Memorial for a Martyr

My thoughts for the day:

Get drunk for Martin Luther King, Jr. day.

Do it as an act to symbolize the state of social activism and institutional justice that results so long as philosophic, ethical, and tenets of faith subordinate thought, true dialogue and nonviolence to the unquestionable belief in the concept of “evil”. The result is a social activism and progressivism that is all too like the behavior someone who is drunk.

Consider President Obama’s steadfast affirmation of the problem of “evil” in place of a better, deeper thinking of true causality. It is deployed to “explain” both the brutal actions of dictatorial regimes and horrific killings here in the US. In truth, it explains nothing. It ensures a limping response — and by limping, this includes violent, since falling into violence is precisely the limping of social activism that aims to prevent violence — rather than true amelioration and support of true nonviolence. Even the sort of nonviolence exhibited in the satyagrahas of the protesters in the civil rights movement in the US bore this sickening concept like a kind of pork barrel line item addition to a congressional bill, whose effects have wended their way through the troubled problems of race, violence and incarceration to this day.

The concept of evil itself should be resisted. It is the subordination of mind and nonviolence into the act of war and preparation for killing, grounding all kinds of violences today: institutional, military, social, outlier — whose violence in turn is merely the collateral damage of the many self-assured and righteous enterprises of social justice and just wars in which a truer nonviolence languishes like another capitive in Gitmo, or a drugged, psychotic ding-a-ling in a California prison, taking on the role of a slave on the plantation of the masters of social justice.

Standing behind the erstwhile community activist Obama and many others in this tenacious persistence in unreason is Martin Luther King, Jr., a wonderful, heroic man of great commitment, courage and sacrifice, yet one whose affirmation of religious faith must be resisted in respectful satyagraha. For this concept of evil comes packaged in along with his professed and learned faith like the prescriptions for violence within Islam; it cannot be separated from such faith, even if King used the satygraha of Gandhi to further a great cause, even if Islam is ostensibly a religion of peace. Few have ventured to take even one step to consider the careful delimitations of faith in Gandhi, nor his explicit and primary faith not in any religion but rather in the dual fundaments of truth and nonviolence in a radical affirmation against any and all religion, however rich with knowledge and wisdom he held them to be. Such a posture as Gandhi’s is, in truth, utterly anathematic to the faith of King, of Obama, and much of the spirituality serving as the grounds of movements of peace and justice activism today. So it is for reasons of the predominant commitment of faith that thought and nonviolence in the world take on the character of one who is drunk: they are systematically degraded in as extensive a way as the effects of alcohol manifest themselves in the inebriated.

The criminal justice system staggers and lurches like a drunk. The US international policy intervenes like a drunk driver. Shouting and unable to listen, the critical cases of nonviolence-based revolution remain uninteresting, while the US remains as ready as ever to start up a bar fight with the best, most inflammatory opponent, from Gaddafi to the next Sandy Hooks shooter. The criminal justice system bludgeons to-be-recdivist criminals beyond recognition or the strength for rehabilitation like a drunk patron attacking a bartender without reserve or measure. Another glass of “evil”, please.

It is fitting enough that on this celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. one might stand in a most unpopular position against the powers that be. What could be less popular or even intuitively less convincing than to question, of all people, Martin Luther King, Jr. in terms of peace and justice? Martin Luther King, Jr.?! And what does it even mean to do so at a the fundamental level of his religious commitment and its relation to the social activism of today? To do so in terms of the status of thought and nonviolence? Surely we will be told not to take such questions seriously. Yet the commitment in question, if thought through carefully, brings with it many concomitant, indeed, collateral consequences for the roles of thought and nonviolence, currently shackled and slaving under the whip of the master concepts of evil and forgiveness that perpetually reinstall the worst “justice” as some “natural” way of the world, the better to transcend it in dramas of murder and redemption, despite the inherent problems associated with such a reinstantiation. That perpetual reinstantiation has kept the current justice system in its crippled, degrading, maiming and lethal form. As social activists flood the streets in outcries against injustices, their go-to solution too often is to remand the “real bad guys” to the very criminal justice system they regularly decry with stunning impotence and complicity. And as activists and community members flood the street in response spates of murders and gang violence, the houses of faith that King emblemizes and leads in absentia stand with doors wide open, promising social change, provided you check independent thought and an independent concept of nonviolence at the door, or tie them out back to serve as workhorses for “the movement” for Peace and Justice.

So it is utterly fitting to get drunk on the day of service reserved for Martin Luther King, Jr., and all the more appropriate to do it on the day of the public inauguration of President Obama, whose own careful reservation of the concept of “evil” is as steadfast as his retention of men in Gitmo, his careful preservation of the logics of violence, that militation inherent in the deployment of the concept of “evil” that has proven to be so similar to that wielded by George W. Bush.

As if drawn in a political cartoon, the staggering drunks in this satyagraha would stumble, have slurring speech, become distracted and basically degrade all activities. Such a state mirrors very well the state of social activism today, dominated as it is by faith whose basic mode of engagement is the unquestionable and the deafening shouts of the brutal thug, rendered essentially differently: in the nearly silent comment, the mere mention, the vague and unquestionable reference. Just look at how Obama carefully inserts the concept of “evil”: after depicting both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi as idealists, he went on to say “but there is evil in the world”, in his speech when winning the Nobel Peace Prize. In his speech concerning the Sandy Hooks shooter, he was carefully to refer to evil actions. But are these really “evil”? What does that even explain? Such actions are of course profoundly violent. But as “evil”, is this even discourse? It is not to be questioned, it is dropped in a mode of speech that is essentially that of the hoarse, screaming shout of the tyrant. Yet only a thinking of essence can reveal this, and only a free thought can clarify this essential tyranny and subordination of thought and nonviolence. And those, recall, are tied up out back, ready to plow the fields of social justice and just wars.

So subordinated, and in many other such ways, dominant faith leaves social justice activism, criminal justice and the response to the need to support nonviolence-based revolution around the world in a limping, degraded form. Look on any drunk person you see coming out of the bars; it is a picture of the status quo today of the very service we are invited to perform today. This writing is my way of responding to this call, whose basic intention is, in the main, good and one I wish to affirm. But I believe that nothing is more important than to affirm the degradation of such service today in our best efforts.

I may not really get drunk; I think it is enough to think through this reasoning, which I offer in a certain faith, and in what I believe is a deep commitment to what remains of the spirit of service and quest for truth and justice, which means nonviolence, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. continues to represent. But unlike President Obama, I will not follow this with the affirmation that “there is evil in the world”.

But there is, indeed, great and terrible violence in the world.

Bob,

Forgive me for intervening in your comment, albeit in this democratic mode of the open comment that does not prevent Michael’s own reply, of course, and in the shadow of my own absurdly long “reply”, really just my own homily on MLK day, to render a few replies to your sad comment.

Mainly I wanted to question the doom you foretell. This has been done for a long time. During the cold war it was “easier” to envision and end of the world that might even draw us out of the culture of violence through the threat of the leviathan of mutually assured destruction. But the fate of violence, “America’s suicide”, as you put it, sadly, is all too unlikely. No, it is more likely to be just certain people, that wake of collateral damage we witness all the time. Just certain people, children in a school, or the unfortunate hits of a drone strike, perhaps among these some driven mad in the logics of “evil” who, in turn, go out to shoot more, yet altogether a “tolerable” number, you see. And that holds out what I think is a truer vision: an America of the future that is business as usual. Why do I feel the need to stress this? In part because I fear your procedure of positing the end of all, America’s downfall in total apocalypse, is all too prevalent. It seems to cloud truth in the form of the vision of total calamity, making it easier to just dispense with it, put it out of mind. I don’t think it is so likely. I don’t think, from your tone, that you hope that such a total calamity would then bring people finally to their senses. You seem, rather, simply sad about it. Despairing. Is it the despair of the hope that it may bring that calamity, or the actual dread and fear that it is simply too likely? I’ll be honest: I actually don’t think you fear this. I think it is more then exhausted form of the usual cold war procedure. You may disagree, of course.

But I feel it is important to take note of this possibility that lies in the “calamity procedure”, the better to return to a more original nonviolence that sees the danger of violence in a more realistic form: of collateral damage that has every chance of perpetuating itself precisely because there will be no calamity, no “Attica”, say, no total crisis or riot that might bring about some hoped-for change. This is the meta-crisis, the crisis-that-it-is-not-a-crisis, presented by every victim of violence, of whatever kind: that their victimhood is small enough to oil the wheels of a great machine, and not great enough to bring it down or to some thought. It is therefore upon me to arrive at that metacrisis again and again. There is literally nothing other that can be done. Yet in it there is a certain hope: the hope that one may see in the heart of the tiniest of the tiny, in the most mute, among the disappeared, in those silenced by violence, that which brings us to an ever heightening awareness, keenness of vision, love of the world that proceeds precisely on that basis. I believe this somehow basically inheres in Michael’s commitment to nonviolence, for example. It grows in the heart of some small child witnessing the worst visited upon his loved ones in incalculable trauma. It grows like a tiny flower beneath the heaving, fetal curl of a desperate adolescent ostracized by society, it grows in the soiled edges of a prison cell of someone in solitary, this crisis that it is not a crisis whose call lies in the absolutely possible, feasible violence carried out by men and women, successful violence that promises no calamity, collateral damage that will be absorbed. For that is the crisis. it awaits just this art: the very art of showing that the calamity will probably not arrive, and that even if it did, the response to it would still be a degraded one, since it must be in our relation directly to these huddled others, in our love, in the nuclear explosion of mind that occurs in the simple relation, the simple love, the Vision of this violence, of trauma, and of trauma beyond trauma, that already finds itself in a secret pact, steel and vein, diamond and flower speaking truth to power, hour upon hour, heart beat by heart beat: I love you for no reason beyond you and you alone.

For no reason beyond you alone. I love you.