Do you listen to Dispatches From a Collapsing State? It's a weekly conversation, one hour, paywalled. If you think it's wonderful, support these creators. Dispatches is on Substack, and I realize many people have reason to avoid Substack — Danielle Moodie also has a show on YouTube, and Jared Yates Sexton has a Patreon, so support them where you can.
Today, on Dispatches, Danielle says something that will stick in my brain for a while:
"When people say: 'Oh, they couldn't possibly bring back segregation, they can't possibly bring back slavery,' I'm like: 'We used to have this thing called Roe v. Wade. We used to have this thing called the Voting Rights Act. Get out! Like, I need people to actually imagine with their whole brain about what the setup is here. It isn't just about the grift. It is also about getting rid of the entire Constitution of these United States that they are slowly dismantling through the Supreme Court. Right? So, when people say, 'Oh, it couldn't happen,' like, progress is not just forward fucking movement because you will always have at least half of this country that is invested in misunderstanding, that is invested in racism and misogyny, that is invested in capitalism to any extent. They don't care about humanity. So I need people to stop thinking that, like a midterms [elections] is going to save you, that the next presidential election is going to save you, bcause what is at the core of America isn't fundamentally good, it is fucking rotten to its core. And all that we have put up — It's like going to the dentist and you have cavities and they're like, 'We'll just put on veneers. We're not gonna actually — ' and then you're like, 'But shouldn't you remove the rotten teeth?' 'No, no, we'll just give you medication for it.' So you live numb but you look good but you're rotting from the inside fucking out. That's America." (48:00-49:45)
Jared's thing in this episode is that anyone who is still selling veneers has chosen to lie to themselves and to others. He can't tolerate the deception anymore. He can't spend his time trying to persuade them. They need to get real. The fascists are telling us exactly what they're doing, why they're doing it, and what their intended outcome is, so it's not hard to understand. Even if it were hard, many people have studied history, reported news, interpreted what's going on, and we can listen to them and believe them.
'Sympathetic pitilessness'
Talking about Molly Crabapple's Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Cory Doctorow describes her "admirable achievement of being both sympathetic and pitiless." As "a veteran political activist," Crabapple has "endured every failure that radical politics can manifest, sat through every kind of bad meeting, and she recognizes in these disputes the same personalities and personal failings that have broken her heart a hundred times. She understands why these people are this way — but she can also see, with perfect hindsight, the ghastly horrors that followed..."
I understand this feeling. You can understand someone well enough that you wince at what they are going through, including the mistakes they themselves are making. And yet you don't have to coddle them. You can judge that, on an ethical level, they've chosen poorly.
Each of us is obliged to tell the truth about the callous people in power who wreak extreme harm as well as the revolutionaries who are flawed and who fail or are failed. There are appropriate ways to tell those truths. Sometimes doing so involves a measure of sympathy, since sympathy, too, is part of our truth.
Truth-telling is the opposite of putting up a veneer.
