Voices from Detention II

I mentioned Part I of this story when it came out. Here's Part II.

Good news?

It's a little disorienting, in the midst of things like the Sean Bell verdict and Russell Pearce's latest turd, but a story came across the wire yesterday that actually seemed like it could be good news -- the judge in the Indian trust fund case has said it's not a matter of whether, but of how much, money to pay out to the Indians who have been ripped off by the U.S. government's mismanagement of royalties from oil and gas development on lands held in trust. I put a question mark after my title because it's not yet clear whether any of the underlying problems -- the government's cavalier, irresponsible attitude toward Indians, and its pre-1494 accounting system -- will be corrected, or if the government's attitude will be along the lines of "fine, pay them so they'll get off our case for a while."

Addendum: I forgot about two other pieces of good news:

1. Janet Napolitano vetoed the anti-sanctuary law, after activists made a stink about it and the state legislators who voted for it -- including erstwhile progressives like Krysten Sinema -- admitted they hadn't even read it. (OK, so this is actually just canceling out some old bad news, plus new bad news about the level of professionalism in our state legislature, but still.)

2. The U.S. government admitted it was wrong to deny a detained man treatment for penis cancer. Francisco Casataneda is still dead, and it's not clear whether this will lead to any systemic change in the quality of health care in jail, but it's at least a step.

Mean

It has come to my attention, over the course of the last few weeks, that I'm becoming ... mean. Particularly in the comment sections of others' blogs, I've developed a tendency to take what is, on sober reflection, a particularly nasty approach to engaging others, both those who are dimly aware of my existence and total strangers. I don't rescind much if anything of the substance behind my various comments and posts, but I do greatly regret my way of approaching the disagreement and attempting to make my point (in some cases, to the point that I should have just kept my mouth shut in that instance).

My meanness can, I think, be traced in part to my attempting to inch closer to being an ally to various oppressed groups. (I stress in part -- I also blame a generalized mood of personal-life grumpiness, with respect to which I've failed to suck it up and get over it.) I've read a variety of "how to be an ally" type articles over the years, mostly written by members of the allied-with groups. They tend to highlight two major failings characteristic of newly-minted allies* -- attempting to take over the allied-with group's spaces or movement (using your privilege within, rather than against, that group), and walking on eggshells due to a sort of impotent paranoia about making a mistake. It makes sense that these two failings would be salient to allied-with-group people, since they're the ones that directly affect that group, i.e. the things that drive a wedge between allies and allied-with people.

I would add meanness to the list of pitfalls for those approaching ally-ship. Meanness is directed outward, a sort of scattershot viciousness directed at any example of oppression (however serious or mild) that crosses your path (including, occasionally, things that you mistakenly assume are examples of oppression). The mean proto-ally, overconfident in his or her newfound enlightenment, finds seemingly less-enlightened others and unloads their fury on them.

The opposite of meanness is not necessarily kumbaya-type understanding others' position and respecting it and compromising with it (of the sort many progressives have accused Barack Obama of exhibiting). The problem with meanness is not the hard line it takes toward those you're criticizing. The problem with meanness is that it's narcissistic. Meanness is characterized by a focus on venting your negative feelings toward your target, rather than carefully choosing your approach and words for maximum effect in engaging your target. Like the other forms of ally failings, it stems in part from an illicit attempt to conflate your own position with that of the allied-with group, to try to practice the same kind of righteous anger they're entitled to without the prerequisite wounding that makes righteous anger rhetorically powerful and morally legitimate. And meanness is narcissistic in another way -- it often involves a (conscious or unconscious) desire to show off your enlightenment to the allied-with group, to wave in front of them the heads of dragons you've slain. But members of the allied-with groups are typically fairly consequentialist about allies -- they want to be less oppressed, not just to have cheerleaders agreeing with them about how oppressed they are. And meanness is in a third sense narcissistic, in that it can involve a projection of one's own self-loathing. New allies have to deal with a lot of self-loathing -- justifiedly so, as they have just come to understand how loathsome many of their attitudes and actions are. But productive, transformative processing of self-loathing is difficult. It's much easier to attack those who are a few steps farther back on the path, to loathe them or what they're doing in the hopes that it will purge your own flaws.

So I've been mean. I will strive to be less mean, as it's unhelpful to anyone. A heads-up to Alon Levy: If I don't succeed in chilling a bit, you may have to take back that thing you said long ago about me being the only civil blogger.

*I deliberately vacillate here between describing people as new allies or would-be allies -- because I don't know what qualifies one for the title of "ally," or even if an (alleged) ally has the right to bestow it on him/herself or anyone else.

Try My Great New Weight-Loss Program -- Jail!

Apparently it takes "finely tuned faculties" to look at a fat person and think "wow, that gross fattie should be happy to take the pounds off any way he can" -- in this case, through being in prison with a diet that leaves you fainting and wracked with hunger pangs. Funny, because I thought that kind of simplistic bigotry was actually commonplace in our society.

The issue here is not any particular empirical claim about the relationship among allegedly fatness-causing factors, fatness itself, and health (though the blogger linked above seems to take glee in using this case as a rebuttal to unnamed fat activists who question how easy it is to just starve yourself thin). The issue is the attitude that fatness is such an awful condition that it undermines people's right to autonomy, giving everyone else the green light to "helpfully" judge them and tell them how to correct their condition.