New York Times article, with video, of shot fired during the Charlottesville rally.

As everyone has commented, the right wing marchers in Charlottesville were heavily armed, thereby making a mockery of any notion of free speech in the public square.  Dahlia Lithwick in Slate has that angle nicely covered.

I want to focus in on the fact that, so far as I can discern, the only shot actually fired that day is the one captured in the video embedded in the New York Times article.  That’s a miracle.  Impressive, really.  All accounts suggest that was some fairly strenuous fighting going on.  Yet no one pulled the trigger, except that one guy, and he fired into the ground.

That’s relevant to my current obsession with the impediments to violence and, from the opposite side, with what incites violence.  All the evidence suggests (the best place to review this evidence is Randall Collins’s book, Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory [Princeton Universioty Press, 2008]) that the impediments to violence are very strong.  Famously, studies done after World War II discovered that in most cases 75% of troops in combat never even fired their weapons.

My supposition is that people need to be authorized to commit violence–except in cases where they are responding directly to violence against them.  And even when authorized–as the World War II case shows–the reluctance to be violent is still a strong impediment.

Clearly, the right wingers don’t think of themselves as reluctant to use violence.  Maybe that’s bluster, and maybe that’s true.  Collins suggest that there are virtuosos of violence just as there are virtuosos in other endeavors.  But my suggestion is that even the virtuousos need to be given permission.  Violence always must justify itself against the assumption that it is wrong.  It must have a story to tell about why it was necessary.

So my thought is: the Charlottesville show of force was a message.  We are armed and we are ready to resort to force if you do certain things, i.e. take down Confederate monuments.  So one question is: what actually would move all these right-wing militias to the actual deployment of force.  They are clearly threatening force, but what would actually move them to use it.

This is also why, it seems to me, these militias are addicted to arcane, hair-splitting interpretations of the Constitution.  They need the law to be on their side to justify their resorting to force.  That is certainly how the two Bundy escapades worked.  They provided themselves with crackpot legal justification.

If we think back to the street fights in 1930s Germany, we have a case where violence from both sides was one instigator, but also where the state quite simply unleashed the thugs.  Similar instances (in Egypt for example or in China during the Cultural Revolution) can also be cited. The violence against blacks in the South was socially sanctioned from 1870 to 1965–and Kennedy’s reluctance to intervene in the early 1960s allowed Southerners to still count on the fact that local justice systems would wink at their violence while their social cohorts would approve of it.

That, of course, is why Trump is so dangerous.  He hasn’t gone so far as to designate certain people enemies of the nation, but he hasn’t exactly embraced the equal right of everyone to be here (to put it mildly).  Still, he hasn’t openly endorsed violence, even as he has winked at it.  What he has done so far is enough justification for the outliers and loners, but not enough to swing the militias into concerted action.  In short, we have not seen any organized violence as of yet, although we have had these organized rallies that are built around the threat of violence.  If we reach a point where the courts refuse to prosecute, watch out.  (Just as the courts’ absurd interpretation of the 2nd amendment has given us people parading with assault rifles on our streets.)

Is there really something, some political event, that would push the militias into action? That possibility is certainly less remote than left-wing violence in the contemporary US.  But it still seems pretty remote to me.  The two Bundy stand-offs were the closest we’ve gotten there–and they never came close to being wide-spread movements.

 

After a series of baffling and upsetting events at my university, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I was moved to write the following letter to our campus newspaper.  I will, doubtless, have more to say on this subject going forward.

What’s Going On?

The University was handed a get out of jail free card by Governor Roy Cooper—and declined to use it.  WTF?

Even more baffling is the fact that we requested the card.  Spurred by a letter from Chapel Hill mayor Pam Hemminger, someone (I assume it was our Chancellor, Carol Folt, but do not know what transpired behind the scenes) managed a feat of unalloyed diplomatic brilliance: a letter to the governor co-signed by Margaret Spellings, president of the UNC system, Carol Folt, Lou Bissette, chair of the system’s Board of Governors, and Haywood Cochrane, chair of the UNC, Chapel Hill Board of Trustees.  That letter, citing safety concerns, asked for a ruling about excepting Silent Sam from the 2015 law forbidding the removal of historical monuments on public land.

The Governor responded swiftly and unambiguously, authorizing Silent Sam’s removal.  I fully expected to arrive on campus Tuesday morning and find that UNC, in a move echoing recent actions at the University of Texas, had removed the statue during the night.  Instead, the statue was surrounded by a double row of fences and a sign was posted stipulating proper behavior in its presence. And then the university, later in the day, turned its back on the ruling it requested, and stated it didn’t agree with the Governor’s interpretation of the law, even while agreeing that campus would be safer without the Confederate memorial.

The mind reels.  The chief Executive officer of the state tells you that a certain action is legitimate and lawful.  But you decide he might be wrong.  What could motivate such a decision?  Clearly, if the Governor gives you the go ahead, you are not going to be prosecuted by his branch’s attorney general if you proceed.  The legislature will, doubtless, be unhappy, but they have no prosecutorial powers.  True, the university could, I guess, be sued over the matter, and could suffer at the hands of a vindictive legislature somewhere down the line.  But should such possible ill effects over-rule immediate safety concerns, not to mention the poisonous message the statue sends every day?  I don’t think so.

Meanwhile, the administration is engaged in a petty squabble with the Campus Y over the posting of political banners.  The Chancellor’s initial communique in response to events in Charlottesville included an appended statement that declared an absolute right to free speech on this campus.  Yet now her administration is relying on invoking bureaucratic minutia to take down the Y’s signs.

Finally, as one last demonstration of a determination to act in mysterious and secretive ways, we get the announcement of a new provost.  The move took everyone on campus by surprise.  What’s worse: we get a new provost with a complete abrogation of any procedure for his appointment.  No naming of an interim, no formation of a search committee, no public meetings with finalists for the position, no consultation with any one on campus.

The Chancellor is acting like a tinpot autocrat.  On the one hand, afraid of her own shadow, she can’t act decisively when she is handed a green light by the Governor. On the other hand, she has isolated herself from the university community, interacting with us through statements that it takes a Talmudic scholar or a Kremlinologist to decipher, and embracing non-transparency.  What’s going on?  Damned if I know.

Here’s my message to Carol Folt.  We–the faculty, students, and staff—of this university are your partners in the educational mission of this great university.  We are not dangerous, unruly, and unpredictable subjects who need to be managed.  Stop being afraid of us and start working with us.

 

 

From Robert Richardson’s “Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind” (University of California Press, 1986), pg. 194: “Whereas the Christian yearns to be redeemed, and the Dionysian to be possessed, the Apollonian yearns to know, to see clearly, to perceive.”  It is that urge for redemption and how to step outside of it that interests me.  William James is a Christian by this account but one, in fact, fascinated with possession if Varieties is taken into account.  I don’t know enough about Thoreau to know if Richardson is right about him and am not even sure that I can wrap my head around this Apollonian alternative.  But I definitely want to try to think about these different character types to consider their possibility and figure out how they shift one’s way of being in the world.

On a separate note.  Bruce Robbins has a great response to Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2015) in a recent issue of PMLA.  I read it on line so don’t have exact info.  Robbins talks about how the insistence that questions of “power” be addressed by criticism is most often a way, albeit often a clumsy one, to raise the issue of injustice.  To pay heed to power differentials and to “the ruses of power” (to use a favorite phrase of Judith Butler’s) is to attend to what justice demands and how the world falls short of those demands.

Seems to me that this point is relevant to thinking about violence.  First, injustice is often sustained by violence.  Certainly, the prevalent tendency to expand definitions of violence out beyond direct physical assaults is often motivated by the effort to delineate more subtle forms of coercion that are connected to maintaining various inequalities.  Second, however, is the opposite point that violence is used by the state in the name of justice, in the restraint and punishment of criminals.  And somewhat analogously, violence is also deployed by the revolutionary in the name of justice.  The revolutionary says that the violence that maintains injustice can only be overturned by violence.  Anything else is meek submission.