A Piffany About Privilege Trumping Politics
So. About this.
How can so many people get it so wrong, all in their quest to be right? Well, let’s get into it. On Sunday afternoon, people watching NFL on FOX during the Cowboys-Packers game caught a view of the luxury owner’s box, where former President George W. Bush sat and laughed next to talk-show host and stand-up comedian Ellen DeGeneres. Oh, to be rich and famous. Nothing a billionaire businessman loves more than showing off how easily they can buy the souls of politicians and celebrities, and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones got both in one shot. Congrats, Jerry!
But the liberals were steaming mad at Ellen for making nice with W. Steaming mad, I tells ya. So Ellen talked about it on her hugely successful daytime TV show when it aired on Tuesday.
Ellen explained that she and her wife, the actress Portia de Rossi, attended at the invitation of Charlotte Jones, Jerry Jones’s daughter. Ellen joked about ‘wanting to keep up with the Joneses.” Haha, Ellen’s making dad jokes. Ellen joked about nobody noticing how cool she is to have the iPhone 11. Ellen joked about being the only Packers fan, which wait, Who Dat? Ellen is from Louisiana, so that’s sacrilege to Saints fans. Let’s boo her just for abandoning her hometown team for the sake of luxury box seats. But Ellen boiled it down to this: “They thought why is a gay Hollywood liberal sitting next to a conservative Republican president?” Then she blamed Twitter for allowing so many haters, then picked one nice Tweet to change the subject to how seeing Ellen and W together gives us all hope for America. Awwwwww.
“Just because I don’t agree with someone on everything doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be friends with them. When I say ‘Be kind to one another,’ I don’t mean only the people that think the same way that you do. I mean, be kind to everyone.” This earned her an applause break.
So many people took to their social media accounts to take Ellen to task for not taking W. to task over his disastrous foreign policy and wars and war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some pointed out the more obvious awkwardness that W. believed Ellen’s homosexuality meant she shouldn’t have equal rights and protections under the law. A few even pointed out the timing of that with a very current U.S. Supreme Court case being heard this week, which considering how right-wing conservatives played dirty politics to tilt the court in their favor, might decide that gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered folk, queers and anyone else not in favor with the establishment could get fired and kicked to the curb without any legal recourse. But yeah, W. also paints now, and even when he was in office, he basically let Dick Cheney get all Evil Empire on the world, so why blame him, right? He’s still the “compassionate conservative,” right? Just lacking the compassion for the LGBTQ community. Or foreigners. Or poor people. Or poor black people in LOUISIANA during and after Hurricane Katrina, which heck, did Ellen forget about that? We forgot to put a #NeverForget on Katrina, you guys.
A few sly critics of Ellen also pointed out her hypocrisy, as some press has revealed Ellen hasn’t always followed her own “be kind” advice when it comes to the people who worked for her.
One thing nobody mentioned, however: What did you expect Ellen to do at Cowboys Stadium, in that luxury box?
Did you expect her to see herself on the TV screen in front of her, and in that very moment, look for the camera and say, “George Bush doesn’t care about gay people.” (Remember that Kanye?) Did you expect her to make a scene?
How do we know she didn’t say something to the ex-president about the plight of the LGBTQ community? Other than the fact that Ellen told us Tuesday she probably didn’t make any sort of fuss at all.
It’s so easy to type out your frustrations on Twitter or Facebook, or illustrate them on Instagram, or set them to music on TikTok, or put a filter on it, even. But how do you act when the situation presents itself to you in real life? How do you choose to act in that moment?
We’re seeing that play out also this very week with the NBA and China.
An executive with the Houston Rockets expressed support on Twitter for the Hong Kong protesters, and all of a sudden, the entire relationship between Big Basketball and Big Communism was exposed. And now the right-wingers crow about how NBA coaches and players who spoke out about civil rights and politics in America have remained mum about China. Ha ha. You got pwned by China. It’s a weird take, right wingers. But it’s all part of the same take.
Putting aside our differences, not for the sake of kindness, but for the sake of continuing to live in the lap of luxury. Whether it’s a seat in the owner’s box, or a gabillion-dollar deal to globalize American basketball. We’re seeing people choose maintaining their privilege over their principles.
Is there a better solution, though?
I mean, Ellen is right in the O.G. WWJD golden rule way, suggesting we extend kindness to everyone. But that’s not always possible. Or plausible. Or preferable.
Should we all get along? Certainly. But in what context?
There’s family at Thanksgiving getting along with relatives who espouse horrible views.
There’s sitting in the pews at church getting along with strangers and neighbors.
There’s standing next to each other on a crowded train getting along, all of you just wanting to get where you’re going and tolerating each other in cramped quarters to get there relatively cheaply and quickly.
There’s waiting in an interminably long line getting along, bonding with the people in front of or behind you in the queue, making awkward jokes about what’s taking so long up there, anyhow?!
And then there’s sitting in an owner’s booth at a football stadium getting along.
Some equated Ellen joking around with W. to Michelle Obama making nice with W. at state functions. Which isn’t entirely the same, since attendance at an NFL game is slightly more voluntary than attendance at a presidential inauguration or a funeral for a past president. And the protocols for behaving at those is slightly more formal and reserved than for cheering on our modern-day bloodsport gladiators. But it is all one and same, if you realize that despite what the tabloid magazines tell us every week, the stars are NOT like us. The true elites, the one-percenters, the rich get richer, the powerful more powerful, because society structurally benefits them. That gives them much more in common with each other than with us, the 99 percent, no matter their personal politics. Their privilege unites them in a way that’s rarely ever broken.
When I use the word elite, I’m not talking about so-called “coastal elites” or “Ivy League elites,” precisely because I live on the coast, graduated from an Ivy League university, and orbit around elites, while never having become one myself.
But I do know what it’s like to take these hypothetical abstracts and live them in real time. I’ve seen firsthand how, when someone you oppose with every fiber of your being exists in the same room with you, I’ve seen how you act toward each other. The social cues of the situation tend to dampen whatever enthusiasm you have may have hoped to muster for the occasion.
I served in student government at Princeton alongside Ted Cruz (he was a member of the U. Council, our version of a senate, while I’d been appointed Communications Director for the USG, or Undergraduate Student Government), and with my friends, we enduring his often pointless pontificating on a monthly basis, looking at our watches hoping for it all to end as quickly as possible. Had we made it more awkward for Cruz, would it have stopped his political career before it began, or served as his super-villain origin story, or would it have changed nothing?
I did make it awkward with the Kardashian sisters (original KKK trio of Kim, Kourtney and Khloe) back in December 2007 on my first, and so far only, face-to-face encounter. I have not kept up with them since, and yet everything in pop culture keeps me keenly aware of their comings and goings, and their little sisters, too. You’re not picturing me in any room with the Kardashians, and I completely get that. For it wasn’t my plan. A PR firm had invited me to Cabo San Lucas to attend the re-opening of their client’s hotel. I was unemployed at the time (had just launched The Comic’s Comic the previous month) and they knew that they’d get no press out of me. They insisted I come just because they enjoyed my company on a previous business trip to Madrid. Wow. That sounds both super-privileged and crazy fiction when I type that out. And yet. I did bring my Tasmanian Devilishness version of fun to Madrid in 2006 while working on a travel story for The Boston Herald, inadvertently getting blackout drunk my first night there with George Clooney and Rande Gerber. Wait. Why? How?
Gerber’s presence made sense, as he owned the nightclub in the Madrid hotel we stayed at, and Clooney showing up well past midnight, while I and another reporter were nursing beers in the bar, was just a stroke of luck. The last thing I remember about that night was looking Clooney in his beautiful eyeballs and telling him, “I’m not the enemy,” because that’s what you do if you’ve seen Almost Famous too many times. When I opened my eyes next, I was in my hotel bed. The other reporter with me that night, who ordered us all Jager bombs as a way to sit with Clooney and Gerber in the first place? Last thing I remember about her is that she went on to become one of QAnon’s biggest propagandists. So we all have our paths to follow.
Mine took me to Cabo. Like I said, not working press. Just there to soak up the Mexican sun, and get over my recent departure from the New York Daily News. But. Seeing a red carpet opportunity, and seeing Kim, Kourt and Khloe on said carpet, I walked up and asked Kim point blank how she felt about having a rep as one of America’s dumbest celebrities. I guess I Kanye’d her first. Right? Right???? OK. I’ll shut up.
The following day, outside the resort near the beach, Kourtney chewed me out for trying to belittle her sister and let me know just how smart they were, all while a camera crew filmed it. Followed by someone with a clipboard asking me to sign a release. Somehow, the exchange wasn’t up to snuff. When Season 2, Episode 1 of Keeping Up with the Kardashians aired in March 2008, “Kim Becomes A Diva,” the script simply called for a spontaneous girls’ weekend out to Cabo (official description, via IMDB: Kimberly and Khloe take a depressed Kourtney to Cabo San Lucas after she learns something about Scott. Meanwhile, Kimberly lets her growing notoriety go to her head.)
Anyhow. I type all this to let you know I know of what I type.
When people stress the need for civility, and that’s what makes America great is respecting one another for our differences, please take a moment to check the motives of those people. Yes, we all should get along. But when the other side dehumanizes and demonizes you, to the point where society begins to believe you shouldn’t have the same basic human rights as other humans, what then? How kind, how civil should we remain in the face of those people who’d wish us harm?
There’s only one cheek to turn.
“We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”
I’ve seen more than a few places promote this quote, attributing it to the late great James Baldwin, although it’s really from a 2015 Tweet by a guy named Robert Jones, Jr. Your confusion isn’t as misplaced as your attribution. Jones uses a Twitter handle “Son of Baldwin” despite not being a member of the Baldwin family, let alone the ghost of Baldwin himself.
So here’s an actual quote from Baldwin, from his debate with William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1965 at Cambridge University, about whether the American Dream had come at the expense of the American Negro. Baldwin closes his case in support of the motion thusly:
“It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. And until that moment, until the moment comes when we, the Americans, we the American people are able to accept the fact that I have to accept. For example, that my ancestors are both white and black. That on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other. And that I am not a ward of America. I’m not an object of missionary charity. I’m one of the people who built the country. Until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream because the people who are denied participation in it by their very presence will wreck it. And if that happened, it is a very grave moment for the West.”
Can you imagine in 2019? One-ninth of the population still denied equal rights? Can you imagine? I’m joking. You don’t have to imagine it, because we’re still falling short in treating all Americans equally, not only under the laws, but in the practices of our fundamental institutions across the board.
And as a gay black man, Baldwin knew even more precisely how America was falling short on the promise it made to us back in 1776.
We don’t have Baldwin to speak on today’s injustices.
We do have Dr. Cornel West.
I’m privileged enough to call West a former professor of mine. I enjoyed seeing and hearing him for three hours at a time each week in the intimate setting of a Princeton seminar on Ralph Waldo Emerson. That was then. This is 2019.
So here’s West talking in April 2019 at the University of Oregon talking about race matters. As we approach another Columbus Day, which some have taken to reclaiming as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which isn’t the same thing as giving the tribes back their land, but still, it bears reminding that when we even talk about the American Dream, and who can access that, we’re not talking about some made-up utopia. We’re talking about a land where people already were living, taking it from them, killing most of them in the process, then bringing another culture in chains across the ocean to keep the agrarian economy moving, or abusing immigrants from other lands (hi Ireland and China) to build the railroads, or subjugating women, and so on and so forth.
My dear Professor West puts it so much more lyrically in his speech. Preach!
About 48 minutes in, he acknowledges how, if he wants to act more humanely, he must combat not only his own male privilege, even as a black man, but also the institutional and structural obstacles that keep us at a distance from one another.
“It sounds so simple and yet it’s so very difficult to raise our voice. I don’t think any one of us has the solution, capital S. I’m talking about race matters, empire matters, class matters, sexual orientation matters and so forth. But it’s only by lifting voices together, like jazz musicians learning how to learn and listen. To take it in. To cultivate the faculty of receptivity as much as expressivity. That’s always mutual and reciprocal in that regard. That’s the raw stuff of democracy.”
He continues:
“We must never confuse nor conflate the problematic with the catastrophic. The catastrophic. There has never been an indigenous people’s problem in this country. They have had catastrophes visited upon them. It’s true. There has never been a negro problem. Lynching. Terrorism. These are not problems. These are catastrophes. There’s never been a woman’s problem. There have been catastrophes visited on women. Psychically, structurally, institutionally. There’s never been a Jewish problem in Europe, there were catastrophes visited on Jewish brothers and sisters. And we can go on and on. An Armenian problem in Turkey? No. That’s a catastrophe. We could go on and on. But the catastrophic is something that rarely is able to make its presence in our discourse, in our universities, in our newspapers, because we’d rather opt for sanitized, sterilized, deodorized discourses. That’s what we like. Whereas the catastrophic is about what? Keeping it funky. Because when you keep it funky, you keep it real. When you keep it real, you let all of that stuff come out. Let it all come out. That’s one of the reasons why American artists have played such an important role. Because American culture in its dominant form is what. It’s the culture of limitless possibility….”
West jokes about how every year, no matter the political party in power, our American president proclaims the State of the Union is solid because Americans can do anything. That exceptionalism. It binds us together. But it also keeps us separate from the world. It can also blind us to our own injustices.
“The last thing you want to be is well-adjusted to injustice. That’s the last thing you want to be. Last thing you want to be. Well-adjusted to injustice. I’m just fitting in, fitting in! Well-adapted to indifference. Rabbi Heschel used to say indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. He’s right about that. William James used to say indifference is the one trait that makes the very angels weep. That callousness. That coldness. That numbness is what is reinforcing the worst of our collective project together.”
West says we used to be able to measure the progress of our progress by the nature of our most vocal black Americans. Not now.
“We live in a time now where even so many black folk have been devoured by commodification, devoured by obsession with success. Generating peacocks. Look at me! Look at me! I’m so smart. I’m so rich. I’m so famous. You can hear Malcolm X saying peacocks strut because they can’t fly. I’m not impressed by peacocks. No matter how far and high you go up the social ladder, if the hierarchy is still in place, and the hierarchy is not being interrogated, called into question and called for transformation, then you’re just making those at the top more colorful and reinforcing the same kind of hierarchy that was doing you in when you were at the bottom.”
We’re so caught up in likes and ReTweets and shares, some of us may feel we’re making a difference when we’re merely virtue signaling. We’re mere peacocks.
Some of us may feel that’s the only recourse we have, and we applaud social media for giving us any voice at all.
I hear that. I hear you. I am you, sometimes.
The powerful were once you, too. And you, with your American Dream, hold onto the hopes you may be them. So how do we speak truth to power when we become one of the empowered? Will we dare to make a difference? Or will we keep our mouths shut and simply smile, and be kind?