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Don’t get me wrong in this post. I’m not going to rant about marketing to children (a worthy rant) or the merchandising of everything, from birth onward (another worthy rant). Instead, I want to think about Thomas the Tank Engine as a troubling site of ideological reproduction. If the show is inside little people’s brains, then we ought to think about the world it gives them as image and maybe even reality.

By “ideological reproduction,” I here simply mean a place where certain forms of life – values, preferences, comportments toward self and other – are instilled in us out of habit and everydayness, rather than from an authoritarian source. That is, how forms of life happen in our common experiences, rather than surprising interventions of authority. The theorist of this is Louis Althusser, whose famous essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” showed, in such troublingly straightforward terms, how ideology is in the very air we breathe. My favorite example: the requirement to sit quietly in class while the teacher talks produces and reproduces the ideology of submission to authority.

What might Thomas the Tank Engine produce and reproduce? In other words, what’s the ideological “something” in the show?

Thomas the Tank Engine follows a pretty simple structure. Each episode has a straightforward conflict that gets resolved, with few complications, in about ten minutes. The plot lines have to do with an ever-increasing (marketer’s dream!) cluster of trains. They have train-like conflicts, but the lessons are clearly intended for the rest of us as well. Trains cooperate, trains get jealous, trains get hurt and need repair. Human stuff, you know. An authoritarian figure – called “Sir Topham Hatt” on the U.S. version, called “The Fat Controller” on the U.K. version – wanders about, constantly doling out critique and reprimand. And therein lies the real ideological question: who and what is the authoritarian figure?

Like I said, I’m not altogether troubled by the marketing aspect of the show. Sure, it is annoying to hear over and over about how we HAVE to buy this or that new character in metallic form, but that’s part of kids. There are plenty of annoying repetitions when you have a kid around. Let’s be honest, we hear the same stories and questions over and over (though few cost as much as Thomas, if you’re soft). It’s part of the “charm” of children, right? (It actually is.) What I am troubled by in Thomas the Tank Engine is pretty simple: the trains are always in trouble. The show is full of scolding and punishment. Everyone is always screwing up and getting corrected, and the alleged screw-ups are pretty pedestrian: got dirty, didn’t work enough hours, wanted to stay clean, worked too hard…

You see, I put those four screw-ups out there on purpose. They show that you just can’t win in Thomas’ world. You’re always too much of one thing or another. I’m thinking in particular about the show where James, who’s constantly criticized for being too vain, doesn’t want rain to ruin his new coat of paint. I get that. Not a big deal. James stops in a tunnel to wait out the rain. His penalty for such vanity? An explanation? A quick scold? Some education? No. The workers build a wall on both sides of the tunnel and trap James inside the tunnel to punish his vanity.

I’m hoping a comment or two explores the psychoanalytic dimension of this.

As I write that account of the episode, I’m actually a little chilled. I mean, seriously, what the hell kind of kid’s show walls in one of its characters because he wants to avoid the rain? But if you watch the show, it strikes you as par for the course and not exceptionally cruel. If you’ve watched the show – or been cursed by the books (!) – you know the refrain. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard it: “Usefulness before cleanliness,” he added. Always from the authoritarian figure.

Now, this remark is both typical and fraught. It is typical because the idea of usefulness is the thread to nearly every plot. But the line is also fraught because we know that the trains are constantly in trouble for being one or the other. Too useful and not clean enough; sometimes there’s too much work. Too clean and not useful enough; don’t be vain.

Watch this clip if you want a short example.

The title is “Percy’s Chocolate Crunch.” The book is even more troubling, more stark in its moral scolding, but the clip does enough. Percy crashes into a chocolate factory and is covered in its sweetness. The book shows Percy smiling, but the story is actually much bleaker. Percy crashes, then gets in heaps of trouble and ridicule for being dirty…there is work to do, remember. And usefulness is about labor on the authoritarian figure’s terms, no in terms of the play or pleasure of work. There is plenty of play and pleasure in work on the show, though it nearly always leads to trouble, scolding, and punishment. Covered in chocolate – but that’s not funny? Silly? Or even a kid’s dream come true? No. Percy is rewarded for feeling the shame of dirtiness, but enduring it for the sake of usefulness.

The ideology is clear: you never work hard enough and adherence to various values will never be perfect enough. So, expect a world of conflict, scolding, and assume always that you’re in trouble. Let me be absurdly plain about this: Is this really a good “message” for children? Do we really want their introduction to the world of work and sociality be be so fraught and conflictual? I’m not a parent who thinks every kid should live in a scold-free bliss-world. I get the discipline thing and can be pretty hard on my son. But I still wonder, every time I watch Thomas the Tank Engine, why this depiction of life seems acceptable to so many of us. It portrays life as a commodity, something that, once it is bought by the nicely-named “Fat Controller” (he is fat), is no longer your own, even though you inhabit the body and soul put to work on the controller’s terms.

In that way, I’ve come to see Thomas the Tank Engine as a sad and harrowing story about capitalism. Uncritical, on the show’s part. I mean, what else can “usefulness before cleanliness” mean, other than the idea that you’re the property of another first, before you care for yourself? But it ought to also make us ask: if the world is so grotesque in the show (it is), and the show portrays something essential about capitalist labor (it does), then why doesn’t it prompt oh so many questions from us? Maybe that just reveals how familiar that ideology is to us, so it doesn’t register as surprising. That’s how ideology works, after all. If nothing else, the show ought to prompt a pretty simple parental response, one that, in the end, is always revolutionary: you’re more than that, kid. And a world is possible in which you and your friends are not always in trouble for working too little or working too much. Yes, another world is possible…maybe.

This is no innocent question. There’s so much at stake, so the conversation in writing or on the radio is somber and even a bit fatalistic.

And that has bothered me a lot. For a bunch of reasons I wanted to write out, even if in short-hand.

First, I’m saddened that so many us on the left or progressive wing of politics can’t feel pleasure. I thought of this from the opposite perspective after 11 September 2001, where political critique began instantly and few seemed capable of just being sad at so much death and destruction. And now what seems to be a lack of pleasure at a breakthrough most of us thought impossible. Just as pain gives deep meaning to analysis, so too pleasure. Think critically all you want, but don’t forget the pleasure of something as debilitating and despairing as “no black person could be president” falling away, in such decisive fashion, accomplished by a coalition of random, committed people. My first thought: feel good, damn it! Critical analysis can wait. Ain’t nothing going to change in the next couple of weeks. (Bush is still presidente! Ay!)

Second, this worry about people declaring “racism is over” seems poorly placed at this moment. I’ve actually not heard a person say that, so this is a comment on commentary on a hypothetical case. Still, I ask: is there anyone who thought a week past that racism was a problem and suddenly, now, today, thinks racism is gone? I doubt it. Fact is, many people already believe racism is over and out. This just gives them another anecdote when making the case. Fretting about Obama’s election because he is another anecdote seems pretty lame. Not sure how else to put it. After all, the alternative is pretty depressing. Are we supposed to not want a black president in order to limit the number of examples the “there is no racism” folks can evoke? Nah. So what are we really talking about here?

Third, I listened to a great interview on NPR’s Morning Edition today while dropping my son at preschool. I liked the interview, but mostly because it was a concise summary of the other issue: the claim that Obama’s election is just an empty symbol.

I have a lot to say about this, but will be brief. To begin, I’m not sure why symbols are so unimportant – is anyone that radical of a materialist?! Symbols move the world, for better or worse. They have a real human effect. Were it not for the power of symbolic figures, acts, and events, the world would lack myth and literature. And political imagination. Not so empty in Obama’s case, I’d say. It is a symbol that this one thing, the presidency, is now accessible to African-Americans. For so many in my generation and prior, that was unimaginable. Glad to be wrong.

As well, electoral politics are a symbol for which many have sacrificed so much. I have a hard time imagining telling folks facing down police, hoses, and rabid police dogs in Alabama that, hey, this is just an empty symbol. At the very least, it is a symbol that matters in the body and soul. At the most, it changes the world.

Which is my fourth and final remark: what if Obama is just a symbol and he governs like a regular, mainstream Democrat? I suspect he will. His platform was pretty mainstream Democrat idea-laden, after all. He is a symbol the country needs, though, and I’ll say this specifically as a white person. I think we white people need, as a matter of daily, walkabout habit, to see a world in which we might work for, depend for a livelihood on, and ultimately be a citizen under a black person. Progressive politics around, say, affirmative action labor for something specific: a diversified workplace. But the point is not to have horizontal work relations alone. The point, I think, it to eventually have diverse vertical work relations. The reality of diversity in power relations is good for anti-racism at the level of habit, which is where so much political change happens. The symbol of the presidency matters right there, just so much.

In the end, I felt so happy when Obama was elected. I hugged all of my friends. I felt pleasure. I felt cynicism die just a bit, a cynicism Clinton and Bush share – a sense that nothing matters. And I’ll feel all sorts of critique in the years to come. I don’t think racism is over. I’ve not met a person who thinks that who did not think it already.

But I will say this: racism sustained a serious blow in this campaign season. That’s never a bad thing.

The plot of the film is pretty simple and I’m not giving anything away: the planet earth has become so polluted that it is uninhabitable, lacking all life forms and plagued by sandstorms and hot sun. Humans have relocated to a gigantic spaceship that wanders about, awaiting some sign of organic life. If there is organic life, humans can return to earth and re-inhabit the planet. Great. Environmental destruction is bad. No problem there. I don’t want to move to a spaceship!

I liked the commentary at Slate.com by Daniel Engber. The writer focused on the unfair and inaccurate connection the film suggests between obesity and environmental destruction. Blame fat people. I think the author overplays that angle in the film a bit, as it is unclear to me if the humans were actually obese when on earth or if in fact they only became obese after generations in space. Alas. It is certainly true that the dirtiness of the planet is associated with the slovenliness of the humans. So that complaint has actual traction.

What the reviewer didn’t note, and something that has stayed with me since seeing Wall-E, is the idea of the human person at work in the film. If I’m right, and I think I am, that the humans become slovenly and grotesquely obese (they can’t even walk, really) only on the spaceship, then that slovenliness is not related to environmental destruction alone. In fact, the slovenliness is related to the absence of work. Robots do everything to produce material needs and wants. Automation utopia, really.

Automation – the absence of the need to work for survival – creates slovenliness. Or, perhaps more precisely, automation brings the slovenly out of us. We become who we already are, what we’ve always been, but had forestalled by the necessity of work. Leisure time is equivalent to self-destruction. Sin. I’m not reluctant to use that word – sin – when describing the slovenly humans. We’re certainly not meant only to laugh. We’re supposed to condemn the humans for inactivity.

And herein lies my big complaint with the film. It reproduces a very Protestant work-ethic and morality, where leisure is temptation and corruption, rather than a place where other parts of our humanity come to flourish. Work is salvation. Or at least what keeps us from self-destruction. Left to our own intellect and desires, Wall-E suggests (or even insists), we become blobs. Barely human. This is the fat-mocking version of the old thing about idle hands and the devil.

I object to this. I really do. Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man remains, for me, an exemplary argument against this anxiety about leisure. Sadly, this book is pretty marginal in academic circles – Marcuse committed the sin of academia by becoming “popular.” Marcuse makes a convincing case that new forms of creativity and innovation emerge out of a new leisure, something increasingly possible with automation. Automation isn’t our death. It opens upon new possibilities.

Wall-E is emphatically anti-Marcuse, really, as automation leads to leisure leads to sin. Only toil gives salvation. Doubt me? The back-screen to the credits, which celebrates the human return to earth and happiness, depicts humans working. What does work look like? It looks just like the ant farms I had as a kid. Making perfectly symmetrical tunnels. I don’t think that’s Pixar art. I think that’s ideology.

That’s very much our anxiety about leisure or free time, no? Not to be trite, but kids have scheduled childhoods. Wow. So I’m not surprised to find that Wall-E thinks free time will make us fat and dumb.

Why fat and dumb? Why not freed from the toil of survival for art, science, and alternative possibilities in human relationships? In Wall-E, the spaceship is full of mindless consumption. Not a hint of art, literature, philosophy, religion, science…nothing that comes from human curiosity. That of course could open up a debate about human nature and the like – which is why I teach philosophy, I love that shit – but I’m content here to underscore our still very Protestant work ethic and its attendant anxieties. Indeed, for those who saw Wall-E, there is the question: did the association between toil and happiness make sense? Did you even need to question the connection between leisure and slovenliness?

Of course not. That’s how ideology works best, most efficiently. Not only does it seem natural and invisible, but you actually come to see yourself in it. Thanks, Louis Althusser! Wall-E as an ideological state apparatus! We recognize not only a return to our best state (the toil of the final credits), but also our greatest anxiety: left to ourselves, we’re shit.

Wall-E, I beg to differ.

What you find, for better or worse, is Isaac Hayes as composer of the Shaft soundtrack, so contributor to that certain look, style, and sound of the late-sixties, early-seventies. Jimi Izrael gives the best version of this at TheRoot.com, recalling the importance (albeit in a largely iconic pose) of Hayes in his own life…playing the theme from Shaft as he walked down the aisle to get married, even.

Great write-up. The template has been used in most of the remembrances.

But you can’t really get a sense of Isaac Hayes as an important songwriter, and that bothers me. You don’t have Stax records without Hayes’ songs. He wrote for Carla Thomas and Sam & Dave, for god’s sake, but that slips by as article after article talks about his role in South Park. There’s surely something to be said here about irony, racism, and racial representation, but I’ll pass on that for now – not quite in the mood, and it makes me sad.

I can’t say I’m surprised. The iconic rules, after all, so it seems pretty trite and lame to lament the loss of Isaac Hayes the creative master, the pop songwriter who’s matched by rare few for classics, hits, and just solid songs recorded and sung by the best. “Hold On, I’m Comin’” is as good as it gets in the mid-sixties. He and David Porter changed pop music, making hits that were soul music when r&b had taken over.

I remember that Isaac Hayes. You can say it is personal taste. I also think Hot Buttered Soul is a fabulous album, and he and Marvin Gaye put out the most interesting concept albums in the soul music genre I’ve ever heard. Strange combination. I’m not much for concept albums, but, hey, those two did it well.

The iconic will always trump artistry, I fear, until we live in a very different world. Isaac Hayes was both. No small feat. Download some Stax tunes he wrote with David Porter. It’s a bonus: in addition to appreciating Hayes-Porter as the best soul songwriting duo, you’ll remember why Sam & Dave are pretty hard to beat as singers and performers. Or why Carla Thomas is (sadly) so underappreciated outside Memphis (she’s still big there!) We all win, eh?

Mostly, rest in peace, Black Moses. Thanks for the songs. So many of them.

Well, now and again, when my sweetie is busy and the boy is in bed, I’ll turn on Fox News. I want to know what it’s really about, rather than work with other people’s impressions and stereotypes. It’s true, the stereotypes: they’ve lost their damn minds at Fox News. They really have.

I tuned into that Sean Hannity show, the one where some inarticulate loser plays the “liberal” role to Hannity’s rantings. It’s really ranty, to be honest. I’m not just saying that because I find his politics disgusting. It’s true. Funny. I remember the eighties, how “liberals” were painted as complainers for criticizing the government. The Right took that page and plays it so much better. What a complainer! That’s what I thought.

But there was an interesting segment dedicated to whether or not Obama is “out of touch” and “elite.” For some reason, the in-contempt-of-congress Karl Rove came on to talk about it. Surprisingly, ha, Rove agrees: the dude is an elitist, the arrogant type. There were some reasons, including having taught at U of Chicago (a notoriously conservative institution…alas). The centerpiece of Rove’s and Hannity’s list, however, was a strange one.

“Rumor has it” that Obama will replace the bowling alley in the White House with a basketball gym.

That’s elitist.

Apparently.

Here’s what Hannity said, with Rove nodding emphatically…

Now you were the first person to use the adjective arrogant to describe Barack Obama. We had the incident with the presidential seal. He’s going to replace the bowling alley with basketball courts. No TVs in the Lincoln bedroom.

(No televisions?! I thought conservatives thought television was trash and corrupting! I can’t keep up.)
So, is basketball elitist?

Of course it isn’t, because, let’s be serious, bowling is an occasional hobby of some people, whereas basketball is what kids and adults everywhere play, watch, and (most importantly) buy various expressions of in t-shirt, shoe, and poster form. If you really wanted to talk about elitism, then you’d have to have some basic numbers. If it’s elite, not that many people do it and you have to have some sort of capital – cash or cultural – that others lack. Sailing is maybe elite. So is reading highly theoretical essays on art. Most elitism is pretty harmless, truth be told.

But, basketball courts are elitist?

Basketball is such an interesting cultural site. Really. It is one of those ever-more-numerous places where black and white people meet up in conversation or play, where good and bad representations are battled over (the “thug” image of this or that NBA player, the saturation of national consciousness with multi-racial teams and fans). So it is obviously also a fraught site, a place where anxieties get played out. See the battle over how to represent the NBA. I’d go so far as to say that basketball is where a huge percentage of our racial anxiety as a nation is discussed, in however sublimated a form it might take.

Which gets me back to Rove. Like Satan (just sayin’), he’s clever. Building a court is “elitist.” That was such a strange thing to say, except when you imagine how difficult it is to call out racial stuff when you’re Rove (folks are on to you, dude) and the candidate is a pretty boring guy with (as luck would have it) a funny name. Elitism, I predict, will be our code for black in this election. Elite = not familiar, even when something like playing basketball is just so familiar.

Is “Barack Obama” an elite name?

I thought that remark to Hannity was strange and made no sense. It does, of course, because, like Satan (just sayin’), Rove is clever. This musing on the remark is kind of a prediction, but also a reminder to myself that racism in this election is going to take some strange and unexpected turns. Like basketball becoming the new elitism!

It’s also a question I ask myself: is such a desperately abstract a sign of how regular old racism is withering away – which requires a more nuanced idea of racism and anti-racist action – or is it just a sign of how nothing has changed except the code? I don’t know. A lot to be said in each case. I’ll leave it at that.

Just a short remark, then, on a new newswire story. Of course it doesn’t ask the really interesting questions, like how the state carries responsibilities not borne by individual citizens, etc., though it does call a reparation plan a non-reparation plan. Or it at least says Obama “opposes reparations,” then shows how he in fact supports a version of reparations.

First, we get to learn that Obama opposes:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama opposes offering reparations to the descendants of slaves, putting him at odds with some black groups and leaders.

Second, we get the nonsensical rejoinder, for Obama (like any reasonable person) cannot let the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and persistent racism pass by without comment and a sense of how to address:

“I have said in the past – and I’ll repeat again – that the best reparations we can provide are good schools in the inner city and jobs for people who are unemployed,” the Illinois Democrat said recently.

Well, I hate to say it – actually, I’m pleased to say it – but that there’s a reparation. Anyone who has actually read the reparations debate, is familiar with the issues raised and solutions proposed, can see it, even if the (strange) popular view is that reparation means a check for African-Americans, once and final. You see, the idea of cash payments is only one version of reparations. And a pretty small one, really. Paying cash to descendent of slaves covers some of the basic questions of justice, namely, how unpaid wages can be paid. Two and a half centuries of labor adds up to a lot, so the cash payment reparations folks eventually settle on something workable. This is a pretty marginal version of reparations. Most reparations advocates take the more complex route, pointing out that the legacy of slavery is a human legacy, not a matter of wages (which does not forget the wages question, just sets it aside). The human legacy is one of full social marginalization, which means…well, that Obama remark, well, hey, that’s a reparation.

The other name for it is social justice. Reparations just gives a more precise account of why that social justice should be enacted. It’s so interesting, too, that Obama’s remarks are linked to the more-than-obvious remark that apologies for slavery are “not enough.” As if anyone thought they were…but that’s another issue.

Score one against the Republicans here, who were no doubt hoping to use the big scary word “reparations,” but now can’t. Alas.

You see, I’m constantly intrigued by religion and its power. I am not at all religious. Just don’t have the sensibility or temperament. Alas. But the idea that a worldview and all of its social and personal consequences comes from before this moment, well, that seems really important. The kind of thing that might save us from obsession with the new.

We know this isn’t true, at least not easily true. After all, the backwards glance of religion also means that the liberations of modernity get demonized and masses of people suffer as a result. Or it takes centuries to “forgive” Galileo for looking through a telescope. Etc. At the same time, to say it again, we could use significant doses of resistance to The New, if only as a reminder of the social, cultural, moral, and political stakes of always loving the newness in things.

Mostly, I think the old-ness of religion makes it possible for institutions to say something about responsibility, to say sincerely that the messages of love, neighborliness, and the like were lost in certain frenzies of violence, repression, and so on. There is a moral core – which is often quite rotted, of course – to religious institutions that makes it possible to hope for such articulations of responsibility. Representative democracy, for example, has no such core. It is an instrumental, abstract institution whose authority comes from a pretty thread-bare sense of fairness, and mostly from a sense of efficiency. It keeps the masses cooled out and reasonably satisfied in ways that dictators and kings just can’t.

Back to the Pope…

You see, I was happy to read the recent AP headline about Pope Benedict XVI, declaring that the earth bears scars of massive over-consumption. Not a huge revelation, this scars business and all, but I liked the Pope getting on board. After all, the right-wing – for which he is no insignificant representative – has been pretty reluctant to see problems with consumption (unless it has sexual content!). I read his remarks, waiting for a moment of reckoning, that moment in which he’d say “and we’ve been such a part of this cultural disease.” Eh, it didn’t happen. The conversation went on about the abusive use of sacred things like bodies, the bountiful earth, graciousness, and so on. Familiar turf.

Now, as a resident and student of the Americas, I wanted to stop this whole conversation. What forgetting! And what important forgetting, for it is the mark of the Spanish Catholic church to have been consumed with greed and the frenzy of accumulation in the colonial era…in the Americas and elsewhere. No small thing, this being consumed. One visit to a city in South America and the amount of gold – so very tacky, let’s be honest – is just overwhelming. The death of so many bodies and so many cultures is unspeakable. That’s a different issue. What’s important to me, though, is how that greed and frenzied accumulation gave birth to a new cultural form. An ideology. The one with which we’re not only familiar, but genuinely at home: the liberal idea of freedom, connected to the accumulation of property and wealth.

You can’t write the Spanish Church out of this history.

So, when Benedict XVI prattled on about secularism and the decline of values, I got this burning pit in my stomach. It is an angry pit, one that won’t go away so long as this cultural form that has left the earth scarred is put at the feet of secular modernity. I mean, seriously, you have got to be kidding me. The plunder of the Americas – that is, Mexico and southward, the Caribbean – is the first slash that made this scar. It is the first slash that never healed and just festered as secular modernity emerged in perfect conjunction with the colonial Church. And so on.

To say it again, I’m never surprised that institutions forget. I’m just disappointed. I also have no illusions about apology or reckoning with the past. Such things don’t make scars go away. But, and this is important for so many reasons, I also believe in getting shit right about the past, the present, and so how we can begin to imagine how to imagine a different sort of future.

When I read this sort of forgetting, I’m reminded that remembering does not just mean getting the past into mind. It also means re-membering, putting together again. Pope Benedict XVI – you put it back together wrong. You made the ugly picture look ugly again, yes, but we missed y’all in the background…

I really have a small comment to make, but maybe one that has big implications. No matter, I guess, as only a couple of hundred will read this, though I feel compelled to say this because I care about things like reason. To start: I remember the original Sister Souljah moment. It confirmed what I thought then and have always thought: Bill Clinton was icky, cruel, and actually quite comfortable being anti-black. That’s why this primary season had me barely (if that) restraining “told ya” every time the news had Bill’s newest quip about Obama.

What I remember second most about that moment is how lame Sister Souljah’s music turned out to be. I went to iTunes to check my memory, and it took a second search – I left out the “h,” missing I guess the righteousness of her rhymes (is nothing sacred? Jah?! Alas.).

Obama’s recent “controversy” – you know the one about his Father’s Day speech, then speech to the NAACP – has bordered on the ridiculous. And thoroughly fallacious. The ridiculous, of course, is that the notion that it is controversial to say that fathers need to be present in the lives of children (seriously…that’s controversial?) or that the television needs to be turned off and books read.

On the matter of fathers: let’s be real. Absent parents do a lot of economic and emotional harm. In fact, amongst the bourgeoisie, this latter part is what keeps therapists in business. (Oh, and if you read the “Father’s Day speech” of such fame, Obama talks about “all fathers” and stuff like that. Obama can be annoyingly universal in stuff…ya noticed? But who’s troubled with reading such long documents, right?) My personal note: my father was pretty checked out of my childhood. Around, yeah, but distracted and indifferent. That hurt a lot. Still does. So, I can’t connect even just as a person with the sentiment that Obama was actually wrong about this. Instead, the real argument is about his motives, the “Sister Souljah Moment” thing – but that’s a fallacy. It’s called “appeal to the person,” and it is an entry-level fallacy. Just wrong-headed reasoning. We can’t have a conversation if that’s the response.

OK, so my first complaint: I’m sick of the schematic thing about “moments.” The “find your voice moment” or the “Sister Souljah moment” – this is really damaging language in the current electoral cycle. I fear it is here to stay. The damage is that we can’t hear what is said, and only examine whether or not the words can be bent into this or that “moment.”

I’ll pass over the fact that the NAACP is pretty old-school and hardly hostile turf for talking about “family values.” Please…

And the television…my first thought was, eh, that’s the most mundane observation you can make. Of course that is true. But you gotta think more about television. I mean, is looking at moving images the problem? Kinda. It’s not the best. After all, spectatorship ought to be a luxury, in an ideal world, but is more and more the norm. That makes you an easier marker for, well, marketing. That’s the word we need: marketing. The real problem is that pre-schoolers onward are marketed to in commercials. The problem is not when my boy watches television and comes back counting to ten in Spanish or saying hello and various colors in Chinese (that really happened). The problem is when he asks if we can buy Huggies brand diapers, despite the fact that he hasn’t worn a diaper in a year and a half (yes, that also really happened). So, think more about television, Obama and friends. Turning it off doesn’t address what it means for it to be on. And it will be on. Snark all you like about “electronic babysitter,” but the truth is that folks are ass-tired and need a break sometimes. Regularly, as a matter of fact. Let’s spare those “sometimes” old-fashioned marketing, alright? Now THAT is thinking critically as a politician!

That wasn’t the source of controversy, of course.

Most troubling, for me, is the bristling at the language of “responsibility.” Don’t misunderstand me. I get the bristle and the paranoia. That was a code word for anti-black racism under Reagan. I was ’round back then too. But the alternative is pretty gruesome. That is, the notion that responsibility doesn’t apply to poor people – most emphatically, does not apply to black people – is pretty gruesome. If we (by which I mean those on the left and ultra-left) concede the word responsibility to the Right, then we’re doomed. After all, part of recognizing the humanity of another (an inevitable appeal in justice-talk) is an assumption (not argument or convincing this or that) about the responsible character that comes with being human. Nuance it all you like with social forces, constructionism, interpellation, etc., but you gotta start with the idea that folks are capable of being responsible creatures. Otherwise, you’ve made the people you allegedly respect and care about into moral and political infants. For some context, this is the kind of thing Edward Said fretted about amongst Palestinean rights activist…don’t forget that the humanity to which you appeal is the humanity of a responsible, self-possessed creature. Once you assume responsibility as part of what it means to be human, then you can generate an interesting discussion about the pain and drama of losing a sense of how to act responsibly. Government and community-based work gets interesting when you start there, I think.

Lastly, and this is speculative, but I couldn’t help thinking that this whole drama about Obama’s remarks has to do with another very American anxiety: black people with children. Again, I was around in the real eighties. Not the pop music eighties or the whatever else we see on VH-1 specials, but the eighties in which culture changed so much, became so much more vicious for poor people generally, poor people of color in particular. Part of that change was a kind of rage against black people with children, starting with Reagan and on down through white people everywhere. That’s not gone away. Not by any stretch. So how does that inform these so very anxious moments, when the dominant media image is two black people with their children? I wonder if that anxiety so overwhelms – or at least overwhelms a hell of a lot of important, image-making people – that we can’t hear or think. Because, really, the words and ideas are oh so mundane. Can we hear that mundane insight? The one that “children matter” and that we should change our worlds so that they thrive? It is an old and boring insight, so repeated that it might seem trite. It’s also one that just might change a lot of worlds.

I really don’t know what to say, except that I’m sad and the world feels a little bit more lonely when this loss is recalled. We didn’t deserve him. We really didn’t. But then again we did. Mostly, we needed him. Since it has been forty years since King, Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis, I’ll just post this short clip from his final speech. And hope you find some time, sooner than later, to track down and watch At the River I Stand, a documentary that will remind you just how serious King, Jr.’s ideas were, how huge his vision, and how much we forget – even when we remember as a nation – the endless work to which he called us.

“longevity has its place…”

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The full speech without video…