My partner wants to show me something. It's late, we're on the couch, cozy. He loads up the game, and we're looking at aerial footage of some kind of village, black and white. An SUV pulls up, little figures emerge, swarm the screen. A voice tells him to fire (but not to damage the church), and the room fills with the thick thud of high caliber ammunition (where are we again? Russia?). "Look!" he says. "Do you see how the bodies go flying?"
This is old news, a well-worn debate, maybe not that interesting, even if the resolution is higher. Although maybe it is significant that this newest iteration "is a lot more violent," as he tells me.
***
On the radio they are discussing Charlottesville, one year later. A caller insists that Antifa are the ones responsible for the violence; one of the commentators is "disgusted", says that the white supremacists show up with their fists taped up, ready to fight, kicking and punching their way down the street, and Heather Heyer was not an isolated incident, and she was not just harmed, she was killed. I think again of the various debates I saw on facebook at the time about whether or not it is ok to punch a Nazi, and I think about every time I have taught Kant, and how Nazis are somehow too literal, but also strangely unspecific.
***
I wonder if this is the newest version of the Nazi punching debate, but I actually haven't seen anyone debating it, just a lot of delighted laughter. Humor is community, and humor is a coping mechanism, and it is also social critique and enforcement mechanism. When is violence funny?
***
We know it is hypocritical to revere Martin Luther King Jr. and advocate violence: this too, is old news. Or maybe the reverence provides cover; non-violence as the impossible meal for the anointed, knuckle sandwiches for the rest of us. And maybe his philosophy of non-violence is more nuanced than radical -- we are told he owned a gun. When I teach "Letter from Birmingham Jail," I always pause over the veiled threat in this paragraph:
I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the "do nothingism" of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as "rabble rousers" and "outside agitators" those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies--a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.
(It's a freshman comp class. How did it get so heavy all of a sudden? Arguments are serious business, my friends.)
***
Violence: a Syllabus. Wouldn't it be wonderful to spend a semester thinking about this with a bunch of smart students? We could read Benjamin and Arendt and Fanon and everyone would have a research project on some specific topic and they would curate the readings for a given week. And then we'd all have the space to think about it a little more.
This is old news, a well-worn debate, maybe not that interesting, even if the resolution is higher. Although maybe it is significant that this newest iteration "is a lot more violent," as he tells me.
***
On the radio they are discussing Charlottesville, one year later. A caller insists that Antifa are the ones responsible for the violence; one of the commentators is "disgusted", says that the white supremacists show up with their fists taped up, ready to fight, kicking and punching their way down the street, and Heather Heyer was not an isolated incident, and she was not just harmed, she was killed. I think again of the various debates I saw on facebook at the time about whether or not it is ok to punch a Nazi, and I think about every time I have taught Kant, and how Nazis are somehow too literal, but also strangely unspecific.
***
I wonder if this is the newest version of the Nazi punching debate, but I actually haven't seen anyone debating it, just a lot of delighted laughter. Humor is community, and humor is a coping mechanism, and it is also social critique and enforcement mechanism. When is violence funny?
***
We know it is hypocritical to revere Martin Luther King Jr. and advocate violence: this too, is old news. Or maybe the reverence provides cover; non-violence as the impossible meal for the anointed, knuckle sandwiches for the rest of us. And maybe his philosophy of non-violence is more nuanced than radical -- we are told he owned a gun. When I teach "Letter from Birmingham Jail," I always pause over the veiled threat in this paragraph:
I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the "do nothingism" of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as "rabble rousers" and "outside agitators" those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies--a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.
(It's a freshman comp class. How did it get so heavy all of a sudden? Arguments are serious business, my friends.)
***
Violence: a Syllabus. Wouldn't it be wonderful to spend a semester thinking about this with a bunch of smart students? We could read Benjamin and Arendt and Fanon and everyone would have a research project on some specific topic and they would curate the readings for a given week. And then we'd all have the space to think about it a little more.
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