Politics paints with a palette of emotions: What's a girl to do?
Tue Jan 22, 2008 at 11:44:20 PM PDT
Especially a gilas girl...(?) Oh my.
This is not an easy bit of fluff to write. The use and abuse of emotions in politics is not a minor matter to me. The various registers of emotions that politics engage goes beyond the two dimensional approach that political commentary forces us to occupy. My own emotions, though quite powerful, are not something I share easily with others. My politics, as well, are something that I both think and feel to very great degrees. They resonate in me: my politics and my emotions. And often, they come together, though not generally in any kind of scenarios provided for by the conventional wisdom of US political culture.
Politics, many folks--including experts--will claim is about power. And there's no denying that. But politics is also about meaning and engagement, and those two things are not achieved without addressing our emotions. This is, and has been, a liberal dilemma for the last 30+ years. The last emotional highpoint of liberal politics was the Civil Rights Movement. From that point on the conservatives fully captured the politics of emotions and the liberals' response has been to deny emotion as a reasonable aspect of political engagement. Our two-dimensional political system does not serve us well, and this is but one example of why that is. The accepted conventional wisdom on this dilemma has been to eschew emotions in favor of liberal wonkism: numbers and data and reason and logic can overcome the "emotionality" of issues (see abortion). Liberals, who were at one point supposed to be about representing people's interests and connecting those to power, became the group that wonked everyone else out of the room. When I was a child, the insult of choice was to call someone a "bleeding heart liberal", i.e. those who had liberal political leanings led with their hearts rather than their heads. This, I think is a product of the Civil Rights Movement, where emotion became an important political tool.
But that was then and this is now. What's interesting to me is that it is the conservatives who learned more in regard to emotions and politics from the Civil Rights Movement than did the liberals. And I don't think that liberals, and even the left, have gone beyond the Civil Rights Movement in their thinking about emotion and politics. I'm pretty sure this is a deficiency, but I'm not so sure that I can explain why.
I'm still not quite sure what to do with this topic. It overwhelms me in ways that are frightening. But I know both in my head, and in my heart that it is important. And its not something I'm confident we know how to talk about.
I keep stumbling over it because of the Bush Administration and the use they have made of emotions as a political tool. I stumble over it because of the commercial media culture we live and thrive in which packages our emotions into easily digestible tablets for ready consumption. But I stumble over it also, because I know that my head, my heart and my hands are the key to any political action I might engage in. The heads, hearts and hands of all the people who came before me are what brought me the political legacy I now benefit from. And none of those three component should be minimized. Yet, I also recognize, especially in this day and age, how vulnerable a target the second one is. Of those three component that make up the political, the heart is the easiest to manipulate. It is the easiest tool to wield.
For many folks then, the answer would be, eliminate emotions from politics. No easy task, that, but even if it were, I'm not sure its desirable. Because politics do have to engage our emotions. This is the primary lesson of the Civil Rights Movement for me. It was only by engaging the public in a recognition of a collective emotion: shame, that real political change was achieved. So emotions are not separate from politics, nor are they separate from public life. The question remains how to incorporate emotion without exploiting them into the public arena. And how to do it genuinely, authentically, rather than commercially and formulaically.
I wish I had an answer to this dilemma. But for me it is a relief simply to state it out loud. I yearn for conversations about it, rather than the basic acceptance of "it goes without saying" that we live with on a day-day basis.
The current political palette, as I see it, is anchored by three emotional shadings: fear, shame, and hope. These are the three that stand out to me, at least. The three that occupy me the most, for reasons of personal biography, primarily. I suspect I need help in uncovering the other emotional palettes employed in the construction of reality that is contemporary US politics. I invite that help where ever it is offered.
Fear
There's a lot that's been written on the politics of fear, some of its very smart, so I shall not attempt to broach this subject. Only to note that it doesn't work with me. The people I'm most afraid of in this world are the Republican leaders in the United States. Its been that way for a long time. If a "politics of fear" really worked, then we would have found a way to get rid of the leaders of the Republican Party. At least, that's the way I see it. If I had to put it in a slogan I'm afraid it would have to be: "I'm not afraid of terrorists, I'm afraid of Republicans". And I'm afriad that would be true. I am more afraid of people in my own country than I am of people outside of it. I am afraid of corporate CEOs. I am afraid of evangelicals. I am afraid of white racists. I am afraid of US Chauvanists. I am afraid of militarists. I am, at times, afraid of liberals, even. But I'm not afraid of immigration, and I'm not afraid of terrorists, and I'm not afraid of peak oil, and I'm not afraid of the end of American global dominance. i can't be afraid of losing my house, because i already have. And I can't be afraid of losing my health, because I already have. And I can't be afraid of lising my job, because I alreayd have. So the only thing that's left for me to be afraid of, is all the stuff that everybody else cherishes. Now tell me, what does that do to a "politics of fear"?
Shame
The politics of shame is something I can't think about without thinking about Abu Graib and Guantanomo. I'm struck, time and again, by how our government has used shame as a political tool in the interest of very questionable power. My only experience with shame as a political tool in the past, was with the Civil Rights Movement, where shame was utilitzed in the interest of progressive social change. This one hits me hard, in the gut, and without a sense of where to go. But it is an important lesson about tools and goals and underlying ideologies. The Bush administration has dirtied shame for me, so that I no longer feel comfortable feeling shame. I don't know what to do with that at the moment, but I know that it comes to me via politics.
Hope
For weeks now, I've been scanning my brain for all the political references I have for "hope". The politics of hope, of course, is not a new item. Its familiar goods to me. I worry sometimes that hope, while clearly the most transportable and translatable of our emotions into a political lexicon is also the most easily exploitable. The list of my own references, easily accessible in my head is surprising long for an inside the head list, but here are some of the more famed highlights: "Hope is the thing with feathers" (Emily Dickinson), "To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death" (Pearl S. Buck), "Keep Hope Alive" (Jesse Jackson), "A Man from Hope" (Bill Clinton), "Hope Dies Last" (Studs Turkel, et. al). Hope is familiar. Hope is accessible. But that does not mean that hope is a cheap date.
Five times in my life I have awakened on the other side of a suicide attempt. Five times I've gotten up out of bed after wanting never to see daylight. Hope does not come cheap. Hope is not something I take lightly. Nor is my relationship to hope something I am willing to turn over to patent medicine hawkers and their decendants. So I feel some amount of confidence in stating that hope is not easily manufactured, no matter how stirring the rhetoric. Hope is built upon things more tangible no matter how far out of reach they may be.
I don't want to eliminate hope or shame or even fear from our political pictures. I don't expect they will be eliminated. But I can't help thinking if we are equally blessed and cursed with our emotions let us paint with them honestly.
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