Memorialize What?

Last night my eyes and ears were bombarded with coverage of maimed men and women in uniform being caressed by loved ones and crying while listening to really cheesy music on Capitol Hill. This is supposed to be the weekend when we all remember and give thanks for the sacrifices that other people made for our freedom. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad today’s a government holiday, because now I could sit around and this afternoon I could jam with a friend. But the reason for this holiday is pretty much fictional.

Granted, there are a few dead or wounded soldiers who really were or are heroes. But most of them were just victims of the state, and so deserve not our praise but our pity.

After I was subjected to those images on television my dad and I went to have dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant in San Jose. While waiting for our vegetarian combo, I got a call from my brother who told me of a young man in Long Beach who was hunted down on foot and trapped in an alley where he was shot and killed execution style. The guy had been involved in gang activity, and finally got what is not unusual for men and women in his trade.

There isn’t much relevant difference between the sacrifice this man made and the sacrifices made by those in uniform. The men and women in uniform have nicer outfits, bigger guns, a gang sign that you don’t need both hands to display, and the occasional self-righteous belief that what they’re doing is actually good for others. And if they do loose their lives while committing their gang activity, their names are projected in red white and blue on the ceilings of outdoor stages and their mothers are asked to read their last letters on TV.

I once had the privilege of seeing a grown man bullied into joining others in some act which may likely have been violent. He kept saying “No! I told you I don’t do that shit no more!” It didn’t really work, because after a while another man looked him in the eye, said a few strong words, and the man followed him into a black truck as a Mexican woman crossed her heart and looked at the sky. The men and women in uniform aren’t subjected to that kind of bullying. If they try to pull out of their gang activity, they could be kidnapped and locked in a room for a few years.

We’re supposedly honoring those who paid the price for our freedom (Christian idolatry, anyone?), but this holiday is meant instead to legitimize a process in which human beings are transformed into commodities to be spent for the convenience of others. And if this holiday really does what it’s meant to do, then it is part of that same commoditizing process. Of course that doesn’t really matter, since most of us treat it as just another day to have a beer and a bbq in a park.

College, Guns, and Texas

This is going to be the most bloggy type blog I've written in a while. I just read that the Texas senate passed a bill allowing college students and employees to carry guns on campus and into college buildings, given that they are over 21 and are licensed to carry concealed handguns. It does make a little sense. College students are walking targets, since by law they are forbidden from arming themselves, and everybody knows that police arrive on the scene AFTER the shooting happened. College students aren't safe in their own dorms, either. There is/was a serial rapist in San Diego who picked his victims in student housing at UCSD. There are basically no guards there, and I only knew of one student who kept a gun (and she wasn't supposed to). Needless to say, the guy struck more than once. Had he perceived a culture of gun ownership and use at the site, he might not have picked his targets there. And had there actually have been a culture of gun ownership and use, he might not have been able to strike more than once.

Now, if the method of deterring violent crime is to make known a culture of gun ownership and use, why allow students to only conceal and carry? Why not open carry? Would a man be deterred by guns that are tucked away under case books and laptops in girls' tote bags? Conceal and carry might be enough to allow a culture of gun use, which would be enough to stop violent crime when it happens on campus. But it won't be enough to prevent the crime from happening in the first place. Prevention requires a way to instantly command respect. And you know what would make a man respect a young woman? A gun on her hip.

I shouldn't be coming off as so pro-gun, however, because really I'm not. I just see guns as a temporary solution. Saying that a woman has a right to carry a gun and use it on whoever she perceives as a threat to her life is to allow a subjective standard. Proportionality is then defined in terms of what the woman perceives, rather than what threat is actually posed. If we had non-lethal weapons that neutralize the target as well as guns do, we wouldn't have to worry about people shooting to death scarry-looking men who they thought were going to kill them. (I should say, however, that some subjectivity is inevitable, since in the future days of non-lethal defence a woman would still be free to use her non-lethal weapon in accordance with her perception of the threat. But the risk of killing men who mean no harm would practically be zero.) Until those days, though, allowing individuals to carry handguns in holsters is the only way to ensure that an individual can protect him or herself.

Anthony Gregory, the Right, and War

Tuesday, Cinqo de Mayo, at the MLK Library in San Jose, was the first time my dad talked to a real-life anarcho-capitalist besides me and knew it. Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute and LRC was there speaking about anti-war sentiment on the political right.

There is a movement today called Paleoconservatism (think Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan) which casts its wistful gaze on a group in the mythical past called the “Old Right”. This group had a classically-liberal stance on economic issues and opposed the expansion of power in the Federal Government. Since it opposed big government, it also opposed war.

There is a lot of room in “Conservatism” for anti-war sentiment. If by “Conservative” we mean respect for religious tradition, appreciation of national heritage, love of individual freedom and distrust of big government, then conservatives have to be anti-war. In his writings on Just War, the 13th century Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas established that a war is not just unless it meets three conditions: it has a just cause (it isn’t a land grab for oil or anything like that), it’s fought through just means (unarmed civilians aren’t killed), and it’s winnable (an unwinnable war is needless bloodshed). This doctrine is a cornerstone of Catholic and protestant opinion on war. If we were to take our Christian heritage seriously, then we wouldn’t be so quick to defend America’s land grabs that kill civilians and can’t be won. In fact, we probably wouldn’t defend any war that the US has engaged in.

There is plenty of room in our limited-government heritage for anti-war attitudes. Edmund Burke, the supposed founder of conservatism, condemned British Imperialism in India and the Americas, and sympathized with that bunch of violent malcontents and illegal enemy combatants we call the American Revolutionaries. James Madison wrote that of all the threats to liberty, war is the greatest, for in it sits the germ for every other threat. War requires soldiers, who must be armed and fed, and that requires taxes.

Justin Raimondo, an editor and columnist on Antiwar.com, wrote in his book Reclaiming the American Right that there is an ideological continuum from the Old Right to the modern Paleoconservative and libertarian movements, that these groups were all markedly conservative compared to their opponents, and that today’s Neocons are the ideological spawn of Marxists, Socialists, and the Social Democrats who infested American politics and dominated during the war regimes of Wilson, FDR, Truman, and LBJ (all of whom were Democrats).

This “We are the real conservatives” view of anti-war conservatism is criticized by Jeff Riggenbach in his book Why American History Is Not What They Say. His chapter “The Myth of the Old Right” shows that the people in the Old Right weren’t really conservatives. They were just a bunch of pissed off liberals. They were in the classical paradigm of big government on the right and liberals on the left. Though their views on economics look a bit Reaganesque and would be conservative by our standards, they thought of themselves as relatively leftist. They voted for FDR because he condemned Hoover’s intervention in the economy and predicted it would only make the Depression worse, he called for preserving the gold standard, and he decried big government in general. After FDR did the exact opposite of what he promised, they all got disaffected and started speaking with reactionary overtones. Then comes the era of Ayn Rand’s novels about blowing up concrete eyesores and whatnot.

Riggenbach’s criticisms fall in line with the “We are the real liberals” view. From this perspective, the Neocons aren’t anything new when it comes to warmongering on the right. Conservatism has always had something to do with preserving presently-existing power structures, and has always worshiped authority, war, and the nation. The political right wasn’t hijacked by warmongers; it was rampant with warmongers all along.

Anthony Gregory said that both these views about the relationship between the right and war are too simplistic. Conservatism isn’t an ideology; it’s a temperament. And there’s room in this temperament for both anti-war and pro-war views. What makes conservatives reject foreign war isn’t some principled stance against initiating force against non-aggressors, but a perception of a particular war as going against America’s best interest. Buchanan roused opposition to US entry in the Balkan war when he said our boys shouldn’t be sacrificed for foreign interests. And conservatives happen to like war when they see the war as being in America’s best interest.

On the opposite side of the aisle, leftists oppose war when they see it as sacrificing foreigners to American economic imperialist interests, and they appreciate war when they perceive it as being in the interests of foreigners (“why’d you invade Iraq when there’s a genocide in Sudan?!”). War is most popular, Gregory added, when it is perceived as a sacrifice both for other people’s freedom and for America’s benefit.

Gregory went on to say that conventional American conservatives can turn anti-war, if they seriously examine their “conservative” values and alter their position to fit them. But such a thing won’t happen so easily.

After the formal part of the lecture, different people in the audience asked questions on how we can make conservatives anti-war. I asked what he thought of Molyneux’s “Against Me?” argument, and he said that it’s cleaver but divisive and a little incoherent, and not as persuasive as we wish it were. After a few more rounds of questions I asked him to give a short history on how he became an anarchist.

His answer to my question changed the night’s topic from the prospects of the political right becoming anti-war to WHY ANARCHO-CAPITALISM IS GOOD. And it was a lively, rich, and empowering discussion. He got in some people’s faces, like the brown-skinned social liberal with a British-ish accent who thought that government ensures the provision of services that the free enterprise doesn’t, and my dad, who raised his hand to identify himself as “pro-war” because he thought that he would be considered pro-war relative to everybody else there. The audience participated in the discussion as much as Gregory did, and I can’t tell whether the talk was good because there was a good audience, or because there was a good speaker.

Grateful for Everything?

It’s difficult to describe how liberated I felt parking my car the other Sunday morning and walking to a church door with no Bible in my hand. The white clapboards and four windows on the Friends Meeting House in San Jose can remind any viewer of an old country church with no steeple. There were wooden chairs inside, and wooden benches along the walls with embroidered pillows and cushions. If I remember right, each of the four windows had a little potted plant in its sill. I spent most of my time looking at the shapes the sun cast through the trees and windows onto the floor in front of me. The people there, who all looked like – well – Quakers in the San Francisco Bay area, didn’t do remarkably better than me at sitting still for an hour on end.

They don’t call it “silent worship” for no reason. I’ve been through a meeting in St Andrews where the whole hour passed without a word (not that that’s a bad thing). In this meeting, though, someone did stand and say something. A short-haired white lady about a decade older than me talked about gratitude. She mentioned that Faith and Practice describes the feeling and expression of gratitude as something that can add value and perspective to one’s life. She went on to say that there are two ways to be grateful. One way is to pick out the bright shiny happy things in life and give thanks for those blessings. The other way, which she learned from her yoga partner, is to be thankful for the whole of one’s life, even and especially the end of it. Her recent experience of losing a loved one gave her the opportunity to think about death and be grateful for it. Now that she is at peace with death, she can be at peace with herself in a way that she wasn’t before. She can even find comfort in the belief that here and now isn’t everything there is for us, that there is something “beyond this” that we can value.

I spent the remainder of the hour still looking at the light on the floor as before, but now with questions blazing through my head. Isn’t this what religion does in general? Doesn’t it tend to make us embrace all the world’s shortcomings? An infamous man once called religion the “opiate of the masses”, and for good reason. Not only does it tend to justify presently-existing power structures and property relations, it tends to justify anything and everything that makes a sentient being flinch. Religion, ideology, and philosophy make us view the killing of innocent beings not as murder, but as God’s will, or as the greatest good for the greatest number, or as Nature’s course. They discourage believers from following those very normal gut reactions that offer moral direction and say these reactions get in the way of a “bigger picture” understanding.

What good is Conscience, if everything under the sun and stars should be embraced?*

Now, hardly anyone in the Friends Meeting would say that this woman’s words are official Quaker thought. There is very little that Quakers call official Quaker thought. The Quakers’ liberalism is very conservative. When a woman feels moved to stand and speak, her words are understood as the words she felt moved to say, and no one immediately jumps onto the bandwagon of “God must’ve said so!”ism.
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*Our revulsion at death shows us that we intuitively hold life dear; and were we to think honestly about it, we would be compelled to accept that life’s value comes in the opportunity it brings – the opportunity to enjoy. Different people seek to enjoy different things, but we all seek to enjoy. And when a man’s life ends, so does his opportunity to do what makes his life precious to him. He no longer has that opportunity to do what he as a breathing, touching, tasting, gazing, listening, lounging, soft-bodied being finds value in. Death is when the sacred is snuffed out. It is the avowed enemy of the sacred, and so – except for when a man’s death is his value in life – it is evil, whether brought on by intent or by accident.

Reptiles and Naked Ladies

I was half asleep this morning when my dad came into the room and asked me if I wanted to attend the "demon" - (yes, as in Satan's helpers) - "stration", and though I was half asleep I gave an answer that I had thought long about and that I can defend. "No," I said, before rolling over and closing my eyes. Though I live under the same roof as my father, my own reason for not attending a reptile-themed softcore pornography festival isn't identical to his reasons.

My dad is one of those vegan animal rights activists who is deeply disturbed by Peta's use of female nudity, semi-nudity, and other states of undress. Just about all these instances feature young, physically attractive women and, though they can hardly be called displays of "sexual" nudity, they are definitely suggestive. Some animal rights vegans voice their concerns in terms of "harmful stereotypes" and "objectification of womyn". By displaying physically attractive women in delicious poses, Peta propagates the sexy woman stereotype, and gives creedance to the idea that women's purpose is to satiate men's desire.

I'm not convinced by the moralistic harmful stereotype argument. By that argument's logic I should stop wearing neckties, because by wearing a traditional symbol of male authority I propagate the "harmful stereotype" of the domineering man and give creedance to the idea that men's role is to seek, demand, and establish authority.

I don't see stereotypes as a reason for moral concern. All morality boils down to one precept - individual sovereignty. Every woman is the queen of her own body and her own house, and (so long as she isn't denying others' rights to person and property) displaying her own body is fair game. If a woman's body is hers, then it is hers to celebrate and display. To say that a woman has a duty to other women to not display herself is to say that no woman fully owns her own body. It's to say that there is a universal "community of women" in which every woman's right over herself exists only so far as is beneficial to the collective.

However, morality isn't the only thing to look at. There's also the issue of what we as activists are trying to get across. If I wanted to participate in a protest against racism, it would be against the point for me to lay an Israeli flag on the ground and urinate on it. Now, those who are already familiar with the argument that membership in the State of Israel is defined by ethnicity and race and that those who happen to have been born to the wrong parents are herded around like cattle by the State of Israel would understand what I'm doing, and may consider it art. But the people I'm trying to confront wouldn't already understand that, and would be put off by my demonstration.

Some vegan critics of Peta's tactics say that suggestive nudity in protests actually encourages rather than discourages commoditization and dehumanization of the other. I personally think that displaying the lizzard lady doesn't, but then again I sometimes hang around art critics. Though there isn't a problem of dehumanization, however, there is a problem of miscommunication.

This is where my own "harmful stereotypes" argument comes in. By participating in activism that features nudity, we propagate the image of sexually-loose liberals and leftists. People who see such demonstrations don't walk away taking animal consideration to heart. They walk away putting us in the same box as naked flower children, drag queens at pride parades, and foaming-at-the-mouth feminazis who think women have the unqualified "right" to butcher their preborn children. And as long as we're stuffed into that box, we can't be heard.

What happens when conservatives see peace activists use nudity as a tactic? They giggle, maybe they spit, and they drive on thanking God that our servicemen and women oversees make our country safe for naked vagrants to do it in the road. Then they start wondering whether our country has become too free.

And what happens when everyday Americans see a half-naked woman with her body painted green and signs that ask "Whose skin are you in"? Well, the women fume up with slutty bitch envy, and maybe they mutter their Victorian sentiments to their friends and husbands with words like "objectification" that they borrowed from the prudish left. And the men? At best, they start thinking about what pipes and valves they would need to turn their wives' bathtubs into giant fondues. The thought that they should use vegan chocolate might not occur to them. Any leaflet shoved into their hands when they're gawking at the half-naked woman is just a piece of paper compared to the half-naked woman.

Of course, this is just coming from personal experience. I can't say for sure that nudity never works. I just think that any benefit it has is horrendously outweighed by the costs. People are naturally resistant to change, and they would go to any length to justify not listening to an alternative view. I know, because I used to do it all the time. I still do it. ("Damn statists!" "Damn Zionists!" "Damn Rich White Erudite Liberal Elites!") I can't think of a single time I was convinced by suggestive nudity (convinced to a particular viewpoint, that is). I should admit that I first started thinking about animal rights when I saw a picture of people in a concentration camp juxtaposed with pictures of animals in factory farms. But that wasn't suggestive nudity.

I don't see this as a matter of Right. I only see it as a matter of Prudence. (This isn't to say that I see ALL morality as mere prudence.) If it turns out that a whole lot of people felt convicted about snakeskin boots and refused to buy reptile leather after they saw a half-naked woman painted green, then you might find me at the next reptile leather protest. But until then, we would be wise to take sex-related taboos into account.