no shield despite its guarantees
They sang to mark the passage of bipartisan gun control legislation, which they were determined to celebrate despite mounting protests over the Court’s overturning of Roe that morning. An off-key attempt to rejoice and despair at the same time, the spectacle was a perfect encapsulation of the Democrats’ insistence on celebrating half-measures in the face of defeat.
If these congresspeople thought what they were doing could double as protest—as Rep. Andy Levin apparently thought of his yoga pose—that would only make things worse. A protest must be against something, not just for that thing’s vague and implausible opposite. For the most part, however, the Democrats’ speeches and spectacles were not protests against the Court, the six conservative justices, Mitch McConnell, the Federalist Society, the Electoral College, or the Koch brothers, but for America. Not anger or tactics but calls for votes, donations, niceties.
In her own insipid remarks, the Speaker of the House quoted an Israeli song she has used at least twice before: “I have no other country / Even though my land is burning.” The Vice President said that “The strength of our nation has always been that we move forward” and that “with your vote, you can act.” Cowed by their electoral prospects into endless fundraising and beholden to corporate interests, the Democrats continue to insist in the face of a monstrous country that this is not what America is. It will be part of their legacy that, by insisting on this so heedlessly, they have enabled what it has become.
The rendition of “God Bless America” reminded me of a passage in Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. One of the protagonists, Sabina, is repelled by politics because of the way it obfuscates its platforms through meaningless language:
The May Day ceremony drew its inspiration from the deep well of the categorical agreement with being. The unwritten, unsung motto of the parade was not “Long live Communism!” but “Long live life!” […] For it was this idiotic tautology (“Long live life!”) which attracted people indifferent to the theses of Communism to the Communist parade.
For her, this amounts to duplicity—this use of an “agreement with being,” a blanket good feeling, as a way of recruiting people to unarticulated political ends.
“God Bless America,” that old Irving Berlin tune from World War I, used at first for war and then for peace, sung by Civil Rights activists and fundamentalist Christians alike, by Democrats and Republicans, is not a political motto. If “Long Live Life!” draws from a categorical agreement with being alive, “God Bless America” draws from a categorical agreement with America. A rallying cry for whatever you want, a protest against nothing.1
The Democrats’ insistence on America the beautiful, not just as some general feeling of patriotism but as a meaningful response to crisis is what is so maddening. Kitsch is nefarious not merely because it is ineloquent or corny. Kitsch is, as Kundera rightly recognizes, the very form of denial: “the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch.”
Pelosi: “Clearly, we hoped that the Supreme Court would open its eyes.” A fool’s hope. Their eyes are wide open.
—
In the days leading up to the Court’s decision, many on social media shared and commented on their interactions with GPT-3, a new natural language processing model that can generate human-like text from simple prompts. The outputs are impressive but strange: some mix of corporatese, cliché, ad copy, and propaganda.
For instance, the prompt write a poem Nancy Pelosi would deliver after the reversal of Roe v Wade gives me:
This is not the America that we know
This is not the America that we love
We will not go back
We will not go back
We will fight for our rights
We will fight for our lives
We will not go back
We will not go back
You can keep clicking refresh, keep changing the parameters, but it’s all stuff like this, just interchangeable sloganeering.
Elsewhere, words with weight acknowledged the gravity of the new political reality. In their dissent, the three liberal justices wrote: “The Constitution will, today’s majority holds, provide no shield, despite its guarantees of liberty and equality for all.” No shield despite its guarantees.
I type tell me it’s going to be okay into the AI text generator, and it says:
Everything will be alright in the end--you'll see. Everything will work out in the end--trust me. Everything will be okay in the end--I promise.
ben tapeworm