love is why we are here

Liberalism is not an answer to the rise of xenophobia, white nationalism, and fascism in America. It never has been. It was Franklin D. Roosevelt who put Japanese-Americans in internment camps. It was John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson who gave legitimacy to Hoover’s counter-intelligence programs in order break the revolutionary potential of Black, Brown, and Native liberation movements. It was Bill Clinton who gave teeth to an incarceration system which destroys communities of color. And it has been Barrack Obama who has deported and detained more Latinos than all other presidents combined. Liberalism has always been a reluctant and feckless coconspirator. None of this is a defense of conservatism, it is, as Steven Salaita put it, “an invitation to discover (or create) a politics that doesn’t necessitate dispossession,” to build progressive and radical solutions. 

“The U.S. dropped an average of 72 bombs every day — the equivalent of three an hour — in 2016,” totaling 26,171 detonations in nations including Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan according to an analysis of American strikes around the world conducted by the Council of Foreign Relations… but that’s okay, because Obama is a liberal, yeah?

This is veryveryvery important. My wife was feeling down about herself the other night and asked me “why do I look like this?” And I immediately brought up a photo I had taken of a sculpture of Aphrodite I had taken at the Chicago MOMA. I said, “look at this picture. What does she look like?” And my wife very shyly answered “Me…” (Literally her body is IDENTICAL to the sculpture) so I replied “that is the Goddess Aphrodite. THAT is why your body looks like this.”

Good human is good.