"Henry V," "Merchant of Venice," Caste and Class — and Respect and Black Lives Matter

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he today that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother. Be he n'er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition […].

— King Henry to his troops before the Battle of Agincourt

Henry V 4.3.61-64

Now by my hood, a gentle and no Jew!
— Gratiano, more or less to Lorenzo, on the Jewess Jessica

The Merchant of Venice 2.6.50

            The lines of King Henry V that I quote above need to be glossed nowadays — have the terms defined — and really should be modernized in performance. Henry is offering (figurative) brotherhood to everyone who fights alongside him in what looks like a hopeless battle, and he's making that offer even to the most vile in his army. That is — Henry kind of promises — even the most low-born will become a figurative brother to a king — himself, Henry — and, Henry implies, will rise to, or at least toward, the status of gentleman ("This day shall gentle his condition"). It is significant, and not just for understanding Shakespeare, that a word for "low-born" was negative in Shakespeare's day and has become far worse since then: vile is not a compliment. Neither is "varlet," "churl," "boor," or even "peasant," the last two or three of which once just meant "farm laborer" or "farmer." There were those who were gentle in their birth, and above them, and by Shakespeare's time included in the term, there were and are those who are noble and (above them) royal. And then there were the rest.

            Got it?

            Now Gratiano is a wiseass young man in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice (1596/97), the side-kick to the second-banana hero in the subplot: Lorenzo, the lover of Jessica, a Jewess (sic) with whom he, Lorenzo, is eloping and who (Jessica) has just gone off to steal more money from her father: the villain of the piece, Shylock. In the line I quote as a headnote, "by my hood" really doesn't mean anything, and "a gentle and no Jew" is complicated. "Gentle" puns on "gentile" and means "gentle" in our sense, plus something similar to "genteel": being a gentlewoman or having the qualities associated with a lady or gentleman — as opposed to us non-gentle (lowborn, vile) others, and, clearly, as opposed to Jews.

            "Jewish gentlewoman" or "Jewish lady" would be a contradiction in terms.

            Insofar as The Merchant of Venice is a romantic comedy in a romantic-comic world, Jessica can convert to Christianity (precisely what variety of Christianity Shakespeare won't get into) — Jessica can convert, marry a gentleman like Lorenzo, and become a lady. And the followers of a victorious king or duke or other warlord really might accumulate enough in loot and/or ransoms to move up the social ladder, or at least start their families up the scale.

            Not so with any non-converted Jews, and, in the real world of Shakespeare's day and long after, not so with Jews generally. In many mouths, "Jewish gentleman" was a kind of sick joke or condescending slight. It was like the folk etymology of "wog" as an acronym for "Worthy Oriental Gentleman": a put-down.

            Shylock in Merchant and far more so the earlier Jewish villain Barabas in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1592) could buy and sell, fairly literally, almost all the Christians in the play, and for the most part were smarter and better educated. No matter. There had been a long-running argument De vera nobilitate, "concerning true nobility," and one could argue that "true nobility" came from cultural "breeding," virtue, and leading a virtuous life, not from biological breeding, one's birth.  By Shakespeare's time, the boundary for respectability had moved down enough that the argument was on gentility, not nobility, and one could argue, "Gentle is as gentle does." Still, there are limits!

            In the late 19^th and much of the 20^th centuries, those limits were expressed in racial or racialist or downright racist terms: modern anti-Semitism is part of racism — as an ideology, an Early Modern invention — as well as traditional anti-Jewish prejudice and doctrine. And that's how I encountered it at Cornell University in 1965 when I asked what people were talking about when they mentioned "the White houses" on the Ithaca, NY, campus. The African-American fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha was founded at Cornell (1906), and the fraternity chapter I advised had two or three Black pledges that year, but from my rather out-of-it, new-graduate-student view, the Cornell fraternity system looked pretty much incandescent, albino-lily White. So what would the meaning be for "White houses"?

            Well, as you've probably inferred, "the White houses" didn't admit Jews, and had been open about it (and may've been leery of Catholics): "White" pretty much meant WASP or at least the generalized "the white man" as used by an old Jew in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" (set ca. 1950, novel published: 1959, film: 1974).

            Which gets me to the time I write, moving into the latter part of November 2015, a time of the Black Lives Matter movement the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, and campus protests against insults and threats to Blacks and debates on "microaggressions."

*

            Ordinarily, I press the point that "Guilt isn't inherited, but the loot is" and say that discussions of race in America should start with the issue of reparations and move on from there. And I am grateful to Bernie Sanders (and Elizabeth Warren and the persistent old New Left) for reintroducing issues of class into upper-end American political debate. And, indeed, I used to say, and will say again, that the crucial color in American conflicts on race is green: acceptance into bourgeois society will come when many more Blacks have wealth enough to make them bourgeois or richer.

            But —

            But one of the things I know I want money for is for status and respect, and for good and for ill — and it's the "for ill" aspects I'm concerned about here — even in militantly capitalist America not even old money can inevitably or maybe even reliably outweigh issues of caste and a pretty inflexible de facto hierarchy.

            In an earlier blog (31 Oct. 2015), I passed along a 1960s racist/anti-racist joke about a prominent American with an earned doctorate and a résumé that included serving as a university department chair, service in the OSS (the precursor of the CIA — although that could only be rumor until 2008), and the winning of a Nobel prize for work done with the status in protocol of a senior ambassador. The punch line was on correct forms of address for someone with so much high status and how was referred to in a recent visit to Mississippi or other deep-South state. The answer is that in Mississippi (or whatever) he was called "Nigger," which to a devout racist is simply a statement of who the man — Ralph Bunch — essentially is or was (Bunch died in 1971), and to a non-racist bitterly funny as a reduction to the absurd of racist "essentialism."

            We have such racial and racialist, and often racist essentialism as part of the cultural DNA of the United States, intimately combined with highly persistent Old World ideas of hierarchy and castes other than race: gender as a higher or lower caste for one thing, plus more amorphous and interconnected quasi-castes involving religions, ethnicities, sexuality, and even geographical culture. (How much anti-Semitism remains with us [and what happens when American bigots remember that Arabs are Semites], how much tolerance Christian America has for secularism: such matter will become clearer the longer Bernie Sanders runs for President.)

*

            It was a cliché when I was in college that the two great systems for political analysis of the 19^th and much of the 20^th centuries were class and race, and the Left mostly went with race — which is why part of split on the American Left after the 1960s had much to do with race, and still more to do with gender and sex.  As a man of the Left, I'll again offer the unsolicited (and therefore necessarily arrogant) advice that Blacks and other marginalized groups should keep their eyes on the prize of economic equality and ensure that calls for reparations in some sense help start the conversation on race.

            "Justice, justice you shall pursue!" (Deuteronomy 16:20), and economic justice is a central issue. But there are the standard "But's" that made "Class, Race, and Gender" a kind of mantra of the last part of the 20^th century, and to which we need additions, including in the US age and generation.

            Like the Jews and Catholics before them, Black Americans on mostly-White college campuses are both privileged — Hey, you're in college! — and still subject to the snubs and disrespect that do not make life significantly unsafe but can make one's life-experience unpleasant and bit-by-bit can wear a person out. And there are real threats. A noose on a tree on campus isn't a lynching even as the march of neo-Nazis through a heavily Jewish suburb isn't a pogrom; but a swastika made of feces on a dorm wall adds injury to insult, and needs serious investigation and prosecution.

            I had my life threatened once by some laughable fascists while a graduate student peace activist and risked a couple times getting clubbed by cops; and I tried to respond by sucking it up and following the mock-Latin motto, "Illegitimi non carborundum": Don't let the bastards grind you down. Still, the threats to me stemmed from what I did, not who I was or what I am.

            That may change for me if substantial human groups move into another period of full-scale religious warfare, but probably not. For American Blacks — centrally Blacks still, although Latinos and American Muslims are catching up — for American Blacks the challenges will include dealing with a declining but still important caste system in the tradition that had "Colored lady" and "Colored gentleman" ironic denials of status, and where one was color-coded into a caste that was in varying degrees, but constantly, in danger.

*

            During the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the radical English Lollard priest John Ball incited a group more "vile" than Henry V's common soldiers with the subversive rhetorical question, "When Adam delved and Eve span / Who was then the gentleman?" If we can't "get ourselves back to the garden" of Eden, we can at least get ourselves back — figuratively — to the "beginning" of human culture when Adam farmed and Eve worked at her spinning, and "all men by nature were created alike, and" only later "our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men," where "naughty" means evil. Ultimately, the goal for an enlightened and redeemed humanity would be the destruction of systems of caste and hierarchy root and branch, and on the way destruction of systems of inherited caste and hierarchy. Moving toward those goals we do indeed need to do more to equalize wealth and income and opportunity, and simultaneously we need to pursue justice and decency in more everyday things so that "Black Lives Matter," as well as Black deaths, as do the oppression, deaths, and quality of everyday life of all those dismissed as innately incapable of being a "gentle," all of us seen as innately "vile."

Reparations Debate: John Conyers, Ta-Nehisi Coates and House Resolution 40

            During the US National Student Strike in the spring of 1970 — after the US Invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State University and Jackson State — there was a meeting of Illinois "student leaders" in Chicago or Springfield or some such appropriate place, and I went there as one of the representatives of the Graduate Student Association of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

            Early in the meeting, an undergrad got up and started making a speech, and, after a few minutes, I said something like, "Point of order, sort of," at which the undergrad stopped and told me he was making a speech. I replied that I understood that, that I'd heard his speech from others, that I could make his speech myself. (It was against the War and for peace and racial justice and other good things, and, actually, I had made that speech or soon would.) I noted that there was a useful custom in parliamentary procedure to start with someone's making a motion, which usually gets seconded, and then people start speechifying and debating and discussing: "Something specific! What do you want us to do?"

            The undergrads looked at me with bemused disapproval as the graduate students in the room applauded. If you were in "The Movement" and over 23, you'd heard The Speech and had attended many too many meetings with people working on our consciousness and enthusiasm and really just wanted to know what someone wanted you to do.

            There was and is much to be said for putting a motion on the floor to do something and have the debate and arguments start there. Even if it's a bad idea, if the motion is well stated, it focuses the discussion and can lead to a better idea. In any event, having a motion on the floor — as they say in parliamentary jargon — having something specific that at least a couple people want done is a better place to start a practical political debate than philosophical First Principles or appeals to shared sentiments.

            If you’re the American Continental Congress, first you decide whether or not you want independence, and then you get some bright folk to come up with a Declaration proclaiming and justifying the act.

            Sooooo … So here I want to repeat a suggestion from Ta-Nehisi Coates: "For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr. […] has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for 'appropriate remedies.' […] A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions," Coates adds, "But we are not interested." We are not really interested, he says, in "The Case for Reparations" for "Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy," not interested even though, "Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole" (Atlantic, 24 June 2014).

            I'm interested.

            Partly I'm interested because "the old schooling sticks," and I was brought up in the "Justice, justice shall you pursue" tradition; and Justice, the Prophet Amos insisted, should "flow forth like rivers / And righteousness as an every-flowing stream," not trickle down drop by drop. Also, I'm interested in the debate in itself and how simply — if honestly — pursuing a serious debate in itself ensures this much justice: making us examine our history and ourselves.

            The reparations issue is complex.

            Women as a very large group — a majority of the American population — have an argument for money owed for uncompensated labor, and, God knows, if we are going to talk about White Americans as receivers of stolen goods, the descendants of peoples Europeans weirdly called "Indians" have some bills to present for the deaths of a number of cultures and theft of two continents.

            (Minimally, we might stop celebrating Columbus Day as a holiday: Matthew White estimates the death toll from the "Conquest of the Americas" on at 15 million, making it #12 on his list of the 100 worst mass homicides in recorded history, with about the same body count as World War I, and nobody celebrates Kaiser Wilhelm.)

            Irish Americans might note that the word "plantation" comes from English colonization of Ireland, and the descendants of poor Irish and English in colonial America could argue that the high death rates among indentured "servants" — contract slaves — was one of the reasons African slavery got introduced and became, among the planter class, popular. Which gets us into useful discussions of what I have called (following Steven Pinker) "the continuum of cruelty" of which Black African chattel slavery in the New World was the most horrifically extreme case.

            Alternatively, many of us Euro-Americans can argue that our ancestors weren't around during the era of slavery but back in Europe getting the shit kicked out of us until the family got over here (where we were usually just exploited for a couple generations). My incandescent-White Scandinavian-American colleague who taught a course in The Immigrant Experience pointed out that people doing well back in The Old Country usually remained back in The Old Country; Americans generally are the descendants of European losers. He could note that his ancestors managed to fight on the defeated side in some six different wars; and I could note that my grandparents fled the goddamn Russian Empire of the goddamn Romanoffs, with my father's father one step ahead of a murder rap for killing the goddamn Cossack who was raping my grandfather's sister during a pogrom.

            "We weren't even in America to profit!" is an argument we need to consider; one kind of counter-argument, however, might remind me that I grew up in Chicago, "The City that Works," and it worked better for me than it might have because it systematicallydidn't work well for Black people. Further, my family was in the car wash business, and we made a higher profit than we might have because Black labor was cheap, in part because Black workers were systematically betrayed by unions that were supposed to represent them (and in one case would've been betrayed worse if "the old schooling" hadn't stuck enough with my father that he drew some lines when offered "sweetheart" contracts).

            Another counter-argument to "we just got here" suggests that that "one nation" referred to in the Pledge of Allegiance has real existence and duration over time and that Americans of all ethnicities in complex ways participate in — are part of — that nation. If the nation as a whole owes some debts and dues, we might all have obligations, if different ones, whenever our ancestors arrived and however badly they were treated.

            Now I find the idea of America as "one nation" as overly abstract and metaphysical and "one nation under God" —and given its unity by God — downright mystical and vaguely blasphemous. But that's a minority view. Further, I do believe in the American Republic and have sworn to "preserve, protect, and defend it," insofar as it's most directly embodied in our evolving Constitution. So if not a "nationalist," I'm a republican (by God!) and would have to admit also to debts of honor owed by the Republic.

            And so forth.

            We may decide that there's just no way we can work out an equivalent of "Forty acres and a mule" nowadays, and what we will do about reparations is nothing directly. But at least that would be a conscious decision — choosing not to act is an ethical/political action — and the discussion would almost certainly get the American government doing things we should be doing anyway to mitigate present inequities, whatever their causes.

            So, a motion is on the floor, and I for one urge the Congress of the United States to adopt House Resolution 40, or whatever might be its current form. Serious talk aims at action or a decision not to act, and establishing a serious Commission to Study Reparations for African Americans is a solid, sensible first step.

Unite, Distract — and Rule: Donald Sterling (& Cliven Bundy [and SAE Bus Songs]) 1 May 2014/20 March 2015

            The headline on The Ventura County [CA] Star for 30 April 2014 read "Sterling Tarnished" (the Star has a real thing with cutesy headlines): "Clippers' owner banned for life by NBA." That was above the fold, just below the box referring readers to page 5A for the deaths of "at least 35 people in the South and Midwest" in tornadoes. Under the headline was a story by a local reporter on the celebration that replaced planned protests at the LA Clippers v. Golden State Warriors game (the Clippers won 113-103), and the Associated Press story on NBA Commissioner Adam Silver's announcement of the lifetime ban on Donald Sterling from "any association with the league or the Clippers," plus a $2.5M fine, plus calls that Sterling sell the team. The Star that day commented on Sterling's fall in its lead editorial, and a reporter-cum-columnist reported and commented on the case on page 1 of the Sports section, dealing mostly with the racist comments Sterling had been recorded making, but mentioning briefly — very briefly — Sterling's history of issues with race and misogyny, and housing discrimination.

            And so on with much of America's media uniting in noting that Donald Sterling is a racist asshole.

            Okay, I agree: Donald Sterling is a racist asshole, an ineffective team owner, and one creepily weird dude. Still, people should not be punished for what they are and most of the time only condemned, contemned, and verbally (counter)attacked for what they say. What counts most is what people do, and where the hell was the National Basketball Association when Sterling was quite likely racially discriminating in housing and undoubtedly acting as one shitty landlord!?

            Far more important is this. The attacks on Sterling unite all us right-thinking Americans in enforcing norms of decency in language but do little else. The attacks help assuage White feelings of guilt and help Blacks' self-esteem, but that's pretty much it. It's a legitimate high, but a cheap one, literally cheap; real progress will be expensive.

            I'll repeat a rule, one of the Basics every adult human should know: "Guilt isn't inherited; but the loot is."
            To find the US peculiarly evil among the nations is just another form of BS American exceptionalism, but European America was born in the dual original sins of the dispossession and slaughter of Native Americans and the enslavement and exploitation of Blacks. That is where any serious discussion of race matters in the US must begin and topics to which it must return.

            The loot is the main issue, folks; relatively speaking, all else is distraction.

            Look, it's nice if people admire and like you and potentially dangerous if people hate you. Still, what is crucial for minorities is whether or not and how much you really have to care what other people think. Keep your eye on the prize, and the most initial prize is political clout and social status — as in, initially and largely, money: if you have enough of it, you can laugh off the bigots.

            Sticking with Blacks here: much of the wealth of the United States came from extorted Black labor during slavery and to a lesser but significant extent under Jim Crow. That's the loot when it comes to African-Americans, or the main body of it, and some of us shared the loot far more than others. White folks tend to have more wealth than Black folks in large part because White folks inherited almost all of the loot.
            The serious question is what, if anything White and Black Americans — and the various blends of Americans — are going to do about that.

            Freed slaves didn't get "Forty Acres and a Mule," and figuring out a contemporary equivalent will be very difficult; actually doing anything will be painful for a lot of people because it involves reparations, which means taking some of the stolen property and giving it back.

            So let us enjoy righteous indignation against Donald Sterling and throw in Cliven Bundy, the songsters of Sigma Alpha Epsilon of Oklahoma U, and other such, and rejoice in the fall of Sterling and perhaps when the Federal Marshalls stop Mr. Bundy from going from deadbeat racist to insurrectionist. But let's keep the party fairly quiet, and brief.

            Then we can get down to serious discussion of who has what and how they and we got it: what to do with the loot from Grand Theft Continental, with lethal violence, against the AmerIndians, and kidnapping, murder, and crimes against humanity against the ancestors — some quite recent — of African-Americans.
            That's the issue — not the attitudes and blather of bigots.

Altruism: I'm Sort of Against It (25 Jan. 2015)

[N]othing is so soon corrupted by power-seeking as altruism."

— Odo "The Day Before the Revolution"

"Since when was altruism an Odonian virtue?”

"I am no altruist!" — Shevek in

The Dispossessed (chs. 8, 11)

            Odo and Shevek are characters created by Ursula K. Le Guin in the early 1970s, characters who "theorize," inspire, and initiate (Odo) and then help renew (Shevek) a revolution toward a just and good society based in communist anarchism. That's "communist anarchism" with the communism of the small "c" variety and "communist" acting as a modifier of the main word of the phrase: you-bet-your-ass anarchism.
            Odo may misspeak in her reservations about altruism (it turns out she's dying and may be confused), and Shevek is the hero of The Dispossessed but definitely fallible. Still, as Dan Sabia points out in a fine passage on altruism in "Individual and Community in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed" (pp. 119-20 [pdf 147-48]) — and I argued about the same time — the upshot is that Le Guin's Odonianism isn't keen on altruism, and Le Guin herself is at least skeptical.
            That may surprise people who sensibly assume any communal society requires a good deal of altruism and that an anarchy (pure society: no State, no government) would require a great deal of altruism. That may be the case, but Le Guin presents a thought-experiment where an anarchistic culture, society, and economy work with normal humans: a species — well, genus in these stories — that's clearly social but whose members are not reliably altruistic.
            I liked the doubts on altruism when I came across them in Le Guin's work, in large part for the good human reason that even in my early 30's when I encountered the stories, I had long shared such doubts.
            A relatively quick story.
            Arguably, I'm about as pathetic as Al Bundy on Married … With Children insofar as I pretty well peaked at age 17. I wasn't some Bundy-esque high school jock, but, about 1960, at age 17 or so, I became president of The Merton Davis Memorial Foundation for Crippling Diseases of Children. Relevant here is the election meeting and, so to speak, my inaugural address to our executive committee.
            I was later told that the outgoing officers who'd engineered my selection had been somewhat worried about me. I'd been a good soldier under their command — hard-working, obedient, and respectful and all — but the obedience and respect part, and some perceived excess of idealism, had them a little concerned: they thought I'd be too diffident to lead.
            My little speech dispelled that belief. I'd been a good soldier and carried out orders, and I wanted people to do that for me now that I was in charge.
            I also wanted my executive committee to work hard and explained that idealism and altruism probably wouldn't be enough for the necessary level of work.
            I served the organization is part out of youthful idealism but only a small part. My major motivation was that I'd had Legg-Perthes disease as a child and had only fully recovered from it a couple years earlier. By coincidence, just as in a matter of chance, my father had also had Legg-Perthes disease at the age I got it, possibly triggered in each case by the same sort of accident (he'd fallen while climbing a tree; I'd fallen off a swing set while trying to walk across the top bar of the swing set). The difference in our experience was that my father had been put into a cast and traction and had a year pretty well cut out of his life; my parents, on the other hand had been lucky enough — and maybe my father had been insistent enough — to find an orthopedist who was trying a "First, do no harm" approach and just kept watch on the disintegration of my left (or maybe right) hip joint. Basically I was told to "Let pain be your guide" and led a normal life, except insofar as I got most of my serious exercise swimming rather than on land.
            The passive medical approach took some chutzpah on the part of the orthopedist; the X-rays looked really scary, and, of course, hotshot physicians in the Cold War Era were (and remain to this day) supposed to DO SOMETHING!! about scary diseases.
            Anyway, the ball and socket on my hip grew back so well I'm not sure which hip was affected, and the only serious concern is if there were any ill effects from a decade of hip X-rays at 1940s-50s standards for exposure to radiation, X-rays that necessarily passed through my genitals. (Only in my last set of X-rays did the lab tech get around to putting a shield over my testicles.)
            My father and I had both been mildly diddled by the Goddess Fortune — I've linked to at least one image that will help you picture Her with a suitable Wheel — in getting a rare disease at all, but compared my father, I had seriously lucked out.
            So I owed. And serving The Merton Davis Memorial Foundation for Crippling Diseases of Children went a long way toward paying the debt.
            That part of my motivation had to do with my sense of self, my integrity, my honor: which, in themselves, have nothing to do with altruism since I didn't have to give a rat's ass about crippled kids; I had dues to pay.
            Actually,I could identify with and did care about crippled kids, but more important was that Pride thing in my not wanting to owe nobody nuthin', plus whatever standard weird psychodynamics were going on with my relationship with my father. And there was the Pride thing big time in being president of a charitable foundation at 17.
            I told my executive committee I wanted them to have similar motivations: some idealism, a touch of altruism, but enough of the down-and-dirty basic human motivations of being on the executive committee of a charitable foundation while still in one's teens and being pretty hot shit, as we used to say, in the world of Chicago North Side (mostly Jewish) high school fraternities and sororities.
            By junior/senior year of high school, I'd observed enough human behavior to know that altruism exists and is a beautiful thing, but I'd learned that altruism isn't to be depended upon for the long haul, or even a year's service running a charity.
            Self-interest, preferably — not necessarily — enlightened self-interest, provides a more solid basis for human action, including doing good.
            At least in the world Le Guin created for The Dispossessed and "The Day Before the Revolution," communist anarchism could work because it served most people's self interest well, and in any event better than capital "C" State Communism and Capitalism.
            You don't have to accept Odo's ideas or Le Guin's or mine on how to move toward The Good Society, not here anyway. The point here is on motivating people and that offering rewards for people doing what you think is right is better — more effective to start with, but also better — than appeals to altruism or, I'll now add, to guilt.
            This is part of what ticks me off about too much stress on victimization of women, African-Americans, Native Americans, Jews, et al.
            Consider the following literally pragmatic argument (what respectable thinkers would call vulgar pragmatism, to which I'll cheerfully admit).
            If the more militant analyses of US culture by the most radical women and Blacks of the 1970s were correct — and there is much to be said for those analyses — then White privilege and patriarchy operate to direct most wealth to White males and leave everyone else relatively poor and pretty much powerless. Okay, but if that is the case, action by White males would be necessary for any significant changes since a revolution from below would be doomed — see that bit about powerlessness — and the only motivation to help would be either an overpowering sense of guilt or altruism.
            So long as radical women and Blacks could plausibly threaten disruption and even property damage, there was the possibility of more centrist sorts wringing concessions out of the power elite (those old White men).
            There's only so long that militant enthusiasm can operate, however, and a time limit on how long mass movements can move: people leave the streets; the power elite and their bureaucrats stay; and we see "Backlash" (under Richard M. Nixon) and then "Rollback" (Ronald Reagan through today).
            You end up better off then you started — "Two steps forward, 1.7 steps back" — but there is only rarely radical change: change from the roots up.
            Most of the time that's just as well with radical ideas and mass movements since, to recycle one of George F. Wills's correct ideas, most new ideas are wrong, and mass movements do tend to get nasty. The goals of the Movement of the mid-20^th c. however, were right, and they were important.
            It is necessary to vent gripes and publicize past and continuing wrongs. And it's necessary to do so frequently since the American people are chronically amnesiac, and American media have the attention span of beagle puppies. After that, and while doing that, however, to implement necessary changes one needs nuanced analysis, and building of coalitions.
            Some basics for those projects:
                        * "The White Man" and "The Man" are abstractions. Actually-existing Whites and men (or whatever) share privilege and power very unequally, as it is becoming fashionable to point out.
                        * White privilege and patriarchy are ways to bring together groups of people who can feel privileged because they/we are — relative to the nearest sets of "wogs," including women. These abstract mass groupings (these binary opposites) however, are a thin overlay over a much more significant social model of the power-and-economic pyramid. At the top of the pyramid are those who have, and nowadays again have big; while further down is everybody else.
            Indeed we are not beyond racial and sexual divisions; but it is time to get back to that old time Leftism that notes that White guys with a little bit of power and privilege — guys with a decent union, say — have only a little bit of power and privilege and might have more with more equitable distribution of wealth.
            Or would locally: things get more complex if one wants "All men" and women "created equal" and living somewhat equally, and want to bring into the equation, say, most Africans or most humans generally.
            At least in terms of American politics, we could use less slathering on of guilt and implicit reliance on altruism and more appeals to Pride-based honor and self-interest. "Guilt isn't inherited, but the loot is"; and we non-African-American Americans can be reminded that we've got a debt of honor to pay Blacks and that the serious issue is how best to go about paying it down a bit. Meanwhile we White guys should be dealing with reparations and other issues of fairness and wealth-distribution not out of altruism, and not only as a matter of honor, but also from self-interest.
            Maybe not 99% of us, but most of us will be better off in a world that is fairer, more just, more equal.
            Altruism exists, and it's a beautiful thing. Holiness also exits, though I found it as upsetting as beautiful, but I've encountered holiness exactly once. You should count on altruism only slightly more than actual holiness for politics.
            As a practical matter, activists must count on coalitions, and the technique of building them starts with getting your grievances out there quickly and then talking to ordinary people, who always have near the core of our basic motivations that crucial question, "What's in it for me?" The question isn't just nearly inevitable; it's also legitimate, and people who want major social changes need good answers.