On the politics of an identity: Why I both love and hate America

Facile left-liberals will say that it is reactionary to affirm your social identity if it involves predicates that they (the left-liberals) associate with 'oppression'. But this only reveals that they think oppressing them is your culture's only attribute, and that is absurd.

Further, it misconceives the ethics of difference. If my neighbor is from (what for me is) an elsewhere, whether 'his people' are 'oppressed' by mine, or not, the only way I can be a good neighbor is simply by being who I am in what for me is the fullest or best way, and welcoming him being who he is.

Do you think for a moment that those people in France, Poland, and elsewhere who hid Jews during the Holocaust were guilty about their own identity? What use would that be to anyone? (I mean this only by way of example.).

That is not to say that people should wallow needlessly in their particular identity. I only notice what I might think is mine when it is either attacked or when I am around people who seem strangers to me, or find me to be to them.

I am a European-American whose fate has been to find much of the (more or less American) culture around me in some ways rather inhospitable. But then, doesn't everyone who has become sensitized to the particularity of the culture of their residence and belonging, especially after you have witnessed some different ones, feel some inclination to both defend and attack that identity? Would you dare deny any people anywhere the privilege of criticizing not another country but their own? It is only an intolerance of a kind that refuses this, and an intolerance that is particularly ignorant because it wants to insist on its being as it is in the name of a false innocence. Indeed, it is happier to know that you are a mortal than to think you are a god. And so too it is happier to live in a place and among a people that you don't expect to be perfect or need you to be. As the American Independence Day approaches, I observe that I am an American, this is my country, of which I am a citizen, like it or not (and I sometimes like it and sometimes do not), and I love this country and am critical of many things about it, about 'us', at the same time. Why would anyone want to deny me this? What obscure privilege of domination or ignorant way of being are they trying to conceal with the dishonesty of their pretension to the perfection that is only an apparent innocence (false like every other such)?

I was incarcerated by a doctor (doctors can do this to you, no legal proceeding being necessary, as you have basically no rights at all in their system -- the 'health' they pretend to protect in your against yourself, and your own intelligence, whose use is not a virtue they are necessarily are eager to tolerate, is fully a god, that is, an idol, to them, and like all gods in all their inevitable pretension and dishonesty, if recognized, and falseness when not, they can use this against you) -- all this because he thought me possessed of an un-American personality. Hell, what would you say about that? Nothing is more provincial and reactionary than the pretensions to universality, normality, and the progressive pursuit of the presumed perfection of the good, than someone in authority insisting that because you are in this country you have to act in the way that they prescribe as normal. I fully 'own' this attribute: I have lived elsewhere (in Europe, France and its capital to be precise) and quite honestly, I think that the United States is a better country in some ways and a worse one in others. In saying this, I can surely only be convicted of using my intelligence. Of actually thinking and - horror of horrors - saying or otherwise appearing to reveal, what I think.

Another doctor approached me on the ward and said, out of the blue, "This is a good country. And if you don't like it, you can sue me." I did not sue this scoundrel, but I wondered: So is that why I am being kept here against my will? Doubtless to punish me for criticizing some of the people in power.

I'll do that again, and I won't stop. What are you going to do about it?

My country, for better and, in my case often, worse, the United States, is a nation I recognize as committed to some noble ideals. And its government has done me a lot of wrong. I try to cultivate a measured outrage about this. Not a resentment, certainly no kind of hatred. But I don't shower with admiration and flattery every person I meet, nor do I think that the flag of this country is a symbol of the divine. It is a symbol of a form of society and government that is good in some ways, awful in others. I say what I think, and make enemies as easily as friends because of this. Maybe one of the other Americans will manage to kill me or worse -- these medical professionals threatened me explicitly, but in a way that preserves their 'deniability', with something worse -- sending me to a hospice, a place where I could only be expected to die, while being carefully cared for by nice nurses, no doubt, and all this while I was and am clearly in the prime of my life and creativity as a writer, and minor thinker - that of course is what they wanted to prevent, these doctors and social workers who were working for the police - and who left their own conscience god knows where. They did this after threatening me with — I kid you not — “elimination.” This was said by a social worker who was obviously an undercover cop. I almost said ‘piece of shit’. And what was my presumed offense, in this auxiliary prosecution where nothing was said explicitly that those saying it would ever admit to? They didn’t say what they didn’t like about me that motivated their extended harassment and nasty verbal threats. They did mention that they understood that I am or want to be a writer. I think what they did to me is a slightly harsher form of what they mean to do when they shoot someone’s dog: it’s a message, and it means: next time we come for you. They wanted me to be afraid. I can’t say that they didn’t entirely succeed there, and I am well aware that if they come for me, they will again pretend that I am ‘mentally ill’ and that is what it is about. That is a lie, and everyone can see that except most citizens and most people who work in the places where these lies are enforced, with whatever violence the bosses consider necessary. I was informed that I wasn’t being ‘eliminated’ only because it wasn’t necessary, at least yet; the cop put this by saying “that would be in a case of life and death.” Mine, obviously. I lost friends when I mentioned — but this is New York and I live in the Bronx — that some of the people hassling and threatening me, including this well-trained police officer posing (ridiculously) as a “social worker,” were black. Of course, they chose a black cop to fuck with my head thinking that that would make it harder for to squeeze out of it with any credibility. I have also heard that a man might be tortured by a woman officer — and then wouldn’t it be amusing if she or someone else claims that she is a ‘feminist’. Ha ha. The difference between the United States and blatant police states where everyone lives in fear has less to do with a quantitative or qualitative difference of any kind than with widespread disavowal. In East Germany, it was obvious; I was told by a film scholar from former East Berlin, “You Americans worry about whether a person, or you yourself, are really a man or a woman. We worried about who was or was not STASI.” In America, such shenanigans on the part of ‘deep state’ officials in the police and elsewhere, who can fuck with people and fuck them over or up, are always a source of either scandalized recognition, or the disavowal that they knew they could count on from most people simply by declaring me ‘mentally ill’, and of course threatening to insist on that point in the event that I were to talk about it; for my story makes me sound ‘paranoid’ and that means I must be mentally ill, and therefore lying, which means that what they tried to do with me is justified. That’s their modus operandi, obviously enough. Do you believe it? There is no shortage of fools who will believe whatever people in authority tell them.

In two weeks I must go for grand jury duty. That’s fine. I have pondered whether or not to volunteer any statement of my own views. I believe that our criminal justice system is a system of injustice, and in some ways, it is almost purely that. A grand jury is expected to rubber stamp a prosecutor’s bid to bring criminal charges against someone. If they do, that person will almost certainly be railroaded by that prosecutor or someone else from their office, almost certainly going to prison on a ‘lesser charge’ that everyone knows they did not commit, only because the prosecutor threatens them with incarceration for most of their remaining life on a much worser charge, that they also probably did not commit, and that is also known to most people. So the system is almost completely unfair. At the same time, I know that there are serious crimes and some of them do call for removing the person from normal society. A very small percentage. Do I participate willfully in a system that I think is almost pure tyranny and injustice, designed to destroy the lives of people who — especially here in the Bronx where I live — are mostly black or hispanic, and poor, and whatever ordinary Americans like me think, are basically destroyed by a system that serves — who does it serve? Besides capitalism itself, and the class and social hatreds that seem to underpin it?

Few things are more evil than a professional or other person who believes that the social institutions that they are part of or serve are so purely good that they can have perfect confidence in them, and inculpate all those individuals whom they suppose to be in the way of their wonderful steam-roller of justice and happiness, their idea of happiness, as they define it, as they expect me to pursue it, in the way they define, not, as in Jefferson's famous declaration, as I do or might. A professional worker in any capacity who works for other people is only as noble and just and good as far as extends her or his willingness when called upon to recognize that in the course of their duties they are normally asked to participate in acts of barbarism, injustice, or oppression - and who does not will to resist this injustice. If you see a medical or other professional and you sense that they have no sense of their very possibly being involved in an injustice that a just person will resist, than my advice is to part with this bad company as soon as possible, since they can only hurt you. Unless of course you are a perfectly docile person who never opposes anything yourself.

I suppose this means that I have read some of the documents and signs that have defined this country in ways quite different from some others. I also have learned what I think is one of the principal lessons of the Holocaust -- an event that is now consecrated by this country as an evil it opposes, because 'we' were among the victors in that war -- but that it actually did pretty much nothing at all to stop -- that lesson being that as much or more evil is done by the obedient as by the disobedient. But by definition, the overly obedient are rarely sanctioned or punished.

There is no good person or social entity that thinks it has no great capacity for injustice and wrong. We mostly don't tolerate such presumptions on the part of individuals. Why are they so tolerated and insisted upon when the pretended god is not the individual but the society or its government and institutions? What lies are you perpetrating, what crimes are you concealing, when you shelter yourself behind that flag, supposing that it makes you holy by contact? It does not.

It must be with nations and societies and institutions and communities as with individuals: The good are scrupulous enough to be full of self-doubts; good people are hardly insistent that they deserve the admiration due those who are essentially without sin. It is only the worst scoundrels who are certain of their own virtue.