Notes in the Margins: AOC's Dress and the Nassar Case
In this eleventh installment of 'Notes in the Margins', R.C. Roberts considers the ridiculous reaction to AOC's dress and notes how the Nassar Case reveals the weakness of our civil liberties
There is a Gaelic seanfhocal that always speaks to me before I start writing. On the worst of my days, it has the power to almost derail my impulse to write, and the power to make me laugh. The proverb? "Don't give cherries to pigs or advice to fools." In addressing the situation with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her dress, I feel like I am offering cherries to the pigs, animals I would never compare to the usual American; pigs are smart, gracious, inventive. And Americans are fools.
But enter that picture, having been circulated and circulated, over and over again, of Ms. Cortez in a dress which, in un-aesthetic fashion, had a phrase on it. 'Tax the Rich'. What does this mean? From eye level, where I sit, it means little more than a photo-op for a politician, who has been rewarded for this or that political handjob. A progressive capitalist went to the Met Gala and stood for a photo-op. The fruits of power were on display, and the woman who had traded her soul for tickets was offering false opposition.
But as I have always maintained, the truth is mundane and obvious; the whole of human history can be pinned down to our desire to make life interesting. The first myth we told, the first story we used to regale, kicked off everything else we attempted, from art to science to politics. As Erasmus said, the mind is not inclined to truth, but towards falsehood. And so, seeing a display of a relatively regular consequence of political trading, the hoi polloi smelled a fire without seeing any smoke. If you get your news purely from Twitter, Facebook, or your friendly neighborhood YouTuber, you would have thought that the words on Ms. Cortez's dress were sewn with scarlet yarn. It was as if they could only see the red A among all the letters on her dress.
On the Right, we heard the cries of knaves, either mimicking their media personalities, politicians, or redneck divines. Tucker Carlson turned this into a parade of lewdness; leave it to a man who used to wear a bowtie to lecture someone on how they dress. For the most part, the Right defended their oppressors, angry at Ms. Cortez for suggesting that the rich ought to be taxed, using lewd insinuations as a replacement for argument. In the face of power, the Right gets Freudian; suddenly, everything is about sex.
On the Left, we saw something like a melt down; on one side, the left-liberals elevated Ms. Cortez to the level of an ingenious activist. They wiped away any thought of the powers that brought Cortez to this point, giggling about 'how mad' everyone was. Satisfied with reactions in cyberspace, they became space cadets, content with remaining out of touch as long as it poked others' amygdalas.
Among the populist Leftists--Dores, Johnstones, Knights, etc--have leapt at the chance to feed the giggling psychosis of liberals (a word, curiously, they have shortened even more than it already is, suggesting such fine minds, no?), raging much like their far-right counterparts. As obedient consumers of the rage industry, they rage about performance in politics. Summoning up boogeymen like 'neo-feudal political economy', they gripe that this 'libtard' is not offering a real alternative to our situation. How she dresses is not a 'tangible act of reform'; because the Revolution so far has failed because we have not coordinated our outfits.
And finally, the theorists have descended upon this event, now a spectacle of retweets and photoshops, and given their explanations. Of the theorists, the most irritating have been the followers of the late Mark Fisher. They tell you to never meet your heroes. I would turn that on its head, however. Heroes should never meet their fans; they're idiots. And, lucky for Mark Fisher, he's dead and doesn't have to. His fans spent the last few days, since Ms. Cortez's appearance at the Met Gala, using her appearance as a sign of 'capitalist realism', a concept that Fisher created. In love with memes more than books, these fans took a picture of the Wikipedia article of Fisher's book and juxtaposed it onto a picture of Ms. Cortez in her dress. At twenty paces away, one cannot tell the difference between 'theorists' and parrots; they both repeat whatever they have heard. Sometimes, you need an autopsy to tell the difference.
They tell us Ms. Cortez represents capitalist interests; as a progressive congresswoman, this has never been in question. Her acts have a name we have used for decades; logrolling. The theorists show us how activism is folded into the capitalist 'spectacle', wishing to tell us, once again, about the loss of a future, a present that spreads infinitely. They meme the picture of her dress with the Wikipedia page of Mark Fisher's book Capitalist Realism--God forbid they actually read the book--and they begin repeating Zizek's phrase about how imagining apocalypse is easier than imagining the end of capitalism. It is almost as if they have come to the realization that America is, in fact, a capitalist country.
All of these reactions, of course, are the pathologies of politics; but no one said pathologies cannot be funny. Who does not giggle, a little, when someone goes about declaring they are Jesus or Napoleon? We know it is serious, a product of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia; but when they don a towel around their neck and call themselves Caesar, who doesn't chuckle?
This is politics. A balance between the serious pathologies and the comic symptoms they produce.
Like a politician turning the rewards of a political handjob into photo-op activism.
***
It is always a slightly annoying affair, when someone is accused of sexual harassment or assault. The tragedy of the circumstances, proven or otherwise, are usurped by people with opinions on the matter. On one side, you have people who say you must believe the victim, regardless of what is going on. The pronounce judgement before evidence is found. While I am not one to judge before evidence, I have taken to heart a phrase Christopher Hitchens used to say: take the side of the victim, support their struggle. And so, until proven otherwise, I am on the side of the victim.
This is often juxtaposed with people who, also without evidence, call for people to be wary. Often, they will dismiss claims of sexual assault, harassment, and even rape because 'they do not think it could have happened'. Even in cases as cut and dry as Ron Jeremy, I have been asked to show him sympathy, to consider that the accusations could be misconstrued or, even, nefarious. It makes me agree with Karl Kraus, who noted that when a man demands moral responsibility--and respectability--of a woman, it is because he lacks it. To dismiss them, they claim, is to dismiss due process; a process they skip over when asking for our unjustified sympathy with people who are accused of horrible things. People are innocent until proven guilty, and this extends to the plaintiff just as much as the defendant.
But as the case against Larry Nassar, the pervert physician, is investigated and negligence, corruption, and stupidities in its process are revealed, I await these sorts of scavengers to make their rounds. These 'critical thinkers', 'free thinkers', 'truth seekers' are merely passels of pinheads, whose concerns for 'the accused' tend to be political, and thus performative. In the face of the massive scale which measures the FBI's failure in addressing Nassar, I must ask about the role of due process in America. It seems to me that no one gets their due, they merely get processed.
This is not to say that civil liberties ought to be done away with; failures are bound to happen in any system. But, as is my approach to everything, the strategies we used in the past can become the pathologies of the present; due process has failed us, increasingly, throughout the years. It has come to fail victims of sexual abuse, and no amount of self-deprecating apologies will rectify this. And no appeal to this, by the aforementioned pinheads, is satisfying. A blind faith in the civil liberties of our Fidélean Republic, especially coming from Leftists, should be discounted on the fact that we have lost these civil liberties over the last couple of decades, not to mention the shifty history of their application anyhow. All of which Leftists, as at the very least critics of the United States, should consider. Don't confuse your ideals with the legalities of the nation; that's the kind of linguistic blindness that allows us to overlook our issues.
The importance of the Nassar affair isn't that it has revealed anything; after all, we have had bombshell after bombshell revealed about the American legal system and its inconsistencies and miscarriages of justice. No, what the Nassar affair has done is revealed how personal these inconsistencies get, where no one, not even the supposed revered like Olympic athletes, can escape its darkness. The Nassar affair is, in a sense, a case of high noon; it has revealed with penetrating light the obstacles without the cover of shadows. These are obstacles that relate just as much to the state of American cultures as it does to revelations by Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning about the role of the U.S. Government in squashing our civil liberties. You can either blindly trust our system and those civil liberties, or you can't. There are no two sides to this. And, I would hope, Leftists would understand this.
In a country with a terrible track record of protecting victims and defendants, united with social mores that have long promoted a conscious blindness towards sexual abuse of all stripes, what better advice can there be then Hitchens' dictum?
Take the side of the victim, support their struggle. Always.