Master’s Tools, Australian Rules

liberals are experts at gaslighting; didactic ideologues are allergic to complexity

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Hey! Why can't we use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house? The master exploited people like us to build his house. He didn't do it himself. He probably doesn't even know where the tools are, let alone how to use them.

Audre Lorde was obviously a brilliant writer, but I don't think she really understood how tools or ownership of tools work. We can do whatever we want with whatever we can grab. In any case, the master's days are numbered. Bearing in mind that infinity is a number, or at least a quasi-numerical concept.

For example, the master’s tool of bigotry. I recently realized I’m bigoted against Australians. I’ve been laboring under the impression that the term “Australian Rules Football” was tongue-in-cheek slang for “no-rules football.” And that’s because I have this notion of the stereotypical Australian. Despite the many gentle, funny, intelligent Aussies I’ve met, the image in my mind of the common Australian has been of a soccer hooligan guzzling seawater, 151 rum, and anabolic steroids out of a bull’s skull. Australia to me is like a Wild West that never passed through adolescence, with poisonous spiders the size of Galapagos tortoises your average Aussie drunk is likely to challenge to a nude wrestling match for fun.

Apparently, Australian Rules Football does have rules. They just happen to be Australian, and not even in a particularly drunk way. Despite the recent disabusal of my misunderstanding of the meaning of “Australian Rules,” though, I’m hanging onto my prejudice. Because, of the seven groups it’s still okay to make fun of – billionaires, snake-oil tech gurus, celebrities inveighing against wokeness, QAnon-believing sex criminals, Italian plumbers battling barrel-throwing gorillas, emotionally detached Scotsmen, and Australians – that last group seems least likely to take it personally. And they have the best sense of humor of the lot. Or maybe they’re just the group whose feelings I care about least.

This whole thought process started because of a discussion among activists concerning how this historic moment resembles others in the past. There are various analogies to be made regarding the Israeli military’s mélange of massacres and atrocities in Gaza – a crime against humanity which, unbelievably, continues to this very minute. The US reaction to Pearl Harbor leading to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is one analogous subsequence. The US reaction to 9-11, another. But to me the most persuasive is comprised under the statement, “Gaza as the climax of the Occupation of Palestine is to Israel as the war in Indochina in the Sixties and Seventies (the apotheosis of Cold War theory and proxy war praxis) is to the USA.” Basically, the current crime against humanity in Gaza is Israel’s Vietnam War.

There are no doubt slews of junctures in the overall allegorical plumbing where this analogy leaks or even disintegrates, but it’s still worth considering. The conflict has gone on far longer than the rational observer can comprehend. The dehumanization of the underdog under the two violences share a similar flavor. Their primary casualties are civilians, and their continued pursuit threatens to turn the non-military population into a fighting force, thereby manifesting the greater power’s self-fulfilling prophecy of every man, woman, and child being a possible combatant.

The stigmatization of critics of the crimes is similar. Protesters’ varying degrees of identification with the underdog in the struggle is also comparable. As it was in the case of the US war on Indochina, corruption behind the scenes on both sides of the Gaza grisliness and among external actors is yet to be fully accounted for, but if the bulk of the iceberg looks anything like its tip, we are in for decades of sickening revelations.

Fascinating to me, though, is how the analogy carries through to the upcoming Democratic Convention in Chicago. The echoes of the 1968 Democratic Convention are obvious, although differences in circumstance also abound. Such as that Hubert Humphrey, though representing the incumbent party, was not the incumbent candidate, while Biden, of course, is. The power of those who can be expected to demonstrate against the asymmetrical carnage in Gaza is not buttressed by nearly the same amount of prior political action, sympathetic cultural discourse, or accumulated momentum as was wielded in 1968. And back then, the Left was in its ascendancy, if not at its apogee, whereas today the Right holds that position, although it may rather be on a downward slide from that peak.

Progressives pursuing activism that includes strategic investment in electoral politics are grappling with the current scenario in part by casting an eye back to the political environment of 56 years ago. We, for I include myself among them, do not want to see the election thrown to convicted felon Trump because of Gaza. We are reminded that, in the 1968 election, the votes for Humphrey were tightly competitive with those for Nixon. We worry that the good Biden has done in the Department of Labor and the harms he could mitigate of those residual from the previous administration (things like the recent Texas GOP floating the idea of the death penalty for abortion) will be eclipsed by the inhumanity of the war on Gaza the way the Great Society programs of Johnson were by the war on Vietnam. Surely Trump would be as likely to exacerbate and spread the conflict he seeks to inherit in as grotesque a fashion as Nixon did when he took over from LBJ. Except now Trump would also have the Ukraine/Russia war to screw up.

formerly cheesy allegorical image of Biden mending the flag, manipulated by the author

formerly a cartoon of Diddy in jail, sweatin’ it, manipulated by the author

Currently I’m celebrating the conviction of Donald Trump on all 34 felony counts. I’ve heard a lot of poo-pooing of such joy – such delightful schadenfreude – by those who want to reiterate the point that Biden is aiding and abetting genocide.

One is mistaken to abstain from delighting in a sociopathic narcissist getting a micro-fraction of comeuppance simply because a genocide is going on. When isn’t a genocide going on? Where were the discerning moralists of radicalism before last October? Not celebrating anything? Moping in moral defeat? Telling people to stop smiling, Rohingya are being murdered by Buddhist cops?

Then again, there is much discussion among the elders about how to bring the justly enraged left to an attitude of support for an incumbent Democratic candidate who, it can’t be denied, has betrayed all principles of human rights when it comes to this massacre. And now his signing of an executive order limiting asylum protections for immigrants makes one wonder if Biden is emboldened by Trump’s felony convictions. Is he daring us not to vote for him? The question is being pondered on and worried over and analyzed because, despite all the negatives, there are still those who feel Biden is the better of the two horrifically unpalatable choices we’ve been forced by our morally shrink-wrapped system to make.

The previous title of this piece, Australian Rules Vietnam War, referred to how Nixon handled the war in Southeast Asia after LBJ. In a war no one thought could get worse, everything got worse. Nixon and Kissinger had a tight relationship with the worst factions in the CIA and other covert operators, who cultivated relationships with fanatical groups and drug smugglers. They spread their violent chaos to Cambodia, setting the stage for the takeover of that country by the Khmer Rouge and one of the deadliest genocides of the last century.

The circumstances, then and today, could argue for being politically strategic: voting for Biden and an arguably more maleable fascism rather than avoiding moral nausea by refusing to vote or by voting for a non-viable conscience candidate. Biden has already been pushed toward urging Netanyahu to dial back Israel’s unconscionable viciousness, albeit unsuccessfully so far (and probably so by intention). One must admit, Genocide Joe is a weak prophylactic. A porous condom at best. But Trump is a raw dog with dog syphilis.

Trump will not be one sixteenth as responsive to demands from the left for a change in US policy toward Israel. Remember, he officially recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the US Embassy there. His ambassador to Israel was a former columnist for an Israeli news outlet aligned with the religious right. And didn’t he rename the Golan Heights “Trump Heights?” Well, he probably would if he got the chance. He won’t even go through the motions Biden is ineptly miming. At least rational thoughts do visit Biden from time to time. I honestly fear the many ways Trump could contrive to make the Gaza violence a far wider war, and that war an endless engine of profit for, say, his daughter and son-in-law, or himself.

We should welcome impediments to Trump without apology. He deserves misfortune. I don’t like how Biden seems to be using the leverage thereby provided to do some Clintonesque triangulation, but I’d be more inclined to punish Joe after the election. There are many fun ways to do that. More than there are to try to affect a brick of narcissism like Trump who doesn’t even possess a smidgen of the humanity God gave a rabid rat. No offense meant to rabid rats.

I know there are other legitimate arguments that arrive at different conclusions, and, who knows, I could very possibly be persuaded by one before November. I vividly remember being in the voting booth back in 1996 and not being able to bring myself to vote for Bill Clinton because it had become clear he was the number one enemy of labor.

Yes, Biden is wearing ongoing mass murder around his neck like a fashion accessory too hot for the weather and dusting his cheeks with Texas-tinted sparkles of draconian southern border policing. I see it this way: the quarterback is failing the team – he might even be playing for the other team off and on – but our only other option is to substitute an Australian soccer hoolie known for guzzling seawater, 151 rum, and anabolic steroids out of a bull’s skull, playing to win ownership of the other team and the stadium, with the ability to call penalties on our team he invents in the moment, at his whim, along with whatever punishment comes out of his puckered aperture of mouth. And, to put the cherry on top, he’s also in a self-pitying delusional funk right now. No one wants that garbage on the team bus, not even riding in the luggage compartment, not even in the bilge tank the whole way – he’d stink up our sewage – never mind in the driver’s seat.