Fell Rabbit, Christmas Eve Morning

The cursed rodent has found me.  For those who may not remember, I encountered the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog not long ago while mountain biking on the Hoyt Park trails.  When I escaped the white beast, I thought I was rid of it forever.  But this Christmas Eve morning, that oxymoronic time of anticipation and procrastination-fueled preparations, he returned.  I opened the door to head out and pick up some Kouign Amann from Amaranth Bakery (which, as an aside, are the finest breakfast pastries that I have tasted) when I spied the creature's tracks at my door, mocking me, as it were.

An auspicious beginning to Christmas Eve day.

I donned my battle gear for the bakery run:  Sorels, London Fog wool overcoat, and rabbit fur-lined gloves.  I am not above mocking, fell beast!  Projecting confidence, despite my wariness, I strode through the wet snow toward my car, alert for the attack I know must be coming.



"Hasenpfeffer," I thought to myself.  "Bring it on rabbit, I'll make you into stew," I muttered, like whistling in the dark.

My driveway, where it nears the road, slopes steeply.  Surely the foul creature would launch his attack while I was on that portion, strategically the least defensible portion on my walk, a fraught narrow stretch not unlike Gallipoli or Thermopylae.  "If only I can make it to the car," I thought, "I'll be able to arm myself with an ice scraper and jumper cables," an urban gladiator in this spectacle of the absurd.

Alas, the creature is a clever strategist, learned in history and cunning of tactics.  I would never reach the car before the onslaught.  In my heart of hearts I knew this was so.

What happened next was too fast to process.  Perhaps you have seen The Revenant?  In an instant it was all incisors and fur and blood curdling screams.  Instinctively I raised my hands to my face just in time, the razor sharp incisors finding purchase in my left forearm, crushing through soft tissue to bone, tearing sinew and fascia and muscle.

In a state of shock, I felt no pain and threw the beast off me.  It attacked again with lightning speed, not giving me a moment to recover my senses, gnawing deadly, teeth dangerously close to my face as I struggled to hold it back, both hands grasping its now bloody fur, streaked with the ferruginous liquid leaking from the gashes in my forearm.

I tried to find a weakness but the furry fiend's defenses were impenetrable.  I grabbed a hind foot, visions of lucky talismans filling my mind, but it merely dug its other foot deep in my exposed wrist, causing me to yowl in pain and frustration.  Again it flew at my face, gnashing its teeth.  Again I parried the attack.  The super fecund vermin once more found purchase in my left forearm.  I started to black out.  I could not take much more of this.

It was then that I saw it - my salvation, the nub of a baseball bat, the one I told the boy never to leave in the yard, sticking out of the snow bank, just barely, which I grabbed, life surging again, almost gleefully.  I yanked the Easton free and stood, raising myself to my full height, confident, hurling the beast once more from my gaping, ragged forearm, cocking my elbow, a little Joe Morgan twitch, stepping into the snarling rodent which was now enraged and flying at me to finish me off.  It may not have been a textbook swing, nowhere near level, a tomahawk really, but in the throes of mortal danger, in the sights of the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog, function  trumps form and I sent the beast up, up, and away, over the bungalow across the street, over the great oak one street away, its terrible scream Dopplering away into nothing, perhaps as far as Washington Park.

I stood dripping sweat and blood, panting, my wool overcoat in tatters, my hat on the ground, but, I thought, I am alive!  The rabbit that stalked me in Hoyt Park, that found my home, the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog would not defeat me.  This would not be my hot gates, the band would not play Waltzing Matilda.  I gathered myself and, despite searing pain and a barely functional left arm walked to the car and got the Kouign Amann rolls I promised would be on the table for breakfast Christmas Eve morning.  And though I struck the rabbit with Giancarlo Stanton-like ferocity, I sense, no I know, that he is not dead.  Who knows where he will turn up next.  Perhaps it is time to find the Holy Grenade of Antioch.

Merry Christmas

Christmas as Hope, Gifts as Ethics

The way we celebrate Christmas, especially common notions as to why we give gifts on Christmas, has long struck me as problematic.  Christianity is ultimately an Easter faith.  Mark and John do not mention Christ's birth or origins.  Paul focuses exclusively on the experience of the risen Christ.  The only reason the birth of Christ appears in the Christian Bible at all is rhetorical:  to link Jesus of Nazareth to Messiah references in the Torah.  In essence, biblical accounts of the birth of Jesus reflect the Jewish nature of the earliest iterations of the Christ faith.  As a theological matter, the birth of Jesus seems practically irrelevant to Christianity as an Easter faith.

As a matter of religion, Christmas is, for me, fraught.  Principally, the birth of Jesus as the future Christ is the instantiation of hope in the world,  I take that hope to mean hope for justice in the world, the possibility that God's law will be realized or actualized.  The possibility Jesus' birth brings is not salvific in the sense of offering hope for another world, i.e., heaven, but rather is salvific in the sense of bringing the possibility of God's law, i.e., justice, to this world.  The fact that Jesus was not born as the Christ but rather as an ordinary and wholly human infant exemplifies the material or existential nature of his possibility.

As a practical matter, Christ's birthday was utterly ordinary, notwithstanding the rhetorical needs of Matthew and Luke.  This to me is the meaning of Christmas - the instantiation of hope in an ordinary person.  The redemptive or salvific possibility of Christ exists in a person who bears no special markings, a person who is wholly ordinary.  The birth of Jesus, if it is to be celebrated, should be celebrated for the extraordinary fact that the possibility of God's law, the salvific capacity for justice, is fully human and is to be realized in the world.

The idea that Jesus is a gift from God to the world [and that this is the reason for gift-giving on Christmas] turns the radical nature of Christ's meaning on its head.  Jesus was not a gift.  Christ represents an ethical choice.  We should celebrate Christmas as an acknowledgement that the condition for justice is being human and that the possibility of justice exists in all of us.  Christmas is truly a material holiday, but only in the sense that it demonstrates the wholly existential nature of God's law, that justice is human rather than heavenly.

The transformation of Jesus to the Christ was volitional.  The possibility of Christ is embodied in ethical choice.  Gift-giving is laudable but does not, for the most part, have much to do with the birth of Jesus.  Insofar as the birth of Jesus has meaning, it has meaning because it was an ordinary birth of an ordinary child whose future would be extraordinary not because of his birth-status but rather because of how he chose to act.  Jesus was not Zeus or Krishna appearing on earth with divine power and attributes.  Jesus was a man who offered an ethical choice, which was also a divine choice:  to live justly.  Christmas should be a celebration of justice, of ethical choice, not largesse.

Of course, the problem with interpretation is that it sometimes runs counter to reality.  In the case of Christmas, that means gift-giving.  Neither I nor anyone else can do anything to change our practice of giving gifts on Christmas.  That being said, the practice, insofar as it is traced to the Bible, can be made to accord with the significance of the single instance of gift-giving on the birth of Christ - that of the three Eastern wise men or kings:

Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him.”When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. when they had come into the house, they saw the young Child with Mary His mother, and fell down and worshiped Him. And when they had opened their treasures, they presented gifts to Him: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Then, being divinely warned in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed for their own country another way.

NKJV, Matthew, 2:2-12.

The function of the gifts in the passage quoted above seems not to be a celebratory matter exclusively but rather a political one:  here are secular authorities pledging themselves to God's son rather than to Herod (and by extension, Rome).  Tribute, which is what the gifts of kings is, goes to god, not to the secular authorities, not to the empire.  Hence, the notion of gifts for Christmas should be a political act, a tribute to God over the secular authorities, rather than an act of mere generosity or thankfulness.  

This squares with the radical message of Christ, which calls for uncompromising and unaccommodating fealty to God regardless of the secular authority's demands.  In truth, a plain reading of Christ's message puts the believer squarely at odds with the secular authority.  In fact, Christ's message could be read as a critique of all authority qua authority, which ultimately turns into a self-propagating edifice at odds with God.  All authority qua authority becomes an idol, a golden calf if you will.  The hierarchy or bureaucracy or ecclesiastical polity becomes so focused on meta-analysis of the rules governing it and justifying its existence that it effectively turns away from God.  The problem is not 'law' per se, but rather the claim to monopolize both the interpretation and administration of God's law.

The eastern kings or wise men and their tribute to a babe in a 'manger' further the Christ message that God's law is not formal or ethnocentric.  The gifts are not offered to be generous.  They gifts are offered because tributes to God are appropriate.  In this way, the tribute, the Christmas gift is a radical tribute to and tacit acknowledgement of the ethical priority of the other.  "Thou shalt have no other gods before me;" hence, kings or wise men give gifts to Jesus. The commandment is the starkest form of prioritizing the other.  Above all and first, God.  In Jesus' formulation, "The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength."  Mark 12:29-30.  The gifts of kings pay tribute to the absolute and utter primacy of God and our obligation to that otherness.  this radical alterity is the model for our gift-giving.  The gift is not an act of generosity or charity, though it may be that too, instead it is an acknowledgement of the ethical standing of the other as prior to the self.  The gift is a tribute to the material aspect of the first commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself, to acknowledge the other's absolute and inalienable status as a fully ethical being to whom tribute, and hence moral agency, are due.  The fact that Matthew specifically locates the secular authorities to the "east" demonstrates that the ethical priority of the other is not parochial but instead extends to every person.  This is extraordinary and worth emulating.

I still maintain that the way we celebrate Christmas is problematic.  Jesus was not a gift but rather the instantiation of hope in the world.  The message of the risen Christ only makes sense if Jesus was wholly human, one whose divine status centers on volition, an ethical choice, rather than a magical birth.  Nevertheless, we give gifts on Christmas and that is not going away.  Although I am not particularly religious, I will remember the model of the eastern kings or wise men when I give gifts this year:  my gifts partially fulfill my obligation to understand and treat those receiving them as ethically prior to myself, to treat them as I would treat myself.  In this way, whether we are religious or not, we fulfill that most basic and radical ethical command when we give gifts at Christmas.

Whither Milwaukee French Immersion School?

I have the good fortune to be able to pick up my son when his school lets out for the last couple of months.  Parents wait for their children in the auditorium.  I usually arrive a bit early and have time to observe the process.  It is uplifting to see the younger kids' eyes light up when they spy their mom or dad (or grandparent).  I am not certain that there can be more clear and unmitigated joy than that precise moment.  Witnessing it privileges me.

As lovely as the excitement of kids meeting their parents is, I write this post for another reason.  Chiefly, I worry about this place that has become a sort of family for my son.  My son attends Milwaukee French Immersion School, which is part of Milwaukee Public Schools.  The staff and students are a mix of races, ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds, etc.  Sitting in the auditorium and watching this group of kids smile and goof and pout is heartening.  I am, however, painfully aware that this group of students and staff is all too unusual in American society where segregation, intentional or not, is the norm.

I am worried because the instances of integration in American society, when they do occur, tend to occur in urban areas.  Even in a hypersegregated city like Milwaukee, a place like French Immersion School can and does exist.  There are few, if any, other places in the State of Wisconsin where a place like French Immersion School would even be a possibility let alone an actual school.  Unfortunately, the things that make Milwaukee French Immersion School possible and other opportunities for integrated experiences in urban centers are under assault from state and federal legislators.  What is truly disturbing about the assault on urban self-government is the historical antecedent.  A similar assault occurred in Austria in the 1930's, pitting the left-leaning urban center of Vienna against the right-leaning central government.  As historian Timothy Snyder notes,

The central government (controlled by conservative Christian parties) lined its artillery pieces up on the hills above Vienna and set about quite literally shelling socialism:  firing down upon the Karl-Marx-Hof and all those other nice working class Hofs, with their kindergartens, their daycare centers, swimming pools, shops and so on--municipal planning in action and despised for just that reason.

 Judt, T. with Snyder, T.  Thinking the Twentieth Century. Penguin, 2012, p. 30.

It is difficult not to note how this parallels the struggle going on the U.S. between urban centers and the rest of the country.  The City of Milwaukee and the State of Wisconsin are good examples.  Milwaukee has enacted municipal regulations designed to benefit residents such as mandatory paid sick leave for employees of employers located in the city limits.  The measures are favored by a majority of residents and liberal politicians.  The regulations are opposed by businesses and conservative politicians, almost none of whom represent the city.  Rather than allow the city the privilege of self-governance, the conservative controlled state legislature passes state laws prohibiting municipalities like Milwaukee from enacting local laws to which conservative state legislators are opposed, such as mandatory paid sick leave.  Similarly, conservative legislators have attempted to wrest local control from local school boards such as Milwaukee Public Schools to push school districts to adopt policies conservatives favor but residents do not.

I am not entirely certain from where this animus towards local control proceeds other than the fear that the policies will prove successful and thereby undermine the conservative legislative project to privatize and deregulate virtually every aspect of civic life.  Regardless, the worrisome consequence is the stark derogation of urban residents' self-determination such legislative action represents.  The exercise of state legislative authority to trump local regulation and governance is blatantly paternalistic and infantilizes municipal residents whose political will is treated without deference or respect.  Although the legislature is not lining artillery around the perimeter of the city, politically their actions gut our kindergartens and shops and effectively shell municipal planning in action.  It is as if they despise urban communities simply for having a different vision of how to achieve the good.

What this hostility toward urban places means for Milwaukee French Immersion School is not yet certain.  Nevertheless, the historical antecedents for rural antipathy toward urban centers is disturbing.  Historically, rural populations are driven by resentment of that which makes urban centers desirable and a misguided fear that urban centers are more powerful than they in fact are (as exemplified by the results in the recent Presidential election).  Rather than allow urban centers to flourish, examples such as Vienna of the 1930's demonstrates that persons and politicians from outside the city will do what they can to cripple urban centers.  The Milwaukee Public School District has made many strides and weathered a significant assault from conservative legislators to take over the district.  Nevertheless, the question remains, for how long can it continue to do so?  Five years hence what will another father see when he sits in the auditorium and waits to pick up his child?  I fear he will see something different and less extraordinary than the sight I see because some conservative from the countryside saw the same thing and couldn't abide it.

Words Matter: White Nationalism Is White Supremacy

Words matter.  The media currently is awash in the term "white nationalism."  I prefer "white supremacy" for the simple reason that it more accurately describes the beliefs of those who profess it.  White nationalism has a vague whiff of legitimacy about it that white supremacy does not.  And to be sure, white nationalism is wholly illegitimate.  White nationalism is, ideationally, a construct that functions to justify separation.  White nationalism does not, as an idea that takes up psychic space, contain room for even segregation or apartheid.  Instead, white nationalism is of a piece with national socialism, more commonly known as Nazism.  The reason is that white nationalism, like Nazism, seeks to carve out a geopolitical space populated wholly by those it defines as "white."  There is no room in the "white" nation for persons or groups designated as non-white.  However anodyne the language white nationalists use, the fact is that a white nation has no room for non-whites; hence, white nationalists will ultimately, if they have the authority, use state power, including violence or the threat of violence, to maintain the separate geopolitical space they crave.  In this respect, white nationalism is the geopolitical equivalent of white supremacy.

It behooves us to refer to white nationalism as white supremacy so that we never lose sight of the teleological endpoint white nationalists seek:  it is the same teleological endpoint that white supremacists seek.  That the definition of "white" is wholly arbitrary and incoherent in any meaningful biological, sociological, or political sense matters little.  Like Nazism or Stalinism, the arbitrariness and incoherence become irrelevant in the face of state violence against categories of persons.  White nationalists define "whiteness" as a sort of self-referential privileging of "whiteness."  To be sure, whiteness inures in part based on appearance, but whiteness does not inure on appearance alone.  That which is deemed effete, tolerant, or skeptical is not white.  Hence, categories of persons such as intellectual liberals who might otherwise be deemed white are placed in a non-white category.  The point being that "whiteness" is used to signify a particular sociocultural experience, to privilege that experience above all others, and to use the experience as a justification of state-enforced separation.

White nationalism is of course ironic in the sense that if all those who are not "white," as white nationalism defines it, left the country, the white nationalists would find themselves in an economically and intellectually impoverished nation.  The political and economic consequences of white supremacy, however, do not assuage its danger.  White nationalists are white supremacists and will resort to violence against those deemed to be non-white in order to enforce the sociopolitical ramifications of their beliefs.  This is why it is imperative to refer to white nationalists as white supremacists.  They do not seek peace.  They seek domination and exclusion.  They do so based on a belief that they are superior to other humans.  In fact, the simple truth is that white supremacists do not consider non-whites to be fully human.  Whether such a belief is coherent or justified does not matter if one is being dominated and excluded.  Placing oneself in the "human" category and others outside the "human" category will beget violence.

One of the problems we face is that calling a white supremacist a Nazi or equating white nationalism with Nazism feels uncomfortable.  This has to do with many factors, but two seem apparent to me.  First, no white supremacists in the U.S. have, at least since the Bureau of Indian Affairs abandoned efforts at assimilation, attempted to exterminate a class of persons using state-sanctioned deadly force in the way that Nazis did during the Holocaust.  We simply have no received experience of anything so radical in its violence and extensive in its reach.  Even the violence done to black Americans does not compare to the systematic efficiency and scope of the Nazi killing project during World War II.  Thus, calling a group Nazis feels overblown.  The problem is that white supremacists would surely behave as vilely and violently as Nazis should they ever control the levers of state power in the United States.  For this reason, the comparison, while a bit jarring, is certainly apt.

Second, we in the United States have a belief that we are somehow inherently different than Germany in the Weimar era.  In essence, we believe that Nazism or anything similar cannot happen here.  The reason for the belief has to do with the vast experiential differences in representative democracies between the United States and Weimar Germany.  No one would seriously debate that the American republican system is different from Weimar Germany.  The U.S. was a historical first and has nearly 250 years of uninterrupted history as a representative democracy.  Nevertheless, this does not suggest something about the inherent quality of being American.  It simply reflects that this was the government the American people chose due in large part to historical fortuity.  What this means is that demagoguery in the U.S. is unlikely to take the same route to power that it took in Weimar Germany.

That the United States is different from Germany does not mean that Americans are immune to promises of prosperity and happiness based on ethnic scapegoating.  Donald Trump's promise to exclude Muslims and deport/keep out "Mexicans" demonstrates that we are as susceptible to ethnic scapegoating as any.  A part of the population that self-identifies as "white" is aggrieved for a variety of reasons.  That population blames Muslims and "Mexicans" for their grievances.  This is of course patently absurd.  Muslims as a category are not violent or anti-American.  Further, Muslims as a category create enormous wealth and add tremendous value to the United States.  One need only look at the roster of doctors at any hospital to understand that Muslims as a category benefit America rather than harm it.  The same is true of "Mexicans."  American produce would not make it to American tables if "Mexicans" weren't working the fields.  Nevertheless, Muslims and "Mexicans" are scapegoated as sources of white supremacists' grievances.  This is not so different from Nazis scapegoating Jews for grievances Jews were not responsible for.  Like the case with Muslims and "Mexicans" in the contemporary United States, Jews in Weimar Germany benefited the German republic but were nevertheless blamed for all grievances.

White supremacists are ultimately Utopian thinkers.  This is why white nationalism is a poor word choice to describe the white supremacist project.  The truth of all Utopian projects is that they seek to create a sort of prelapsarian community in the world.  This requires a myth of an ideal community, the prelapsarian Eden from which the world devolved, and a narrative of what corrupted the ideal community.  All such myths are incoherent from anthropological, sociological, and historical perspectives.  Nevertheless, all such myths are dangerous because they establish a hierarchical organization of human beings based on purity and impurity.

All utopias are imagined because every utopia assumes an impossible state of perfection is possible.  In this regard, every utopia is pernicious, whether left or right, because achieving utopia requires eliminating human imperfection, an inherently exclusionary and violent project.  The white supremacist utopia imagines a prelapsarian world in which prosperity and happiness were functions of whiteness.  What white supremacists consider to be white is a sort of 1950s chauvinism in which family supporting jobs were available because white males were the workforce and the jobs were good because white males were not constrained from being white males.  That is, white males were bigoted, society was segregated (though insufficiently), and economic prosperity resulted.  At the international level this translated into American belligerence which is viewed as evidence of America's strength and confidence.  Individuals were strong because they were free to be prejudiced and the nation was strong because its bellicosity was unfettered.  The Utopian project seeks a return to "white" America, which means elevating bigotry beyond the normative to the legal and intentionally removing any persons or groups with state force who would sully the new "whiteness."  Again, the fact that this idea is wildly incorrect is irrelevant because many persons adhere to it and the notion countenances segregation and ultimately violence.  It is a supremacist movement through and through.  History tells us that supremacist movements will use the possibility of and desire for a Utopia as justification for state violence.  America is no different than any other country in this regard.

How we describe the current iterations of the white supremacy movement matters.  Cloaked in the garb of an incoherent form of ethnic nationalism, those espousing white nationalism are still white supremacists and ought to be so described.  "White nationalism" tames the true yearnings of white supremacists and implies that statehood is an ethnic concept rather than a political one.  This has implications for all persons who are not considered "white."  First, it strips them of the legal standing and protections granted to citizens because it transfers political rights to an ethnic category.  Second, it suggests that every non-white would then have a place in a nation that matches their ethnic category.  In this way, white supremacy creates the conditions for legal exclusion and possibly violence if full citizenship is effectively removed for non-whites and there is no physical place to put the new non-citizens.  The violence the U.S. government perpetrated against native tribes is perhaps instructive.

The question remains whether this concern over language is hyperbole.  In this regard I return to the Nazi problem:  if white supremacists who masquerade as white nationalists espouse beliefs that designate "white" as the only fully human category of persons and they have as their goal an exclusively "white" geopolitical territory, then the Nazi comparison is fair and not hyperbolic.  That the U.S. has different political conditions than Weimar Germany does not by necessity immunize the American system from racist demagogues willing to use state power to perpetrate violence against non-whites.  White supremacy is, if not on the rise, more in the open.  Every media outlet should call white supremacy for what it is rather than using language that has even the merest whiff of political legitimacy, i.e. white nationalism.  Anything less is complicit in the white supremacy movement's attempt to color itself as even marginally legitimate when it is wholly illegitimate.  It is not hyperbole to call something exactly what it is, particularly when that thing is fraught with danger for so many.