#ellen willis

Under present conditions, people are preoccupied with consumer goods not because they are brainwashed but because buying is the one pleasurable activity not only permitted but actively encouraged by our rulers.

-Ellen Willis (December 14, 1941-November 9, 2006)

no more fun  & games

How radical feminism lost its way

https://antiterf.carrd.co/

(Ask a black American if he or she thinks our Civil War didn't solve anything.)

—Susan Sontag, “Why Are We in Kosovo?” New York Times (1999)

It is because America's crime, its real crime, is to be America herself. The crime is to exude the dynamism of an everchanging liberal culture. America is like Israel in that respect, only 50 times larger and infinitely richer and more powerful. America's crime is to show that liberal society can thrive and that antiliberal society cannot. This is the whip that drives the antiliberal movements to their fury. The United States ought to act prudently in the Middle East and everywhere else; but no amount of prudence will forestall that kind of hostility. And this should not be news. For the radical nationalist and Islamist movements are not, as I say, anything new. Movements of that sort are a reality of modern life. They are the echo that comes bouncing back from the noise made by liberal progress. And this should tell us truths about the struggle that has suddenly fallen upon us.

—Paul Berman, “Terror and Liberalism,” The American Prospect (2001)

If you’re actually certain that you’re hitting only a concentration of enemy troops…then it’s pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they’re bearing a Koran over their heart, it’ll go straight through that, too. So they won’t be able to say, “Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.” No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words.

—Christopher Hitchens, qtd. in “The Left and 9/11,” The Nation (2002)

My frustration, in other words, is not that we took action in Afghanistan but that we have not done enough. We should have fought the ground war and occupied Kabul; organized an international force to disarm the warlords, protect ordinary citizens, and oversee the distribution of aid; demanded that secularists be included in the negotiations for a new government and that basic women’s rights be built into a new structure of law. If this is “imperialism”—in the promiscuous contemporary usage of that term—I am for it: I believe it is the prerequisite of a stable peace.

—Ellen Willis, “Why I’m Not for Peace,” Radical Society (2002)

Obama understands the white liberal American distaste for power as a symptom of white privilege, and he is certainly right. 

—David Samuels, “Invisible Man: How Ralph Ellison Explains Barack Obama,”  The New Republic (2008)

The 20th century, with its struggles for equal rights, with the triumph of democracy as the ideal in Western thought, proved Douglass right. The Civil War marks the first great defense of democracy and the modern West. Its legacy lies in everything from women’s suffrage to the revolutions now sweeping the Middle East. It was during the Civil War that the heady principles of the Enlightenment were first, and most spectacularly, called fully to account.

—Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” The Atlantic (2012)

(Whether for better or for worse—both for better and for worse—liberalism means war:

The Gnostic valorization of freedom at the same time articulates an exceedingly vindictive denunciation of the physical world, a condemnation far harsher than any perspective found in Christian orthodoxy. The radical dualism of Gnosticism means that its adherents assume a drastically different spiritual posture from that of the Christian believer; whereas the latter experiences saving knowledge as the increasing awareness of his or her sinful condition in a divinely created cosmos, the Gnostic sets out to regain his or her innocence in a world that is the misshapen and unregenerate product of a malign deity. Thus, Gnosticism, in order to sustain its belief in the innocence of the uncreated spark, must project all that is baleful and malevolent onto the cosmos itself. The assertion of this insuperable divide between one’s inviolable self and the woeful prison of matter generates an equally intractable sense of indifference to one’s actions in the world, since such indifference, which is actively assumed out of disdain and horror and thus not to be mistaken for detached quietude, demonstrates the powerlessness of the Demiurge to corrupt the divine spark within. According to [Harold] Bloom, the American Religion is likewise defined by the conviction that the world and one’s actions in it are irrelevant to the purity of the self: “If your knowing ultimately tells you that you are beyond nature, having long preceded it, then your natural acts cannot sully you. No wonder then, that salvation, once attained, cannot fall away from the American Religionist, no matter what he or she does” (265). Furthermore, if the creation is truly identical to the Fall, and the physical world reveals the designs of an antagonistic deity, then the sacrosanct self becomes defined according to its hostility against the order of being. For the American Religion’s worship of freedom is at the same time a war against otherness, which it understands as “whatever denies the self’s status and function as the true standard of being and of value” (Bloom 16).