The Silence of Our Friends
Kamala Harris, Shaw Brothers kung fu, pragmatism, and more.
The naming of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s running mate, vice-presidential pick, and assumptive future successor is no kind of surprise; one might even say it was written in stone following the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016. The demands of our identitarian approach to politics made it all but inevitable that he would choose a woman, and almost as likely that it would be a woman of color (especially given the deeply sad performance of Elizabeth Warren during her own presidential run and the public’s utter lack of interest in Amy Klobuchar). By the same token, a different and more pressing set of demands—those of the donor base the Democratic Party exists to service—required that it not be a particularly radical, or even progressive, woman of color, but one who has shown an ongoing comfortableness with the exercise of power within an authoritarian capitalist framework.
Tactically, the move might not seem to make a lot of sense. Most of the people who are excited about the Harris nomination were already in the bag for the Democrats, and are so wrapped up in the rhetoric of Donald Trump as an unprecedented and intolerable evil that they would have thrown their support behind a broken toaster if Biden had picked it as his VP. Harris is liked but not well-liked, and in her home state of California, she was pulverized during the primaries; her dreadful performance there was the final nail in the coffin for her already floundering campaign. Her policy positions, absurdly hyped by centrist do-nothings as the ‘most progressive in history’, are so uninspiring that few can even name them, let alone rally around them, and her personality and charisma are terrifyingly similar to those of the candidate Donald Trump utterly embarrassed four years ago. It’s hard to see her winning any demographic anywhere not already on the side of Joe Biden.
Strategically, though, it’s a perfect choice. Republicans are already predictably smearing her with the usual attacks they reserve for literally any Democratic politician (far left, culturally abnormal, and very possibly not a Real American™), but Harris’ record is so utterly center-right that nothing is likely to stick. The scandals in her past are ones that liberal Democrats, who love cops just as much as Republicans do, don’t really consider scandals. And best of all, her status as a woman of color allows her boosters to wield the twin blades of racism and sexism against anyone, left or right, who dares speak against her. People who have co-opted the language of oppression to defend the powerful have found a sparkling gem in Harris, and they won’t stop polishing it until 2036 if the end of the world is obliging enough to wait that long.
But who exactly are those boosters? Who are the people who look at the behavior, background, and record of a mediocre centrist prosecutor turned mediocre centrist senator and thinks: This is the future of America? In an election season increasingly defined by the laughable factor of hostile online supporters, Harris features some of the worst; anyone who has dared to cross the so-called K-Hive (which is to say, who has shown anything but utter and abject fealty to the junior senator from California) knows that they are the political equivalent of Philadelphia sports fans, only less fun. In almost every regard, they seem to be the rump of the Hillary Clinton die-hards—politically, philosophically, demographically, and temperamentally, they seem to have worked some kind of essentialist alchemy whereby Harris’ rise is a back door for Clinton to re-enter the White House.
Over the last week, two comments from social media have stayed with me. One was by a leftist organizer on Twitter, a woman of color from Harris’ home state, who noted that everyone who has urged her to support the Biden/Harris ticket has been a white man or woman of the bourgeoisie. She noted that not a single black or brown member of the proletariat had expressed any excitement or even interest in Harris’ ascent; to them, she’s just another big-talking Democrat who won’t do a thing for them or their families. Though many members of the American working class are black, they don’t see Kamala Harris as one of them; they see her as the black cop who clubs them extra-hard, the black D.A. who pushes for their friends to get the maximum allowable sentence, the black judge who sends their relatives away for minor drug offenses. They find nothing more in common with this black woman than I, as a white man, find in common with Joe Biden, and will do what they always do on election days: stay home.
The second was from a leftist organizer on Facebook, a Jewish man from my own state of Illinois, who noted that he came up in politics under Barack Obama, and worked with a lot of people of color who placed all their hopes and aspirations in him, only to become bitterly disappointed when he turned his big promises of a post-racial America built on hope into typical centrist compromise when he finally became America’s first black president. He wrote that not a single one of these people had talked to him positively about Harris, or urged him to vote for her, or decided that they would spend their time campaigning for her. They’d seen it all before, and weren’t willing to get burned again; Harris’ rhetoric is already less inspiring and lofty than Obama’s had been, so why risk it all for someone whose distance from their goals was already so profound?
Whenever leftists express doubts about Harris (or Biden, or Clinton, or, well, essentially any Democrats), we are told: This is not the time. There is a fascist in the White House, and it is incumbent upon us to vote him out. There will be time to criticize the party and its leaders later, once the threat to America is over. But the threat is never over. The time to criticize the party never comes. It seems impossible that anyone could look at the trajectory of the Democratic Party since 1984 and believe for a second that it can be pushed left, or that it exists as anything other than a marketing effort on behalf of well-placed elites; the narrative of imminent eschaton will never be abandoned and the day we can ask our elected leaders to actually do what they’ve promised will never arrive. The Democrats have figured out the trick, even if the voters never do: If they know they can count on your support no matter what, there is zero incentive for them to ever change. They will keep the grift going ad infinitum because their voters voluntarily give up the only leverage they have every single time.
We’ve heard, over and over, that there will come a time to ask questions of the Democratic leadership, to push them to the left, to hold them responsible for the promises they’ve broken and the ideals they’ve failed to live up to—but that time is not today. Well, until an official announcement is made that I can definitively put on my calendar, I think I’ll pick today just the same.
A few weeks ago in this space, I was praising the release by the Criterion Collection of a gorgeous and feature-packed box set of Bruce Lee’s films. It was largely these movies that created such a big audience in the United States for Chinese martial arts movies—kung fu flicks, as we called them when I was a kid. (Well, some people called them that. There were worse names.) Growing up in the 1980s, in a desert town without much in the way of movie houses, they weren’t easy to find; my early exposure to them was via horrible prints with abysmal edits shown at odd hours on the upper reaches of the TV dial on shows called Kung Fu Theatre and the like. When I got a little older and the home video explosion happened, you could seek them out in Phoenix’s tiny Chinatown by haunting Asian-owned warehouses, groceries, or knickknack shops that might happen to stock a few classics and the odd rarity. (Even today, I miss the selection of weird titles at these places; I’ve been trying to find a decent copy of the bizarre but fascinating 1982 Lau Kar Leung comedy Cat vs. Rat for over thirty years.)
These movies, whether broadcast on Channel 61 in between music videos or hunted down at a rug store next to the freeway, were always a technical disaster; the prints were awful, with bleeding colors and fuzzy edges. The sound was abysmal, and your choice was either bad dubbing or no dubbing at all, never subtitles. The box covers and VHS cassettes were usually in Chinese, and we’d as often as not end up with a completely different movie than we’d intended to buy. But that was part of the appeal: While the end result was usually a dud, sometimes we’d get a movie much better than the one we thought we were getting. And they were always so much fun.
Many of these movies were released by the Shaw Brothers production company, a titan of Hong Kong cinema run by entertainment tycoons Run Run and Runme Shaw, and recently, a slew of them have come to Netflix via a licensing deal with Celestial Pictures. They also feature a slew of other Asian action flicks, from 1990s absurdist comedies to 2000s gangster pictures, but the wuxia films of the 1970s and 1980s are the real cream of the crop. It’s a real mixed bag: some stone cold classics (Five Elements Ninjas, Legendary Weapons of China, The Five Venoms), a few oddities (Opium and the Kung Fu Master, Little Dragon Maiden, The Young Vagabond), and some curious omissions (Return to the 36th Chamber and Disciples of the 36th Chamber, but not The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, a.k.a. Shaolin Master Killer, one of the best examples of the genre ever made). But there’s at least a dozen worth watching over a long weekend, and what else have you got to do these days?
These are not high art by any means. The plots are tissue-thin, often nothing more than an ancient legend about some goofy-looking weapon and a screenplay built around what a hoot it would be to see someone use it. The dialogue is arch and frequently ridiculous (although it’s actually quite enjoyable to put on the closed captioning and see the chasm of difference between what was written and what’s said by the overdub actors). The special effects can be dazzling, but they can also be deeply silly. They blend action, story, and comedy in ways that can come across as tonally off. But taken for what they are—ballets of violence, essentially—they can’t be beaten for pure fun. The costumes are always gorgeous, the detail is something to see, the scope of the Shaw Brothers studio sets are dazzling, and you even get little bits of Chinese history, albeit not accurate or consistent for shit. But what you always can count on is movies that are inspiring, exciting, and insanely fun, in a freewheeling and friendly way that’s almost completely absent from the alienating, noisy CGI messes that pass for action/adventure these days.
Misunderstanding words and their meanings was already an American national pastime before the internet, and after it, it’s basically our national sport. But if there’s one word I’d personally pick to rescue from the nonstop abuse it suffers at the hands of the half-smart, it would be ‘pragmatic’.
Particularly when applied to politics, ‘pragmatic’ is often used by centrists as a totem against leftists: Things like universal health care, free education, or environmental preservation are dismissed as good ideas (with which the speaker, of course, fully agrees), but, my dear boy, we must be pragmatic. The meaning is clear: Politics is the art of the possible, and these things are quite simply impossible. The intent, however, is just as clear: Shut up with all your pie-in-the-sky nonsense, you hippie commies, and stop asking for things that everyone else in the world already has.
‘Pragmatic’ is usually used in this context to mean ‘practical’ or ‘realistic’, but there is nothing impractical about fighting before surrendering, nor is there anything unrealistic about demanding things that are already commonplace in countries far less wealthy and resource-laden than our own. Pragmatism, as a philosophy, elevates the actual functioning of a system above ideological imaginings of it, quite to the contrary of this base misuse of the word, and despises the kind of bad metaphysics and public relations that passes for liberal politics today. Pragmatism is about negotiating commonality, certainly, but it is also about feeling out the horizons of the possible, and forever testing our beliefs to see if they measure up to our needs, and, if not, abandoning them as irrelevant. We could easily power a Green New Deal off the energy of Peirce, Quine, and Rorty spinning in their graves.
This week in links: Democrats are already walking back their limp promises on health care; VICE documents the government’s plans to scuttle the U.S. Postal Service; a new college graduate outlines the generation gap of a hundred years ago; Suzanne Treister’s engrossing psycho-political tarot; and we say goodbye to the masterful classical guitarist Julian Bream, who died this week at the age of 82.