Every event, no matter how earth – shattering, always ends up being reduced to a meme. Every discussion of the Charleston massacre has been downgraded to the endless rehashing of the need to remove the Confederate flag from South Carolina ‘ s capital. I have scrolled through my newsfeed and discovered not a single article among dozens and dozens that discussed any aspect of the tragedy but the stupid flag.
Yes, the removal of the flag will have symbolic value. But I’m fed up with the symbolic, to be honest. Aren’t you? We’ve all heard endless blather about the symbolic value of electing the first black president, but after Obama has been in office for 7 years, there’s one racist outbreak of violence after another. And the fault lies with those who fixate on the symbolic and pay no attention to anything less cutesy and easy to sell in a neat package with a bow.
Recently, my colleagues went into a frenzy of email – writing and excited chirping over the “politically incorrect” name of the campus grill. When asked why the entirely inconsequential grill name aroused such activity while it was impossible to get anyone to protest the radical budget cuts the governor was imposing on our state’s higher education, the colleagues cheerfully stated that they feel impotent to change anything that really mattered, so they used the grill name as an opportunity to feel like they were still doing something in the midst of all this impotence.
Fixating on the flag is an easy out. All that one needs to do to feel self-righteous is to say or write an anti-flag screed. No actual effort goes into such armchair activism. No acknowledgement of the realities of racism needs to take place. Let’s just declare that somebody else should rename a grill or remove a flag while we go take a rest from this intense political battle we’ve just won.
Clarissa's Blog 
If you take symbolic nonsense out of US politics, by and large there would be nothing left.
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Good point. 🙂
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Over the years, I’ve noticed that special interest groups (e.g., the NAACP, American Indian activists, radical feminists) start going after symbols (flags, sports team logos, politically incorrect language) only AFTER they’ve essentially won the practical issues (the right to vote, equal pay, end of institutionalized discrimination) that those groups originally organized to challenge.
Most of their real battles are over, so going after symbols provides the justification for their continued existence as an aggrieved group.
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That’s stating the argument in a very slanted way. The argument over gun control has become largely symbolic due to use of the mechanic of arguing from extremes. The Tea Party is all about symbolic politics — lip service to principles that have no bearing on actual voting. The government shut down was completely about symbols devoid of meaningful content or creation of valuable policy.
Symbols have become a cover or camouflage, allowing politicians to say the right things and then do whatever they want. Clarissa’s comments about the carpetbagging ways of the GOP governor of Illinois is case in point. I’m sure there are people who believe he is trying to cut government waste why creating new, high paying jobs for friends and family.
No, both parties are equally guilty of symbolic politics. Of course, terrorists specialize in symbols — that’s how they pick their targets. Which also explains why money allocated to fight terrorism in places like Iowa makes no sense at all.
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“That’s stating the argument in a very slanted way.”
Sure it is, Vic. But if you’re as old as your avatar suggests, you remember television back in the days when Sammy Davis could use the N-world with Archie Bunker, and “F-Troop” could have politically incorrect Indians, and “The Dukes of Hazard” could have a Confederate flag on their car, and “Maude” called herself a broad without anybody pissing all over the place.
I’m not saying the world was better then. But it was a lot less uptight.
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One difference was that more people had more of a sense of humor about themselves back then. The veteran black comedians on Sanford and Son (many episodes easily available on youtube) freely used the n-word and the black portion of their audience loved it. Now those lines are censored….
Behind their flightiness and social inhibitions, most millenials seem like dour Miss Grundy types at heart with a lot of (mostly camoflaged) free floating anger they’re just itchin’ to inflict on someone.
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There is something very mission-creepish about most progressive hot button topics at present.
intersectionality, appropriation, supposed plagues of sexual assault at universities, diversity in video games, stereotype threat, micro-agressions etc, are all issues of people with no real greivances going on fishing expeditions looking for issues that might have some traction.
My observations (based on lots of little things) is that progressivism has gone about as far as it reasonably can at present and since no pendulum swings one way forever progressives need to prioritize saving gains made against a possible backlash toward traditionalism rather than exploring newer areas of greivance.
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Absolutely true. This is a reaction to an absence of real grievances. But it isn’t just progressives. It’s everybody. The constant freak out of the bakeries that refuse to cater before anybody asked is right there next to intersectionality. As is the endless freak out about the Tylenol commercials that feature about 2 seconds of footage that might be interpreted as featuring a gay couple.
There are tons of real problems but these are new problems. People need to adjust their mentality to see them. It is much easier to keep beating the dead horse of identity wars.
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A very good quote I found recently, from an unexpected source (no link because I don’t wanna give them traffic, if you’re curious google it).
“The language of today’s media is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, repeated until they cauterize memory. These have become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”
My only disagreement is that this is a recent phenomenon. It goes back at least to the 1980s (when I first became aware of it) and probably further.
I remember back in the 90s listening to radio debate with call-ins on healthcare reform. Every single caller had to begin with “Of course the US has the best healthcare system in the world…” at which point any point they made about reform seemed kind of pointless but it was like a magical incantation that they had to say before they could say anything else (like why they had such limited access to the great system).
That’s one of the main reasons I’m not into labelling this incident as ‘terrorism’ as it seems to be a analytical dead end.
The most relevant questions to me are,
was this a lone stand-alone crime or are others involved?
if others are involved who are they?
Collateral issues about the confederate flag, or gun control, or precisely how to label this (beyond racially motivated mass murder) don’t really help.
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What a great quote. I realized a while ago that the reason why people speak in these cliches because that’s how they think. Many, many people think in these bits of memorized phrases they heard someplace. They have a list of received wisdoms, and they try to fit everything they encounter into a box provided by that list. Nothing is harder than getting people to step away from these lists of clichés for a moment because they become overwhelmed with anxiety.
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Here is my flag post.
http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-flag-post.html
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Here people seem to fixate on historic statues rather than flags, but the same principle applies. Removing a statue of a long-dead politician does nothing to transform education, but much student rhetoric suggests that students think it does.
On the other hand, Dylann Roofs flags do give a pretty good idea of the roots of his ideology — see here Charleston massacre: a mirror of our conflicted society? | Notes from underground
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