Tag: pseudo-liberals

Pseudo-Liberal Self-Identification

~ Clarissa ~ 21 Comments

It seems like pseudo-Liberals try to outdo each other in ridiculous self-representations. Here is the most recent one I encountered:

Coca Colo is a graduate student in economics who researches gender issues and international development.  She has white, cis, hetero and US privilege, but is also a religious and ethnic minority.  She is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.

The statement makes me wonder what the blogger would do if she belonged to no minority to compensate for all that nasty privilege she has. It’s possible that the article that is introduced in this manner makes some important points. However, I feel no desire to continue reading it because the way in which its author introduces itself is so artificial, boring and unintelligent that it’s hard to expect anything useful from the article.

Slavoj Zizek tells a story of his encounter with the humorless earnestness of American pseudo-Liberals in one of his books. He was visiting an American university, and the professor who invited him organized a round table with his colleagues.

“First, let me introduce myself,” the host said, “and then everybody can do the same. I’m a heterosexual, cisgendered, middle-class American.”

Then, everybody around the table introduced themselves in the same way.

Zizek says he was petrified. The idea of introducing himself by mentioning his sexual orientation to a group of complete strangers seemed both weird and useless.

In my opinion, people who present themselves with these strings of meaningless collective identifications do so in order to compensate for lack of any individuality. As a blogger, one could choose the road of developing a distinctive personal writing style that readers would immediately recognize. That, of course, is hard and requires a lot of time, energy, and effort. It is much easier to create a pseudo-Liberal persona on the basis of important-sounding terms that create an illusion of a personality where there is none.

An Egregious Instance of Liberal Privilege Scratching

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

Want a really egregious example of pseudo-Liberal privilege scratching? Here is an app calculating how many slaves work for you worldwide. It must be so delicious to wallow in sweet quasi-progressive feelings of guilt as you contemplate your good fortune in comparison to all those miserable, pathetic Third World folks. As you pass through the cute survey listing your belongings (and what’s more fun that counting everything you own?), juicy little tidbits about the suffering of those less fortunate than you keep popping up on the screen.

Seriously, it’s a Liberal feel-good product of the year.

And the best thing is that it’s a game that can be enjoyed for quite a while. After you download the app, you will be able to

Earn Free World points when you get the app and use it to counteract your slavery footprint.

See? You can earn points while playing on your Android and, in the process, help all those pathetic creatures out there. Because they totally care how many points you have won on your app. It like totally will like change their lives to know how much you care. Isn’t that neat?

You can also put up posts about how many slaves work for you and complain that all your Fair Trade purchases weren’t taken into account when counting your slaves. Has one been so good and benevolent, buying all that expensive Fair Trade coffee, for nothing?

And where does the app get off counting all items of clothing one owns indiscriminately? What if one only buys shirts with progressive slogans that decry privilege? Doesn’t that count for anything?

Well, maybe the next version of the app will give out special rewards to the most righteous among the privilege-scratchers.

Mary Oliver’s “Singapore” As a Pseudo-Liberal’s Manifesto

~ Clarissa ~ 27 Comments

I stopped watching the Oprah show several years ago after I noticed how often it offered reports on some particularly gruesome atrocity suffered by women in Third World countries and followed it by Oprah’s remark as to how “we, the American girls, should remember how lucky we are to live in a country where our rights are respected and nothing like this can happen to us.” The shamelessness of using the suffering of others to make one feel good about one’s own life became too much for me to bear.

Mary Oliver’s poem “Singapore” takes this self-congratulating attitude even further. Before I read a discussion of this poet at Jonathan’s blog, I had never read anything by her. Now, however, I have encountered a perfect manifesto for pseudo-liberals everywhere.

Oliver begins the poem with a nearly concupiscent image of a third-world woman in the most degrading position this poet can find for her:

In Singapore, in the airport,
a darkness was ripped from my eyes.
In the women’s restroom, one compartment stood open.
A woman knelt there, washing something
     in the white bowl.

The nameless woman is on her knees in front of a toilet bowl. What can be more inspiring to a pseudo-liberal who goes through life motivated by the desire to find exploited, third-world people to feel sorry for? I can just imagine the author’s eyes lighting up when presented with such a vision. Of course, toilet bowls get washed everywhere on Earth (even though washing something in the bowl is a little less frequent). Who would want to write poetry about an American washing a toilet? That is not nearly as delicious as a person from Singapore – who by definition is imagined as oppressed and exploited – performing the action. It is also significant that the woman is not washing a purely Singaporean toilet bowl. Oh no, that would make her as boring as a Westerner who regularly gets on his or her knees to wash their own toilet. In order to be properly pitied, a third-world person has to wallow in the rich tourists’ excrement.

Disgust argued in my stomach
and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket.

Unlike the miserable woman from Singapore, the poetic ‘I’ has the lucky means to escape from this horrible, horrible country where people have to deal with messy toilets. Unfortunately for them, Singaporeans do not possess airplane tickets that would take them away from their disgusting realities.

A poem should always have birds in it.
Kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings.
Rivers are pleasant, and of course trees.
A waterfall, or if that’s not possible, a fountain
     rising and falling.
A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

The poetic ‘I’ is not only better than a Singaporean cleaning lady, it is also far superior to those other poets who have no social conscience and who keep blabbing about the beauties of nature instead of concentrating on the plight of oppressed toilet cleaners everywhere. Well, not everywhere. Just in those pathetic non-Western places.

When the woman turned I could not answer her face.
Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together, and
     neither could win.
She smiled and I smiled. What kind of nonsense is this?
Everybody needs a job.

In one breath, the poetic ‘I’ assigns a feeling of embarrassment to the Singaporean woman and comes up with an apology for her engagement in a debasing activity.

Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.
But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor,
     which is dull enough.
She is washing the tops of the airport ashtrays, as big as
     hubcaps, with a blue rag.
Her small hands turn the metal, scrubbing and rinsing.
She does not work slowly, nor quickly, but like a river.
Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird.

Of course, “it is a truth universally acknowledged” that every Asian woman will be compared to a natural phenomenon whenever a Western writer attempts to describe her.

I don’t doubt for a moment that she loves her life.
And I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop
     and fly down to the river.
This probably won’t happen.
But maybe it will.
If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?

As usual, the condescending Westerner is ready to ‘want’ things for the object of her munificent attention. The cleaning lady’s presence at an airport, a symbol of the Western civilization that is contrary to the authentic nature of a Singaporean woman, alienates her from her true role of a winged creature whose place is in a more natural setting. She needs to go back to her roots, which the Westerner imagines as being next to a river. And if a river has nothing to do with the Singaporean’s vision of herself, nobody cares for the simple reason that. . .

Of course, it isn’t.
Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only
the light that can shine out of a life. I mean
the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,
the way her smile was only for my sake; I mean
the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds.

. . . this woman’s smile and her entire existence are there for the sake of the poetic ‘I’ who uses the Singaporean woman to congratulate herself on being a superior poet and a wonderful, compassionate human being.

I strongly believe that it would be very useful to put up a poster saying “We do not need your pity” at every international airport of every Third World country.

Is Thomas MacMaster an Irresponsible Blogger?

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

While I was away on vacation, things have been happening in the blogging world. I have just accessed my blogroll for the first time in a week and discovered that everybody is writing about an American graduate student in Scotland who has been blogging under the guise of a gay woman in Damascus. Now that he has been revealed to be a straight man in Great Britain, numerous blogs are almost exploding in condemnation of his “dishonesty.”

If you care to visit the actual blog (one that attracted over 2,000 followers and had over 800,000 hits since it was started this February), you will discover that, from the very beginning, the texts that are posted on it are announced as a novel, a work of fiction. I wouldn’t say it is a particularly good novel, but the author tried to make clear from the start that this is what it was. Posts are referred to as ‘chapters’ and are structured as such. Can anybody really doubt that 4-page-long dialogues cannot possibly be faithfully memorized by their participants and transmitted word-for-word?  Any such account will of necessity be either fictional or fictionalized. Many of the posts on the blog are poems, which makes it even clearer that we are dealing with a work of fiction.

The reason why people are so upset about the ‘discovery’ that Amina Arraf is not a real person but a product of somebody’s imagination is that MacMaster managed to tap into a number of obsessions that currently preoccupy many liberal bloggers. What can be sexier in the mind of a progressive blogger than a gay Muslim woman persecuted during her fight for freedom within the framework of the Arab Spring? This was an image that was begging to be invented and, of course, it was. The West loves rewriting events happening in foreign places in its own language and in accordance with its own set of concerns. MacMaster did exactly what the absolute majority of commentators on foreign affairs do on a regular basis.

Talking to Westerners about feminism, gay rights, democracy, left and right, freedom, etc. is difficult because they so often refuse to recognize that these concepts can carry an entirely different meaning for people from other cultures. I studiously avoid any articles on Russian-speaking countries that appear in Western media because they keep trying to massage a very different reality into a set of concepts that are alien to it.

Of course, when a person called Amina Arraf with a suitably Arab (but still one that can be attractive to the Western gaze) appearance starts writing exactly what Western progressives want to hear from an Arab fighter for freedom and gay rights, everybody is extremely happy. Finally, these strange, incomprehensible people are giving us what we want and are speaking the language we have been eager to have them speak. When it’s revealed that the dream of the ‘correct’ Muslim gayness is nothing but a fantasy of an American blogger, the hope of finally encountering an embodiment of our pseudo-liberal fantasies is dashed and a wave of outrage is unleashed.