William Rodney Herring

This is really just an excuse, recognizing how much I'd written in an email predicting the AI winner, to make my energy a little less wasted. Somehow.

So in a rant against American Idol, I emailed Doug to say:

Since I still have a conference paper to write before Thursday, I'll confine myself to short scathing commentary: Since America has voted...and once again has shown that it has no appreciation for talent, but does have its finger on the pulse of sales--or rather, has its sense of voting precisely calibrated to sales, which is precisely what consumer capitalism has made available and ineluctable--my guess, very much to my disappointment, is that Jordin sells better in the American Idol format than Blake. Now that's not to say that (a) the American Idol format is the same as record sales format (which is why Daughtry, e.g., has sold better than Taylor Hicks--and why this week's results will tell us little about who will sell the most records), (b) that I'm happy about my choice, or (c) that I'm sure about my choice.

I sorta think Blake's a punk, but I find him a helluva lot more interesting and talented than Jordin. And I sorta blame her for Melinda's departure because I think given two singers of the same genre, America chose (1) the whiter of the two and (2) the prettier of the two. And I know America chose the more mediocre of the singers.

But I think Jordin will prolly pick up nearly all of Melinda's votes--and that she's prolly already picked up all of LaKisha's votes. And given that she's never been in the bottom three, Blake wouldn't seem to stand a chance. Though I'd be highly surprised if Jordin's even in the same league as Blake when it comes to entertainment value Tuesday, sadly, that won't matter, if I'm right.

As Walter Benn Michaels has taught us, America loves diversity, especially when it's entirely perfunctory and illusory--such as voting for a rich white black girl. We can feel good about ourselves for celebrating diversity, and we won't have given up anything to acquire this good feeling. What money we may have paid (text messaging votes, perhaps) will have been completely voluntary, and it will serve the purpose of manifesting our vast sums of disposable income. It will not, however, have had even the smallest effect in reducing the staggering economic inequality in our diverse society. And don't even get me started on how we conspicuously displayed our disposable income on "Idol Gives Back" week, primarily for the purpose of salving our guilty consciences for thriving not only while most of the world languishes in poverty, but thriving precisely because most of the world works while we reap the benefits. At least when AI was entertaining, I could forget this fact.

Doug responded with:

I don't disagree with you at all... But as you and I both seem to understand, arguing against charity is an invitation for trouble--not unlike the trouble that WBM got into by arguing against affirmative action.

And I could only wonder why, since Doug does have a point here, critiquing charity always seems to get equated to "arguing against" charity. (I didn't think Doug was making this equation--just making this equation apparent.)

But Wai Chee Dimock's article (Spring 1990) on Silas Lapham, which I reread for the aforementioned conference paper, helped illuminate this conundrum. She writes of the late 19th C.:

Nativist sentiments, noticeably strong during this period, registered one kind of response: immigrants, after all, embodied all that was alien and threatening in a world grown too large and complex. Humanitarian sentiments, equally strong during the period, registered another kind of response: accepting causal connections even among the seemingly unconnected, reformers proceeded to act upon them, treating the welfare of the poor and weak as their own responsibility.

Dimock links these political responses to claims--represented in Howells's The Minister's Charge by Rev. Sewell's sermon on "complicity"--that unseen causes can be held responsible for unanticipated effects, symptoms, diseases. And "nativist" and "humanitarian" here easily map onto conservative and liberal in today's political landscape, with both sides recognizing problems, the former emphasizing return to or preservation of "traditional values," and the latter eager to help victims.

But two points strike me as noteworthy: first, only the conservatives or nativists recognize the problems as symptoms and then propose to treat the cause. Of course, conservatives get the cause wrong, but interestingly, they would seem, from this evidence, to be less myopic than typically credited. The liberals on other hand don't seem to care about causes--or they treat as causes the symptoms--and attempt to treat the symptoms with a good dose of compassion. And hence we can see why in 2000 Bush's "compassionate conservatism" appeared to be a radical departure from Republican politics as usual.

But the second point, which is of course less surprising, is that liberals are far less shortsighted in their vision of responsibility. If the conservative/nativist position looks a lot like blaming the victim, at least the liberal/humanitarian position recognizes a responsibility to treat the comparably weak with respect and compassion--which is to say that in this sense, liberals are considerably more forward looking than their counterparts.

So this, then, would be my argument for critiquing charity. There's nothing wrong with treating symptoms--until it gets in the way of eradicating--or even seeing--the cause. And so we should be tremendously wary of confusing our liberalism with a solution, when all it amounts to is the strategic and intermittent application of band-aids. And as for why critiquing charity appears for some people to be an argument against charity: well, such a critique cuts right to the heart of such people's blindspot since they think of themselves and their politics as anything but shortsighted. It turns out: they're right in only one of two, important ways.