Harris, Palestine, and the Spectacle of Liberation.

a series of musings nearly entitled, “I am frightened by the way people tire of the world.”

I have had a negative amount of desire to write but Toni Morrison said it’s your job to write when evil wishes to distract you so. Here I am, I suppose.

Indulge me in this clip. If you’re listening, I’m playing the full thing.

For someone that disseminates my work on the internet, I am not someone who is online a lot. I take long breaks because watching my face and voice be disseminated everywhere actually freaks me out. News still reaches me slow, by way of phone calls from family and reading literal, physical newspapers, such that by the time I am well-informed enough to reach opinions I care to share, the internet has moved. But I’m relatively on time for this one because I have been self-harming (by way of Twitter). I have my lemongrass tea here with me (for my nerves). The thesis of today’s musings are that we want the fiction of a happy ending more than we want actual liberation.

We thrive off spectacle.

Women’s March, Washington DC, USA | 2017 | Did this ensure our continued reproductive rights and accessible healthcare for wombs?

March for Our Lives, Washington DC, USA | 2020 | Did this successfully drop the amount of extrajudicial killings of police officers upon Black and Brown communities?

National March for Palestine on Washington DC, USA | 2023 | Has this stopped the bombs from falling? Does the United States feel pressure to cease its arming of the Israeli regime?

I try not to be furious on the internet but some moments, it cannot be helped. What are we doing here? These balloon moments where people care— it always feels like we’re so close. I have been naive enough, especially as a new college graduate in 2020, to believe that we were so close. I believed that with the right kind of education, the right timing, the right cause will bubble to the surface in the hearts and minds of the masses, and then we will finally move meaningfully upon these things that irreparably break our views of the world.

And then, after a series of protests, everyone goes home and continues our regularly scheduled upkeep of the slaughter machines. Because the plan as a mass of people was never really to do anything outside of that— march in the streets and make our displeasure known.

Marches are not scary when we go home at the end of the day peacefully and that should be obvious by now. One of the reasons mass marches were a force to be reckoned with in the 1960s was because it was an act of ritual¹. There was no means of handheld mass media to let millions of people know within a week where and when to be. Each person had to sign on to significant personal cost. And even then, when there was far more concerted effort, people debated the effectiveness of peaceful marches, especially when armed, well-disciplined, coordinated struggle advanced agendas of communal agency at a much quicker turnaround time. In my opinion, marches (planned mass gatherings that show dissent for the empire with people’s bodily presence) created enough spectacle that your oppressed group might gain international attention (which, ideally, comes with international pressure). Such attentions proved crucial to Black dissenters of the US Apartheid systems which took hold of the country post-slavery in even proving their oppression was a real cause to fight against on the world’s stage. Such international spectacle is really relevant now for people that are in colonized regions of the world that have no stake on the world stage, such as what we're seeing with the uprisings in Bangladesh.We have a very different media landscape in present hours; the question is not is the oppression real. It’s obviously real. The question

So then, what do we gain from spectacle? Other than an egotistical sense of comfort that we are on the “right side of history?”

The marches of the modern day serve as little more than a publicly planned, well-coordinated tantrum. I’ll put in that they are a good place to meet other people willing to mobilize within their community, but sustained mobilizations on a national level still do not exist. Even with this parade of historic marches that we've had every like two or three years or so, we still do not have any sustained mobilization on a national level. It doesn't exist. If anything, these political parades allow free reign for the police state to brutalize participants with impunity, serving as a very public reminder not to lash out in any meaningfully disruptive way (lest we actually feel how heavy the hand of the police state is). I already shared this quotation in a previous essay, but it bears repeating.

Marching is not going to stop this. Voting is not going to stop this. And while it is great to see people around the world expressing love and solidarity, we have to think smarter. And think for the longer game. The reason this country ALLOWS US to protest is because they know that it dissipates our energy. —Logan Grendel

Once we yell in the streets and make our t-shirts and signal our support, we go home. If we can observe that these sorts of demonstrations to nothing to change the material conditions of those we advocate for while also giving the police state the leeway to arrest protestors, why do we keep prioritizing marches as a meaningful means of dissent? What is meaningful about marching at this point?

To submit answer:

I think we love the spectacle and the ceremony of it all. I would argue, in fact, that we’re addicted to it. Planning and executing spectacle gives us a big emotional high and release, such that we do it over and over again. And we, the masses of the United States, continue to balk at the idea of a coordinated and sustained national strike because… that would be really difficult and uncomfortable. And we might actually have to give up creature comforts so embedded into our infrastructure we consider them human rights. What happens when the trash collection and sanitation workers joining on our national strike, right? When it's not just the work from home, corporate baddies? When the teachers and the childcare workers and the grocery store stalkers and the migrant hands employed on farms, employed on farms strike as well. What happens then? How do we care for one another in our basic material necessities if we successfully stop the machine? No one wants to think about that, so we engage in beautiful, historic, I was there on the right side of history and took a picture for the textbooks spectacle.

Then we return to our house cubicles to sit on our cushions and share the footage of massacres in Palestine.

Media does not humanize these people flashing on our screens. It makes them icons.

Hind Rajab, who was killed six months ago by the end of July when the Israeli military fired 355 bullets at her while she was trapped in a car surrounded by her dead loved ones calling for help. She was six years old.

Iconography happens on either side of the same coin: you are either made into a devil or an angel. You are a villain to be defeated or you are a cause to rally around. These polar points often happen at the same time, flip sides of the same coin. None of the above is in the normal protocol for How We Treat a Human Being. Human beings are not symbols, and they are often not causes to rally around.

You can tell that slain Palestinians are symbols and not humans because we do not dissent like this until they die. We save the worst of our dissent for when they perish. Instead of fighting for their lives, we wait for the grief mobilize us into action. That’s true of this particular genocide as a whole. 75 years of crying out unto deaf international ears, then everybody cares once the bombs drop.

What happens when a genocide falls out of the news cycle?

For those of us in the West? …Relief. Don’t shy away from these thoughts. It’s my job, as an artist, to force us to be honest. We silently feel relieved. We feel exhausted by the weight of having to care about people we ultimately feel we can do nothing for. True radicalization, the kind of change of thought that translates into changed action, only happens for a precious few. The vast majority of onlookers never really wanted to move from their position as spectator; they just fervently wished for a happier ending. So when there is less to look at (because the news cycle needs fresh blood; because the people providing live, on the ground coverage have been killed; when there’s less to look at because we have seen so many clips and photographs and accounts of visceral deaths that looking only makes us numb anyhow), we turn our eyes to the easiest narrative of hope that our screens can provide. We accept a manufactured happy ending.

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign event in West Allis, Wisconsin, on July 23. A new poll puts her 12 points ahead of former President Donald Trump in Michigan. Taken from this Newsweek article.

I want to explain to you the genius of social media marketing with an experience I had in high school. In my first year, I was in speech and debate club and we were raising money for a tournament fees selling muffins from Costco. Most of the student groups did this. This was not unusual. You just, you know, buy the pack, you sell each muffin individually for a dollar and you turn a profit. The upperclassman on my team constructed an advertisement to run on the scrolling announcements that ran in every classroom on the small television we had on all day.

In my courses (also full of first year high school students), they remarked how odd the advertisement was. It didn’t even say “Speech and Debate Club,” or where to buy muffins, or how much the muffins were. It was just blinking at you: BUY MUFFINS. BUY MUFFINS. Everyone was confused.

When I went to one of the third years behind the advertisement design, I told them I didn’t know if the advertisement was effective. “No one really gets it,” I said. She laughed, leaned in conspiratorially. “Everyone gets it.”

Took me a few years to really understand the lessons here, but I learned three things:

Point One: The older classes— third and fourth years— understood the advertisement was a play on hypnotism in a way the younger grades did not. But the younger grades did not have to understand the joke of the advertisement for it to be effective. Despite not knowing who was selling, where the money was going, or why the graphic chosen was supposedly funny, they still bought a fuck ton of muffins.

So like… none of us think it’s wildly dystopian that teenagers make fancams of elected officials…? This was up and viral the same day she announced her presidency.

Point Two: Media literacy does not stop you from being affected by the media. The older grades laughed at the “joke.” They laughed at how the underclassmen didn’t “get it.” They prided themselves on being too smart to stare at the screen, trying to make sense of the confusing demand like the younger grades were. They still bought a fuck ton of muffins.

Upperclassman, in this case, are the millennial that stick to being witty on twitter (and in in the millennial/genZ cusper case, in essays on substack lol)

Point Three: The only people that really in on the joke are the ones with all the money at the end of the day. Speech and Debate made way more than we needed, and we laughed at the ad for a good, long while. For the rest of the school year, we would joke, “Buy muffins!”

Kamala “The Meme Queen” Harris: An Icon

Vice President Kamala Harris announced her bid for the United States presidency on July 21, 2024, which means that she has further solidifed her place in the American psyche as icon and symbol rather than human worthy of critique. She has already been explicit that continues to ensure Israel’s right to defend itself, the same genocidal talking point we have been fed over Anglophone media for nearly a year. The clips of her or about her I find most viral are not about her policy. They make no mention of her tenure as her state’s attorney general. They’re about the silly, memeable things she says during speeches. Or her slipping around her silk press. Or her laugh, which has a way of humanizing her. This is advertising. Making people laugh is a phenomenal way to build one-sided rapport.

Familiarity breeds trust. Watching the rebrand over the past four years from Harris being shrewd, sharp, and wildly competent prosecutor to her being a head empty, hair flipping, out of the box, auntie-esque orator has been… sobering, to say the least. At first, it was outrageous. It felt silly and that angered me and I didn’t know why. Then, I saw how effective it was. She’s a media queen. We share clips of her talking and “funny” audios of her speeches and not the policy decisions being handled under her administration. Even as many of us were primed to know better. At the beginning of the election in 2020 when she was running for President against Biden, I saw post after post on Twitter reminding us of her previous policy decisions in law enforcement (most recurrently a crackdown on truancy laws that leads to parents being charged with misdemeanors for not taking their child to school, punishable with up to a year in jail). I myself almost did not graduate high school and went to jail at 17 for “criminal truancy” when what I was experiencing was poverty. Cheree Peoples was arrested in her pajamas and paraded in front of cameras for her daughter (who has sickle cell) having two many absences from school.

I think my most poignant memories of her in administration have been when she acknowledged we would be warring over water in the next decade or so, or when she took her first international trip in office to tell refugees from Guatemala not to come to the United States (or feel the weight of US Border Law Enforcement).

“I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border. Do not come. Do not come.”

Remember these children sleeping in plastic blankets in cage-like warehouses? These detention centers built under Obama, kept up under Trump and under public scrutiny in the Biden administration’s first year? Sources: New York Times, Al Jazeera, BBC World News, USA Today

And now, I am watching a happy ending be manufactured. Because the empire has allowed us our small, Western tantrums at the genocides necessary to keep the machines of imperialism going. It is now time to move on and be placated with a victory story— something we feel we have a sense of control over! Never mind the fact that we don’t live in a direct democracy! Vote! Vote out the fascism! The bombs will still drop and the children will still starve to death (if they survive the Israeli snipers aiming for their heads) and the famines will still be manufactured and the raw resources stripped from the colonies but we did it! We managed to keep ourselves comfortable.

This is the part where everyone boos me. There’s usually one section in essays like these that get under people’s skin, so just to set the tone: I’m not saying this because I want to make you angry, I am saying it because I think it’s a useful truth to consider.

We, the “reasosnable” US masses, only dislike Trump because he embarrasses us.

He has a flagrant disregard of the rules of presidential diplomacy that disgraces our reputation. Policy-wise, his era was really not distinct from the current Biden administration or presidents beforehand. He’s someone who says the quiet parts of running an imperialist ethno-state out loud, which emboldens the radicalized right, and it’s overtly racist, and those people were already organizing for a hostile takeover! We need someone to blame for the radical left’s lack of concrete, sustained mobility and so we love to hate him. We hate him because he embarrasses us, not because he’s worse! Harris is only the better choice because she’s prettier, and more relatable, and has the right sort of gravitas. She doesn’t embarrass us. We are willing to trade liberation for spectacle, but it must be a spectacle that makes us feel good at the end of the day.

Do you know how I know?

We should be outraged that the Vice President of an administration aiding an abetting the most documented genocide in human history can peacefully run for office. That is a sham. That is embarrassing. Especially when that person has stated they do not plan on enforcing any sort of concession from the murderous Israeli regime. There has been absolutely no mention of the other human rights crises and violations happening elsewhere amongst the colonized world— the ongoing conflicts in across Black and Indigenous nations that we tend to tack onto Free Palestine to show we absolutely do care about Black people outside of Western imperial cores. haha. We have made no demands because we, the masses, have no demands outside of feeling like everything will be okay again. We don’t actually care about these people as people. We care about them as symbols of liberation and as litmus tests to prove we, in the hard times, would “do the right thing.” If we cared about them as people, submitting to someone still pleased to orchestrate their deaths, which VP Harris is doing right now, would be unthinkable. We would be using this time of mass disillusionment to destabilize the empire’s business as usual. We want spectacle more than we want actual liberation for ourselves or for the people that we say we are in solidarity with. It doesn’t make any sense.

The only thing guaranteed to be worse under Trump is the spectacle. And we care more about spectacle more than we care about tangible, material change. Another Trump presidency is not a happy ending that will allow us to take our minds of the incessant dying of the third world. And we want something to distract us. We want something comfortable. We want something that we can look to and say, “We did it!! And we already went to all these marches. We're so tired.”

We have arrived at the conclusions section, which comes in two parts: (1) the necessity of class traitorship and (2) the foolish concede to corruption.

Point one: We benefit from the illusion of peace as folks in the top 10%.

I know that those of us in the United States (or in the Western world as a whole) are accustomed to defining wealth exclusively within our respective nation states. The working class in the United States is not a fun or aspirational place to be for anyone who has experienced or witnessed it; I just shared an essay giving sleep tips as someone who has disordered sleep from years of working night and day to survive. We spend so much of our time looking upwards in the core of the empire that we (the working class) don’t really see our place on the world’s stage for what it is. As far as global wealth distribution goes, if you are making over $38,000 annually, you are actually in the top 10% of the world’s richest people (according to findings by Oxfam). As I stated last year in discussions about global poverty and poverty metrics, 80% of the world makes less than $10 per day. That means if you're making $38,000 annually, which is not a lovely, easy, or straightforward existence in the United States, like you definitely need to never get sick ever, right? You're still making more than 80% of the world by an order of magnitude. So when we discuss revolution in the United States, it’s way too many people quoting Fanon. The marjority of us are not the wretched of the earth he writes of. That’s not us! We are a class that is enticed into too much comfort to voluntarily revolt. Revolution means death. To call for revolution is to call for death. It calls for the death of everything that you have known to be true about your day to day. It's an upheaval of society. It calls for death. And it usually comes with a lot of bloodshed. The people that get to a point where they are willing to revolt against their government are usually doing so because they are chronically starving. That's not us.

If we rebel against US hegemony and orchestrate the fall of imperialism, we are doing so as class traitors. Not as part of the worldwide vanguard— that's not us.

We are supposed to, we are primed to want to accept whatever happy ending the empire orchestrates, because most of us believe in the ability to be comfortable as a divine right. If we're powerless except for the vote, and we usher in somebody that does the spectacle better, that brings us back to a state of psychological comfort: even if we know that everything's not all right, we can feel like everything's all right. IImagining ourselves as powerless is uncomfortable in a way that a new, smiling, voted-in happy ending can solve. Imagining ourselves as powerful enough to stop the machine is excruciating— that means we would have to forgo comfort altogether. And consistent comfort is the only thing that we have. It's consistent running water and no power outages and subsidized corn and subsidized fuel, okay?

I think a lot of us have given up the desire to imagine ourselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Soaring homelessness, economic depravity, the rising cost of food essentials makes it difficult to delude ourselves we’re this close to being rich. It’s become commonplace in pop culture to disparage the ultra-wealthy; most of us don’t imagine we will make it there in our lifetime. Most of us do imagine ourselves just a few steps from comfort. “I don’t want to be rich! I just want to be comfortable.” Conveniently forgetting the price of US comfort is depravity in the colonies. We want to forget what that comfort costs. We want to laugh. We want that head empty Kamala laugh! Girl, we want to laugh. We as a whole never wanted liberation because it's uncomfortable. And I would actually respect everybody cheering for Kamala Harris a whole hell of a lot more if you were just willing to admit that outright instead of pretending like we're actually doing something good.

If we rebel against US hegemony and orchestrate the fall of imperialism, we are engaging in outright class traitorship.

Point two: The foolish concede to corruption.

I am reading Mama Ellen’s memoir at the moment and it is rivoting. Most definitely a text I will read twice. If you are not new to Threadings., I have spoken on more than one occasion on how we in the US are slowly gearing up for civil war. Right now, war is enacted in courts and in policymaking in various attacks on healthcare, reproductive rights, rights to education, the gutting of public school systems, the systematic underpaying of teachers, and actually of all care workers. Thinking about the chronic nurse strikes that have cropped up and been left mostly ignored since COVID has continued to decimate our healthcare infrastructure. More and more of our taxes are going to making sure that we keep the US armed to the teeth and not to making sure that life in the US for the working class is bearable in any way. We're watching the slow deterioration of society and (as Dr. CBS pointed out), the increased militarization of everyday happenings. The backdrop for war is always the manufacturing of poverty: true of my country of origin, Sierra Leone and true in Liberia (Madam President Ellen Sirleaf Johnson’s country of origin and place of birth). There was a point in time where she was asked to serve under a ruler who openly stole the election with a fraudulent vote (which was another step in the direction of the civil war that would follow). Members of her political party who were offered seats in Senate refused to take them. Her dissent in this way created such a political target on her back she was tried and imprisoned. But she did not relent. She recounts a time where, imprisoned, she was in one of the worst jails in Liberia, waiting in a cage for her supposed execution. President Samuel K. Doe (the fraudelent Liberian president) urged her to take her seat in Senate. US government officials applied pressure to her directly as well. Two military actors under the fraudulent president questioned her while she was locked up.

General Wright and Lieutenant Harris tried to urge me on. “Just go and work with him, and things will be all right,” they said. “Take your seat.”

Still I refused. I told them my party had decided that the elections were fraudulent and that I could not be a party to that fraud. “If I accept, I will lose all credibility with all of the partisans who supported me all over this country.”

And she was right!!

Period Mama Ellen!! Her memoir is entitled, This Child Will Be Great.

If the country as a whole had continued its dissent of President Doe openly stealing the election, its possible the civil war in Liberia could have been avoided (and thus, avoiding the civil war that Sierra Leone suffered as a result of that regional conflict spilling over into its neighboring country). Conceding to corruption does not keep the peace. It allows for said corruption to continue its abuses.

I am not usually so cynical.

But truly, what the fuck. What the fuck. Remember when I said that every American is addicted to something?

The only perk of being working class in the Western world is our unlimited access to comfort? The comfort of denial continues her reign as the sweetest drug of all. We choose to cast our eyes towards the fiction of a happy ending rather than disrupting the machines that cause all this misery in the first place. It’s been a good couple months of us looking in the eye the costs of imperialism, the price of all this endless comfort, and instead of looking towards the growing rebellions across the colonies— something that should actually bring us comfort and joy, the knowledge that others bite back their regimes— we cast our gaze to these ludicrous what if scenarios. What if we can just push Harris left? What if we call her a war-mongering arbritor of the police state after she’s elected? Won’t she be better than Trump?

I don’t care who the hell is wielding all the blood money. What I want is a child. I want children in this life. And I am not, I simply refuse to tell my kid, “Yes, I did voluntarily cheer on this woman who I knew would happily continue to suck the bone marrow from the colonized world, even while knowing she would do that very thing! The other option embarrassed me.” Because that’s all this is. The other option embarrasses us.

There is no popular president that would create the revolutionary policy and world-making that guarantees our collective safety. Does not exist. The job of the president of the United States is quite literally antithetical to that idea, and any progessively minded one would be working to make the position obsolete. There is no such thing as a good president. I am watching the youth of Kenya rise over and over again to force their federal bodies into caring for them. And they are dying at these protests, literally under live ammunition, going missing, bodies turning up in slums. And here we are raising money for Kamala. Trump doesn’t embarrass me! Y’all do! Those of Myanmar have been fighting a revolutionary war for years that much of the professional class has decided to take active part in rather than fleeing. And our professional class is raising money for Kamala. You really want me to cast my eyes towards this woman who makes sure to laugh when cameras are on, telling me to buy muffins?

EMBARRASSING!

We (in the West, as a whole) do not actually care about freedom, really because most of us cannot imagine what it would be like to be uncomfortable for the rest of our lives. It humbles me that we offer ourselves— we offer our minds— to be sold like this. I have so much revolutionary optimism until I open fuckin twitter.

The only good thing I’m experiencing from all this rage is getting ripped out of my work slump. Toni Morrison was right. I really do need to be writing.

Anyways. I hope the work of your day passes through your hands with ease.

—ig

Selected Jazz of the Episode:

Muziqa heywete x Getatchew Mekurya

Afternoon of a Swan x Speedy West

HOW CAN WE MEND A BROKEN HEART x Kahil El’Zabar

Love and Peace x Quincy Jones

A Taste of Honey x Andy Bey, The Bey Sisters

Better Than x Lake Street Drive

Soul Serenade x Aretha Franklin

La notte muore (orchestra) x Sandro Brugnolini

Sweet Leilani x Les Paul & His Trio

1. word to Raven shared this perspective in our Friday group. I still think about it.