclusion you view as objective depends on which analytic framework you prioritize. Marie Antoinette said no in a way which attempted to show that other peoples' emotions were unreasonable. Thatcher said no by holding their arguments unreasonable without having to judge the validity of their emotions. Unlike the queen of France, the grocer's daughter from Lincolnshire managed to say no without making unwarranted assumptions about the options in other peoples' lives. It was both an argument and a function of where she was embedded in the political system. For Margaret Thatcher to cut off the representatives of the working class because she was a Tory Prime Minister also had a different significance than a Jesse Jackson volunteer cutting off my comments about what it was like to pay my way through college serving coffee because I was colonized by false consciousness.


The Tories are traditionally the party of the aristocracy and the police in their role as protectors of private property. Both groups tend to acquire experience with how large groups of people function over long periods of time—who can often observe that at the level of implementation, many of the innovative solutions proposed by social scientists are not quite as novel as they think. A social scientist or someone who works in an office can dismiss certain non-linear observations as unscientific, but a police officer or military commander whose life is on the line has to use a different analytic framework. Bad things would have happened to individual members of the working class no matter which party was in power and Thatcher used her power to ensure that these bad things would be distributed according to established patterns, so that the expertise of her allies would remain valid. The things you shout after consciousness-raising involve dehumanizing people with the goal of destabilizing the system, police dehumanize people to maintain order and stability.


Liberalism in the 1980s was supposed to help us find alternative ways of thinking. Among these I think are getting beyond “Us versus them” “Might makes right” and avoiding conflict by looking at things from the other person's point of view. I am beginning to think that these goals are actually impossible to achieve. The recent dust up between Gordon Brown and Gillian Duffy is phrased as an issue of bias, but in a certain sense it is really an encounter between two different ways of phrasing “us versus them.” We the native Britons as distinguished from dirty Eastern Europeans, or We the enlightened liberals against small-minded bigots. Each attitude can be expressed in both a reasonable and a morally superior manner, but what the encounter illustrates is that getting beyond us versus them, may not actually be possible, certainly in an adversarial party political system. The one thing which can be hoped for is that political leaders and the people they claim to speak for have a somewhat compatible vision of what the relevant version of us-versus-them is.


I endorse the heritage of King and the Kennedys, but one thing I consider is that these liberal platitudes sound somewhat out of place in their mouths. Kennedy got elected partly because of his allegations that the Eisenhower administration was too soft on communism, and there was a missile gap. There are also some things about his defeat of Richard Nixon in the 1960 election in Chicago which, if investigated, could have been blown into a Watergate. Martin Luther King differed from Gandhi in believing that military conflict with Hitler could be justified. King struggled to articulate a point of view for his people, but he knew very well that he could not expect everyone to see it that way. His most famous speech talked about the promises of the Declaration of Independence not as a fraud, but as a default, a promissory note marked insufficient funds.


Every so often every English teacher thinks about George Orwell. I think about his idea of thoughtcrime, the way people react to a certain statement as unreasonable or unwarranted. I continue to believe in the value of the liberal idealism of Kennedys and King, and in the need to maintain alternatives to the automobile. But pundits on both sides of the political divide in the US end up dismissing certain ideas of their opponents in a way that sounds like “thoughtcrime!” The sky has never fallen, but you do notice roof tiles falling to the ground with a resounding crash. But despite my feelings about people from the liberal tradition who fell to assassins bullets, I find the ideas of most of those claiming their legacy less persuasive than I find many conservative ideas. If you believe in CIA conspiracies behind those assasinations, that shows that this one may have achieved its objectives. The reasons conservatives give for rejecting certain ideas seem more solid, even when my preferred response is to rehabilitate liberalism rather than go the neo-Con route. Having worked with Creationists, I am not even sure that the limitations on discourse imposed by Creationism will prove as pernicious an influence on free inquiry as political correctness has in the parts of the academy where it holds sway. Railroads, steamships, and the telegraph were all invented before the Origin of Species was written—you can create intelligent designs for technological progress without a belief in evolution. One hundred years ago, Peter Kropotkin already pointed out that despite Darwin's own feelings, his book was deployed to buttress a bulldozer's perspective of progress, ruthless competition and exclusivity which it was worth seeking an alternative to. That my true task, as it was when I went to Central America, was to seek alternatives to particular policies and alliances of Reagan and Thatcher, without treating the words they said as an abomination. General Lee could fight George McClellan without thinking Lincoln (another president from Illinois) was a fool or a tyrant. In a tribal worldview you can see some virtues in even your deadliest opponents. In the wake of consciousness-raising, another issue is that in some cases you demonstrate your solidarity with the values of the working class more by the criticisms you refrain from making than by the criticisms you make. And sitting in the resurgent China left behind by the Great Helmsman, I wonder if our nation will be stronger if we also consider that the Great Communicator was seventy percent right.


Thatcher said that there is no such thing as society, “there are individual men and women and there are families.” It is quite probable that every country will produce some leaders whose job it is to say “no” to the the representatives of the working class. Undoubtedly they will do so with reference to how other people ought to behave. And it is better if those who do so, do so by asking people to think about families than if they do so by talking about cake and prejudice.