Have you, like me, observed a disconnect between the student protests we're seeing on college campuses across the country against Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and against the investiture of their academic institutions in the munitions and policy industries that make the genocide possible and the response of those universities and the mainstream media to the protests as though they were contextless outpourings of a burgeoning anti-semitism among college and university students? Considering that the organizers and participants in these demonstrations are to a great extent Jewish themselves, you would be forgiven for thinking that something else is going on with the response of the elites. And you would not be wrong. What we are seeing, specifically, is cowardice. Those college presidents who are across the board involving local constabularies and militias to strongarm and clampdown on what have started out as peaceful protests are performing a sleight of hand to try to distract you from their suppression of their student's timeless impulse to apply their growing knowledge of the world's injustices to a plea for something different, and an assault on their right to say it. The attention of these presidents to what is happening on their campuses is selective. By tradition, they’re modeling their concern to the specifications of the biggest pains in their ass; they’re proxying for the pains they can’t defeat, the pains that can ruin them (and probably still will regardless) and that have no doubt demanded the response that we're seeing, and they’re focusing their clampdowns on the gnats (they think) they can defeat who in any case can’t do shit about it. It couldn’t be clearer how venal and cowardly the presidents are being. I don't believe for a second that they have given a thought to what is right. I don’t think it figures into the calculation. I don’t think they care how they are coming across to anybody who isn’t the Lobby (thanks to which they are getting abundant support from a compliant media that is helpfully mis-seeing what is so plain to those of us who don't have AIPAC shouting into our ears.) But the timidity of college and university presidents should not be a complete surprise. It wasn’t long ago that 3 presidents who were visibly annoyed at the bullshit-- and clueless as to how to navigate it-- got taken down in the blink of an eye.
The shoddy conflation of condemnation of Israel's mass murder of Palestinian civilians who it deems collateral damage in the one-sided revenge war it is waging as a feeble pretext for its designs on the beachfront real estate of Gaza with antisemitism is merely one example of the belaboring that is increasingly required to maintain the fallacies of our neoliberal era and Israel and the West's colonial project in Palestine. It feels as if the façade of lies that have masked the true workings of our institutions and the power elite that run them-- lies that we have obediently never questioned if never outright believed-- have been toppling one by one. It's a wall of dominoes that has no end. It’s hard to find a stopping place for a starting point. Gaza is one example but our truly bizarre election of 2024 is another.
I was thinking recently that in the US there are really 2 classes-- Patriots and Immigrants. Patriots are the mostly white, male, Anglo, Christian colonists (and their womenfolk) who think they are the inheritors and guardians of the American mission. The American revolution was a bit of theatre to establish the US as something new, but it was really a continuation of what had been going on in Europe. What was new was the birth of an elite that was not beholden to a nobility. The Patriots are the product and re-producers of that revolution. As zealous adherents to a doctrine of their own exceptionalism, Patriots are particularly bad citizens of the world (case in point their adventurism in the third world; case in point their leadership in doing nothing about global warming other than making it worse; case in point their enabling of Israel's violence).
The Immigrants is everybody else (including yours truly though the immigration that my forebears did was generations ago-- the immigrant can't be washed away by dropping babies on American soil; including also the descendants of those who were immigrated against their will to supply free labor for the Patriots; including also those who were here before the Patriots came, whose ancestors' otherness exiled them before the Patriots established their foothold across the Atlantic from Europe with the help of their own colonizing genocide). Some immigrants assimilate and fancy themselves Patriots and either serve the Patriots as constables or as military proxies for their adventures, and in some cases are allowed to assume Patriot identities for purposes of swelling the Patriot’s numbers. But otherwise immigrants pollute America with nuance and foreign ideas and “enlightenment”. They’ve been tolerated because they do supply the fodder and the reserve army of labor, but now that their number threatens the Patriot core we are starting to see some real unhinged bs from the Patriots.
University presidents used to be Patriots but more and more they are Immigrants (and women-- the Columbia President is not just an Egyptian born British and American academic but a baroness who is on leave from the British House of Lords) -- but there is a large class of immigrants who have been fooling themselves into thinking they can merit inclusion in the Patriot class-- which I think has been “true enough” (meaning not true at all but not worth caring about from a Patriot perspective) but now that the immigrant meritocracy has infiltrated society I think we’re seeing it clash up against the Patriot core.
Biden and Trump are both Patriots and in their doddering unstable persistence in clinging to the reins of power (and in their insistent preoccupation with Anti-Immigrant posturing), fitting symbols of that class's decrepitude. The mission of the immigrants is to abandon the course of ascension by what the Patriots would bestow on them as merit. The response of the mostly immigrant class youth on our nations' campuses to the call to dissent in recent days is a hopeful sign of different days to come. They can't get here soon enough.
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