Review: "I'm Gay" by Eugene Lee Yang

Every single courageous act of coming out chips away at the curse of homophobia. Most importantly it’s destroyed within yourself, and that act creates the potential for its destruction where it exists in friends, family, and society.

—Anthony Venn-Brown, A Life of Unlearning

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Photo by Noam Galai

Eugene Lee Yang of the Try Guys (a foursome who try weird new experiences on YouTube) recently released a coming out video, simply titled I’m Gay. It tells his story wordlessly, through dancing and music, and while ‘interpretive dance’ sounds … well, put bluntly, pretty fucking stupid to anybody who grew up in my generation, this video floored me. I first saw it on Saturday and I’ve already watched it six or seven times, as well as his making-of video. It’s stunning. And I am not the first to observe that, of the possible ways, an intricately designed, visually spectacular internet video of interpretive dance is arguably the gayest way to tell people that you’re gay.

The story is arranged in six scenes, corresponding to the six colors of a typical Pride flag: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Yang tells his archetypal yet fairly complex story with incredible economy—only a single scene (the red) lasts longer than one minute, and every movement is choreographed to communicate its meaning vividly. The best way I can review it is just to describe it, pointing out a few of the symbols that stood out to me. I’ll take the scenes one by one, adding the keywords from the making-of video.

The Red Scene: Nature

This presents Yang in a family setting. A coffee table surrounded by a couch and two chairs sits in front of a red wall, with father, mother standing behind, brother and sister on the couch on either side of Yang; he is dressed in an androgynous red costume representing his different-ness, while his family are in grey, suggesting that they have not yet taken a side, perhaps not recognized a conflict. Childhood, playfulness, and innocence are the salient characteristics of most of the children’s movements. At first their playfulness is not gendered, their mother’s beauty and their father’s rigidity are equal ingredients in all three; but their play soon begins to be an imitation of the same-sex parent—except Yang, who begins imitating his mother more than his father. The camera pulls out more and more, away from the wall, showing that its confines are artificial and belie the real shape and size of the room and that there are large windows letting in bright light further off. When Yang is about to use his mother’s lipstick, his father slaps it out of his hand and hits him; then the family marches offscreen into the next scene.

The Orange Scene: Nurture

A large crowd of people dressed mostly in grey, American clothing (save for Yang, who is in orange-colored clothes that seem to be some variety of hanbok, traditional Korean garb) are marching into a room full of benches. This is stated in the commentary to represent school and work as well, but the primary imagery chosen is that of a church, with a cross-bearing pulpit and two candelabra full of bright orange candles. The main mass of people march in an ordered pattern, sometimes covering their eyes or grabbing their heads as if in pain or anger. Yang’s dancing and leaping become wilder and more joyful as he goes, until one of the grey-clad people stops him, moving his body into a rigid, pious posture like the others, then forcing him to bow and dismissing him. Yang takes a seat in a pew with a toothy smile, and the grey clothes of the others shift to white and black: sides are being taken, opposition expressed. The man behind the pulpit is in white, as are the people on the far side of the aisle from Yang, whose side is in black; the pastor figure begins making violent gestures like a fundamentalist preacher, and the camera zooms in on Yang’s face as he looks away.

The Yellow Scene: Love

This scene is particularly complex in its action. The music shifts suddenly to a lighter passage, building gradually through the scene. Sitting on a bench in front of a stand of trees and sunflowers and golden streetlamps, dressed in a vest and yellow trousers, Yang sees a girl in black dancing. The floor is covered in yellow leaves, as if signifying the organic change that is about to take place. He gets up to dance with her, and they leap and swirl for a while, until he sees another figure, a male, also dressed in yellow trousers. He moves into a pas de deux with him, with acrobatic, extraordinarily graceful movements. At first the two men move away from the girl and she moves more slowly after them. Then the men briefly move back: Yang reconnects with her, and she gives a kindly gesture connecting the two men again. (Yang describes her as representing the genuine ally, helping him discover and accept himself.) The other man lays himself on the ground, catching Yang in a suspended hold and slowly lowering him onto his body. They are about to kiss as the scene changes.

The Green Scene: Community

Here Yang appears in an elegant, sequined, deep green drag costume with a large pompadour wig, going down a set of stairs, greeting and embracing other drag queens and women as they head down to a dance floor. Their costumes are in an assortment of rainbow colors, but green predominates, at once dark and lush. The music has become energetic again, and characters dance for a few moments—then a figure in white, shown only from behind, approaches them, his fingers in the shape of a gun: likely a tribute to the mass shooting at Pulse three years ago. The dancers pause; then the outer ring ducks out of sight, then the rest, leaving only Yang visible, his face fearful as he raises his hands as if to stop the shooter, but then arms reach up from below and pull him out of the frame.

The Blue Scene: Hate

This is maybe the toughest part of the video to watch. We see Yang from above, in a crowd of anonymous white-clad people, bloodied and being kicked from every side. He is dressed only in a pair of jeans that are much longer than his legs; he cannot walk, cannot escape. The brutalizers disperse suddenly, and the camera moves down, showing him pulling himself along the ground, a blue dumpster and garbage bags behind him. Suddenly his family reappears: his mother and brother are now in black instead of grey, and his father and sister are now in white. His mother and brother move to help him up, but his father and sister begin fighting them, and before long his family are all fighting each other and slide out of the shot; Yang is pushed onto the ground again as they leave, and lies there, convulsing, trying to get up. Darkly echoing the first scene with the red lipstick, Yang touches the red blood on his mouth as he finally manages to sit up, then stand.

The Purple Scene: Pride

Yang is again in an arresting drag outfit, indigo shading into violet. He rises from the ground, at first with his back to the camera, but he quickly turns, anxious in his beauty. Crowds of people, some in white, some in black, surround him; some of those dressed in black reach out as if to caress or encourage, some of those in white shove or paw him, but most are busy yelling at each other as he slowly walks forward, finally reaching a point beyond the crowd; as he does, the shot switches to a distant and unfocused one that slowly pulls back in to his face. The music climaxes and stops, and we hear the angry arguments behind, but the shot lingers on Yang’s face: uncomfortable, anxious, defiant, the lips moving slightly, the eyes going back and forth uncertainly and then—just a couple of seconds before the scene ends, it all smooths out. Yang’s mouth is set, his eyes steady, his brows un-knotted. A peaceful, self-assured dignity closes the scene.

Credits

The credits play over a final, narrative-less scene. Yang is dressed in a luxuriant robe, apparently an open-breasted version of the shenyi (a traditional Chinese robe for men), silver and turquoise in color with what looks like a tea-green obi (a Japanese garment that’s a little reminiscent of a corset), seated alone in the room from the red scene, now with the encroaching wall removed. He rises, gesturing with the magnificent trailing sleeves that had at first appeared to be a gown; as if in response, six figures from the green scene—one in each color: red, purple, blue, orange, yellow, and green—file in. When they have all taken their positions, mirroring the arrangement of the family from the beginning, Yang sits down again in the center, and the legend For the LGBTQIA+ Community appears on the screen.

This is one of the most powerful and visually captivating short videos I’ve ever seen. I rank it with the music videos for Hunger or Spectrum by Florence + the Machine. I recommend it to anyone with a taste for dance or design, or anyone who cares about LGBT issues. Or really, anybody who’s open to watching it. Hats off to Eugene Lee Yang for a beautiful piece of art.

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Antifascism 102: A Primer on White Nationist Ideologies

Not every German who bought a copy of Mein Kampf necessarily read it. I have heard many a Nazi stalwart complain that it was hard going and not a few admit—in private—that they were never able to get to the end of its 782 turgid pages. But it might be argued that had more non-Nazi Germans read it before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world perused it carefully while there was still time, both Germany and the world might have been saved from catastrophe. For whatever other accusations can be made against Adolf Hitler, no one can accuse him of not putting down in writing exactly the kind of Germany he intended to make if he ever came to power and the kind of world he meant to create by armed German conquest.

—William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

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CW: White ethnonationalist/neo-Nazi ideology and language.

Why am I pestering you to understand dog-whistles, though? Is white nationalism really a threat to human lives and American society? Isn’t it mostly just a bunch of manchildren raised on Call of Duty and high-fructose corn syrup, manchildren who’ve now moved on to acting out Fight Club fantasies, getting tattoos to be edgy, and trolling libtards (who, let’s be honest, kinda deserve a little trolling) with Pepe the Frog memes?

Well … no. That is, yes, there are plenty of young men in white nationalist movements who are exactly like that; and while damagingly misguided, at heart they may be as comparatively harmless as the heteroflexible stoner dude who has tortured internal monologues about whether his veganism culturally appropriates Japanese Buddhism [1] and considers Donnie Darko the most tragically neglected masterpiece of the whole of cinema. The salient difference between the latter and his white nationalist counterpart is, stoner dude is unlikely to hurt anybody.

But I digress. Yes, there are relatively innocent young men who’ve been taken in by this stuff, and whose primary problems are immaturity and a lack of good information. Whether they form a majority of white nationalists, I don’t know, and really it doesn’t matter. The destruction wrought by this ideology is going to be governed by the movement’s leaders and the ideology they enact—not by the individual guilt or innocence of its foot soldiers. And those leaders, and that ideology, are horrifying.

A key element of this ideology is the ideal of ‘ethnic replacement,’ or (in less sanitized language) ‘white genocide.’ This rests on the idea that white people of European descent do or should constitute a single ethnic group [1] or united racial or cultural identity [1], and that immigration from majority non-white regions like South America to majority white regions like the US or Western Europe poses a threat to that ethnic group. This is less out of a fear of immediate violence from brown people, though there’s fearmongering on that front as well, than out of the additional premise that non-white people will outbreed whites and dilute white ethnicity through intermarriage, and in the long run will oppress, exclude, or even expel white people and white culture—not only from political and social ascendancy in these ‘indigenously’ white homelands, but even from living there. In the words of Alex Kurtagić, who wrote a dishonest and disgusting essay titled The Great Erasure for the white supremacist National Policy Institute (headed by the infamous Richard Spencer):

Much of the debate on the decline of Whites in their traditional homelands centers on “immigration,” and specifically the continuing arrival in the West of large numbers of colored “immigrants” from the poorest regions of the world. Some critics of “immigration” feel the term is euphemistic and prefer to label the phenomenon “invasion.” Guillaume Faye [a French alt-right journalist] calls it “colonization.” … The term is not entirely inadequate, for modern “immigration” in the West involves exogenous strangers colonizing Western polities. …  

Critics of “immigration” in the West have noticed its unprecedented scale, its permanent character, and the non-assimilation/non-assimilability of Third World “immigrants.” Among the characteristics of settler colonialism is that settlers come to stay and do not appeal to the established indigenous sovereignty, but rather deny it and seek to remove it in order to replace it with a reproduction of their own society. … The process of doing so is non-violent, following a legal sequence comprising: appeal to the indigenous authority (for recognition and admission as permanent minorities, and eventually citizens; co-option of indigenous structures (lobbying for concessions, multiculturalism); subversion from without (lobbying for anti-racist legislation); and indigenization (becoming legislators, subversion from within). At the same time, the process coexists with violence, whereby the indigenous are physically attacked or subject to predations (typically muggings, robberies, racially motivated beatings, and rape), or else morally attacked (typically accusations of prejudice and “racism,” and/or “racism” hoaxes).

Yeah, nothing says “minority accusations of racism are just a hoax” like “immigrants are plotting to take over our country, and having someone who’s not a white people hold public office is part of their scheme.” Note that South Americans descended from Spanish and Portuguese colonizers for some reason don’t qualify as “White,” despite being about as European as Americans and Canadians are both culturally and historically. Note, too, that “White people” are not only treated as though they constituted a more or less unified ethnicity, which isn’t true at all, but explicitly as the indigenous inhabitants of the United States. I won’t inflict any more of Kurtagić’s repulsive drivel on you; and I’m also not linking to NPI’s website, because I am not giving neo-Nazis web traffic, but I have screenshots from the essay if anyone wants my receipts (or if they take they essay down at some later point for PR reasons).

This theory—that white (sorry, “White”) people not only form a coherent ethno-cultural group [1] which is being colonized by brown people who are going to do to us what we did to the indigenous inhabitants of North America—comes with the political program of establishing a ‘white homeland,’ an ethnostate to protect whites from being overrun or diluted by other ethnicities. [2] This conspiracy against whites is typically attributed to Marxists, Jews, and Marxist Jews, though the anti-Semitism is optional in some versions of white nationalism, which … yay? With or without the anti-Marxist and anti-Semitic tie-ins, though, the political program boils down to one fairly simple goal, approached through incremental and indirect means: ethnic cleansing.

Because really, you can’t have an ‘ethnostate’ except by conducting a purge first. Even in the ancient world, whose means of communication and transport were so much slower and more limited than our own: every society dealt with ethnic and cultural minorities in one way or another, because ethnic and cultural minorities exist in every society and the idea that there ever was a polity where they didn’t is utter fantasy. Classical Athens had its metics, Rome was a famous melting pot, the Mar Thoma Christians of India were there centuries before the Jesuits, the Holy Family were refugees in Egypt, and the Torah itself makes extensive provision for migrants and resident aliens, all derived from a single principle:

For the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward: he doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. —Deuteronomy 10.17-19

Nor (not to say that any migrant needs to prove their ‘usefulness’ to enjoy human dignity and rights) did the Israelites start out as very profitable strangers, when they first immigrated to Egypt. They were brought in at the behest of a gifted relative, who was himself originally taken to Egypt by human traffickers, and who had since ascended to a prestigious public office. 

The only way to achieve the goal of a white ethnostate is through ethnic cleansing; something white nationalists like Spencer are vague about in public statements, except to say that they advocate a ‘peaceful’ version of it. And I’m prepared to acknowledge that it may be less horrifically evil to forcibly uproot and expel a person from their home for the crime of being brown, than it is to judicially enslave or murder them for the crime of being brown. But I am not prepared to be impressed by the moral difference. I oppose the mere ‘peaceful’ ethnic cleansing advocate with the same conviction as I oppose the white nationalist terrorist and butcher. And these ideologies, these movements, are not harmless juvenility, however harmlessly juvenile many of the people who’ve been taken in by them may be. They are a nightmare in the making.

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[1]Hint: no.

[2]‘Fun’ fact: the state of Oregon was admitted to the Union as a free state rather than a slave state … and also had a ‘whites only’ clause in its original constitution forbidding black people to live there and expelling all blacks who already did, so that the whole slavery-vs-abolition thing could be consistently ignored. Opposition to slavery and opposition to racism were two different things in the nineteenth century, and still are—something that makes a little more sense out of the historical trajectory of the Republican Party, and something that, if all goes well for fascism (God spare us!), we may be confronted with on a more immediate level once again in the future.

Antifascism 101: A Beginner's Guide to Dog-Whistles

The dominant sense of any word lies uppermost in our minds. Wherever we meet the word, our natural impulse will be to give it that sense. When this operation results in nonsense, of course, we see our mistake and try over again. But if it makes tolerable sense our tendency is to go merrily on. I call such senses dangerous senses because they lure us into misreadings. 

—C. S. Lewis, Studies In Words

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Content Warning: Hate symbols and hate speech. Note that I will probably be engaging in some pretty dark humor to keep my spirits up because this stuff is fucking depressing.

What are dog-whistles, and why am I bothering you about them? Basically, dog-whistles are coded signals that will destroy our civilization, like everything else will; and I’m bothering you about them because I have no idea whether my fan base and Natalie Wynn’s have a lot of overlap, or whether it’s mostly just me, Ganymede, Basil Fitzgerald, and my sister.

Dog-whistles are key terms, phrases, and symbols (ranging from icons to gestures to memes) that members of a group can use to signal to each other that they’re part of the group, without revealing it to outsiders. The name comes from the literal dog-whistle: it sounds at a pitch too high for human ears to perceive, but dogs hear it just fine. To work, dog-whistles have to have another meaning in mainstream discourse; if they don’t, they may be private signals but they are not dog-whistles, because they identify the user as part of something unusual even if the general reader may not know what specifically.

Of course, dog-whistles are not necessarily a bad thing. Fan communities use dog-whistles (among other signals) all the time, for the pleasure of discovering each other in contexts that aren’t fan-specific the way chat boards and conventions are. A lot of early Christian symbolism consisted in dog-whistles: St Clement of Alexandria counseled Christians who needed symbols for signet rings (an important way of authenticating documents) recommended symbols susceptible to Christians interpretations like doves, harps, ships, and fish, as an alternative to depictions of gods or instruments of violence, during a period when the blatant depiction of a cross would have exposed its user instantly. Christians living under persecution have adopted the same means of survival in later ages. The Buddhist-Shinto figure of Kannon in Japan was often used by Japanese Catholics in the seventeenth and eighteenth century as a coded emblem of the Virgin—especially since she was a patroness of mothers and was often depicted holding a child. Dog-whistles can be a necessary way to communicate while maintaining secrecy, and secrecy can save lives.

But in the early twenty-first century, they have been put to sinister use by white supremacists. Overtly racist ideologies have been unacceptable in mainstream American political discourse for almost two generations now, as have most forms of totalitarianism, especially fascism and Communism. [1] But this doesn’t mean those things have gone away, nor that they are restricted to blatantly racist gangs like the Aryan Nation or the Klan. Every group—including fringe groups like Scientologists, flat-earthers, anarchists, and guys who still think Jamba Juice is good for you [2]—includes smart, cunning members who know perfectly well that they and their beliefs will be rejected if they’re revealed outright, and are prepared to strategize accordingly.

The ideal white supremacist dog-whistle is one that allows its user (let us call him Pye D. Piper) to say something perfectly innocuous, even something that any reasonable person would probably agree with, while simultaneously sending a different, coded message to fellow white supremacists so that they know the lay of the land. This has the double benefit of encouraging the white supremacist community, and also of deceiving ordinary people into supporting Mr Piper, or at least into considering him reasonable and harmless, when really he is playing a long game to advance white supremacist goals and ideology.

For people who aren’t white supremacists planning to fuck me over—when my crime is merely that of being a degenerate old queen with left-wing internationalist ideas, ‘whose religion involves allegiance to a foreign power,’ [3] and who opposes fascism, racism, classism, capitalism, the military-industrial complex, and Brett Ratner’s continued liberty to direct films—a word of caution is in order. One of the dangerous and frustrating things about dog-whistles is that they are, in themselves, innocuous. For instance, you may have heard about the OK sign attracting criticism as a racist code-signal: it got attention during the Kavanaugh hearings, for instance. Obviously the OK hand gesture is not an intrinsically racist symbol; no symbol is; it was not originally cooked up by racists, nor does it have a typically racist history behind it. It was adopted by white supremacists precisely because it was both recognizable and innocuous, and thus, for dog-whistling purposes, absolutely perfect. (That’s how the swastika itself started out. And even today, there are contexts like Jain and Buddhist iconography in which the swastika is just itself, a shape, without the hideous meaning we associate it with here in the West.) So the mere fact that someone uses certain dog-whistles doesn’t automatically mean they’re a crypto-facist. They could be an ordinary centrist or a good-faith conservative who’s been listening to Pye D. Piper and is humming the same tune in consequence.

And due to what makes dog-whistles work, the better-known a dog-whistle is, the less likely it is to represent a real white supremacist as opposed to someone who ran across it in perfect innocence and happened to repeat or reuse it for whatever reason. The list below may easily be obsolete within months, if it isn’t already. So, yeah, be aware that this could make you a little paranoid, and be careful not to tar and feather people too readily.

Here follows a non-exhaustive list of dog-whistles. I’ve arranged them into symbols, terms and slogans, and gestures; I’ve also given a brief run-down on the basic description, the origin of the thing (if I know anything about it), and how it’s used today (as far as I’m aware, and with the proviso that these uses can and will change as soon as outsiders start to recognize the dog-whistles for what they are).

Shit gets gross after this. Please be aware.

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The Swastika

Description: A cross shape with equal-length arms that are each bent at a right angle, all the bends pointing in the same direction.

Origin: A common device in art throughout Eurasia for tens of thousands of years; in some cultures it represents the sun. Formerly called the gammadion or the fylfot in English.

Use: Expired. The Nazi use of the swastika is so generally known that it doesn’t keep anything secret. Variations on the swastika and similar symbols may still see some usage, like the Thunder Cross and the Hands of Svarog (shown below), which some neopagans use.

The Black Sun

Description: A set of concentric circles with twelve Sig runes radiating from the center.

Origin: Though drawing on older symbols (including the swastika), the black sun shown here is first recorded as a design element in the 1936-1942 remodeling of Wewelsburg castle. Heinrich Himmler had purchased the castle in 1933 to serve as an SS center.

Use: Current. As a relatively simple geometric pattern, it’s easy to spot when you’re looking for it and easy to miss when you’re not. Its use has been complicated slightly by the fact that the Church of Satan has also employed the black sun; so, uh, give them the benefit of the doubt that they might just be Satanists, I guess.

The Wheel Cross

Description: A cross (usually with all four arms equal in length) with a halo or ring around the center; the arms may or may not extend past the ring.

Origin: Ringed crosses are a fairly obvious shape, but their best-known use is as symbols of Celtic Christianity, in which haloed crosses were extremely popular. Wheel crosses also resemble the usual guiding lines for firearm sights; the Zodiac killer used a form of the wheel cross as his personal sigil.

Use: Current. Thankfully, genuine Celtic stuff employs more specific forms like bell-flared cross arms, and elaborate decoration like trefoil knots.

The Iron Cross

Description: A cross (typically black) with equal-length, curve-flared arms, usually with an outlining band around its edge.

Origin: One of many heraldic forms of the Christian cross; the iron cross is a particular variant of the croix pattée, which always has equal-length, flared arms, but the flaring can take different forms (e.g. the Templars’ cross had small, angular flares at the end of each arm). The iron cross is a traditional military decoration, going back through Germany’s history and into the Kingdom of Prussia.

Use: Current.

The Odal Rune

Description: A diamond shape with its two lower sides extended into crossed arms.

Origin: One of the letters of the Elder Futhark, the earliest rune alphabet. (The Younger Futhark of Scandinavia and the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc are both descended from the Elder Futhark.) The Odal or Othala rune represented the o sound, and was named from the Common Germanic term ōþala, which could mean ‘lineage, descent’ or ‘inheritance, property, estate.’ Cf. Blood and Soil below.

Use: Current. Not many people outside certain fan communities and scholarly fields recognize any Germanic runes, and are likelier to assume that they’re references to Lord of the Rings than neo-fascist cosplay. Neopagans, especially those who follow Odinism or Asatru, also use this rune and many others as an inheritance from pre-Christian Germanic culture.

The Sig Rune

Description: Similar to a backwards, capital N with the vertical bars extended (thus resembling a stylized lightning bolt).

Origin: Another rune, but unlike the Othala rune, this one is derived from the Armanen runes of Austrian occultist Guido von List. An apostate from Catholicism who devoted himself to neo-pagan mysticism and racism—‘Ariosophy’ was his name for it—he claimed to have received a new formulary of the runic system in a vision (sure), expounding eighteen reformed runes, of which the eleventh was Sig. A pair of Sig runes was one of the insignia of the Nazi SS, partly because they looked like an angularized pair of s’s, and partly because the Nazis associated the rune’s name with the word Sieg, ‘victory.’

Use: Somewhat current, both independently and as an element in the black sun above. However, it is recognizable enough in doubled form as an element in a Nazi flag that it’s not likely to be used as often.

The Man Rune

Description: Similar to a capital Y with a third branch extending straight up.

Origin: Why hello again, totally unhistorical Armanen runes! Derived from the Algiz rune of the Elder Futhark, with the same shape but a different phonetic value. Often known as the ‘life rune,’ as far as I can tell on the basis of ‘literally no gorram reason whatsoever.’

Use: Current. This one is particularly insidious due to its similarity to a wide variety of totally innocent symbols. The Yr rune, which is the inverted form, is also used occasionally, and is, you guessed it, often known as the ‘death rune.’

Guys, if you need a hug you can just say so.

14

Origin: A reference to the Fourteen Words, a slogan concocted by white supremacist David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” A more forthcoming alternate is “Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth” and my God you people, chill the fuck out. Nobody’s trying to make white women stop existing. As you so creepily demonstrate, white women are popular.

Use: Current. Making numbers look harmless is super easy. May be combined with 88, explained below.

18

Origin: Alphanumeric code for AH, i.e. Adolf Hitler; likely also an allusion to the 18 Armanen runes.

Use: Current.

88

Origin: An allusion to David Lane’s 88 Precepts, a white nationalist manifesto; also alphanumeric code for HH, i.e. Heil Hitler.

Use: Current. Frequently combined with 14 as 1488, 8814, or 14/88; Lane claimed that the number 1488 was a key element in his (SIGH) Pyramid Prophecy, which apparently espouses literally every conspiracy theory: Aryans built the pyramids, the King James Bible is a Hermetic code text foretelling Lane’s own birth and work, and Francis Bacon was secretly Shakespeare.

“Blood and Soil”

Origin: An ethnonationalist catchphrase cooked up by the Nazi party (German: Blut und Boden). Used to express the idealized, racially ‘pure’ and geographically rooted ethnostate.

Use: Expired, as it’s a giveaway to anyone with more than a slight acquaintance with Nazi history. The rioters at Charlottesville in 2017 chanted it, along with “White Lives Matter” and “You will not replace us.”

Fine people on both sides.

“Ethnic Replacement”

Origin: A newer alternative to “white genocide,” coined when that phrase started to seem too dramatic. Basically this denotes a key concept in white supremacist ideology: that majority-white countries are being taken over by immigrants (optional extra: BECAUSE OF JEWS), who will hog all our resources and/or intermarry with whites, thus diluting and ultimately eliminating “the white race.”

Use: Somewhat current. It’s getting recognizable enough to act as a regular whistle instead of a dog-whistle, and is likely to expire soon accordingly.

“Race Realism”

Origin: Sounded better than “I’m really racist.” The phrase denotes a belief in (ugh) so-called “scientific racism,” the notion that there are empirical grounds for (i) classifying people into biologically different races that are (ii) typically ranked by intelligence, and considered superior or inferior accordingly. There’s also “sex realism,” which sounds better than “raving misogyny.”

Use: Nearly expired, I think. It is pretty transparent. The concept is often reached without the catchphrase, usually by starting with an ostensibly positive, widely-held stereotype about a non-white ethnicity (“Look, you’d agree that Asians tend to have higher IQs, right?”) and then … well, I was going to say ‘deteriorates,’ but it ain’t exactly starting fresh.

“Western culture”

Origin: White nationalists love to think of themselves as defending Western civilization against the incursion of foreigners, especially brown and/or Muslim foreigners. (The fact that a lot of the brown foreigners, namely Latino immigrants, are as Western as anybody in the US and more Western than some, gets lost in here—I can’t think why.) More importantly, Western culture has in fact accomplished great things in addition to horrible things, so it’s an easy way to lure centrists, good-faith conservatives, and many liberals. If the white nationalist in question is a Christian, expect the Jewishness of Christianity to be downplayed or (in extreme cases) outright denied—though support for Israel as an (ethno-)state probably won’t be; if the white nationalist in question is an atheist or a neopagan, expect the Jewishness of Christianity to be played up as a reason to object to it, along with its deeply-rooted rejection of racial hatreds and its encouragement of “slave morality.”

Use: Current as hell, and it pisses me off, since I treasure Western culture even while I recognize its many flaws and sins. This one is a great dog-whistle for white racists, because as long as Western culture doesn’t become irreclaimably identified with white nationalism, there will always be an innocuous way to interpret “defenses” of it.

“Identitarian”

Origin: Sounded better than “I’m really, really racist.” The name comes from the French group Bloc Identitaire, a nationalist movement with a patchwork of right-wing ideologies (though generally united by their hostility to Islam). A number of white nationalist organizations, such as the American Identity Movement (formerly Identity Evropa) and the National Policy Institute (hi, Richard Spencer!). Racists of all kinds do tend to be preoccupied with ethnic identity, pretty much by definition, and white supremacists are no exception.

Use: Current—I think. It’s hard to tell.

The Roman Salute

Description: One hand is raised, usually at an angle and from the shoulder, with the palm facing down and the fingers together.

Origin: The Roman salute actually does go back to ancient Rome; even white supremacists don’t get every historical detail wrong (just most of them.) Mussolini adopted it for the Fascisti, and Hitler liked it enough to import it for the Nazis.

Use: Expired—kind of? It is immediately recognizable, and therefore much of its use as a private code signal is gone. Yet, for some reason, it remains easier to claim that using the Roman salute is “just being edgy and ironic” than it is to claim that bandying a swastika around is “just being edgy and ironic.”

The Volksfront Gesture

Description: A V-shaped hand sign, along the lines of the Vulcan salutation but without the thumb, often held over the heart.

Origin: Basically a gang sign, invented by the white supremacist group Volksfront. Volk is the German word for ‘people, nation,’ and since these are or should be the same thing as ‘ethnicity’ in white nationalist ideology, the word’s a popular one.

Use: Current, possibly; I don’t claim to have picked up on it. But of course it’s like the black sun symbol: plain as day if you’re looking for it, inconspicuous if you’re not.

The OK Sign

Description: Thumb and forefinger together in a circle, with the other three fingers extended.

Origin: As a gesture, this one’s obviously much older than its appropriation by ethnonationalists; it’s also a perfect example of the bottomlessly ambiguous atmosphere that crypto-fascists use to both communicate with each other, and at the same time gaslight the people who suspect them. Its association with neo-Nazis and the like is obviously arbitrary, which makes it easy to dismiss as just an example of left-wing paranoia. Moreover, it is, or seems to be, recent—as recent as 2017. It’s unclear whether the gesture became associated with white supremacism by their own design, through a 4chan prank, or by their own design which they then covered up through a 4chan prank. The Christchurch mosque shooter has famously flashed the OK sign in court, I guess because shooting a bunch of innocent Muslims, praising Trump for inspiring white nationalists worldwide, and donating hundreds of Euros to an Austrian neo-fascist didn’t sufficiently establish his racist street cred.

Use: Expired? Current? Honestly this one could be anywhere on the map, it’s so muddied.

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If you are involved in a hate group, you need to get out now. These two sentences are composed entirely of links to various groups that can help you escape.

Like I said above, this list is not exhaustive, nor could it be since dog-whistles are constantly in flux. But I sort of feel like vomiting, so I’m done for now.

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[1] Yes, I'm aware that there are non-totalitarian, non-Stalinist, non-statist versions of Communism. No, I haven't yet read Horkheimer, Bakunin, Goldman, Zetkin, Gramsci, Grindelwald, Sluterevski, and OH MY GOD GET OFF MY LAWN. [2]

[2] If you caught the dog-whistles, congratulations, and all hail Party Monster and Dark Mother.

[3] Thanks for that gem, Locke.

An Open Letter to Archbishop Aquila

Then Fear said: I am Pity that was dead.

And Shame said: I am Sorrow comforted.

And Lust said: I am Love.

—Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Ballad of Life

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To the Most Reverend Samuel Aquila, Archbishop of Denver;

from Gabriel Blanchard, a layman of the Ordinariate of the Chair of Peter.

I trust Your Excellency will excuse my boldness in writing to you, despite the fact that we have no personal acquaintance, and that I am no one in particular ecclesiastically speaking. Yet I write nevertheless, hoping against hope that Your Excellency may read it and consider what I have to say; and, additionally, with the more ordinary hope that others may read it and get some good out of it.

Last month’s event ‘Gender Matters,’ as Your Excellency doubtless knows, drew criticism from gay activists and sympathizers, not least because of its prominent featuring of Andrew Comiskey and his ministry Desert Stream, generally classified as an ex-gay organization promoting reparative therapy. The opening remarks that ‘the power and authority of Jesus Christ can heal any wound, forgive any sin, heal any disorder, if we truly put our faith in him,’ especially taken together with the caution that ‘the healing may not be immediate,’ certainly suggest SOCE (sexual orientation change efforts) to anyone familiar with the literature of the ex-gay movement.

I am familiar, since I was involved in the ex-gay movement in my teens, trying to rid myself of a persistent and almost exclusive attraction to other men that (I was told and believed firmly) was inconsistent with a Christian life. Though they seemed productive at the time, and though I most certainly needed counseling for a host of reasons and profited by it accordingly, my attractions finally proved intractable. Nonetheless, this did not alter my beliefs about Scripture; and when I was received into the Catholic Church a few years later, I embraced the whole of her teaching, including her teachings about chastity and marriage and homosexual sex. Without feigning any degree of heterosexuality, I confessed, and confess, the Catholic belief that God made marriage for one man and one woman to unite as one flesh, and that no other kind of union can licitly include sexual intimacy.

I offer this apologia, because I want to establish my complete orthodoxy as the ground of the following. I affirm the whole of the Catholic faith, including §§2357-2359 of the Catechism. Speaking thus as a son of the Church, and as a sheep to a shepherd, I implore Your Excellency to reëxamine SOCE and to disassociate the Archdiocese of Denver from it.

There are many reasons to do so. My own fruitless experience of SOCE says something; given my familial relationships and some experiences of abuse (even though my same-sex feelings predated the abuse, not the other way around), I should have been an ideal candidate for change, since I fit their mold so perfectly, but no change was effected. Even so, the primary negative of my experience was that it wasted so much time. There are those who have been involved in ex-gay ministries for years, decades even, and come away with stories that alternate between the ludicrous and the nightmarish; there are deep scientific and theological flaws in the whole ex-gay substructure; and SOCE is, after all, entirely unnecessary for any person to lead a virtuous life animated by the Spirit of God.

Samuel Brinton, the son of Baptist missionaries, attempted SOCE for two years, beginning at ten years old when he realized he was attracted to other boys rather than to girls and confided in his parents. The counselor to whom he was taken tried such techniques as aversion therapy: specifically, freezing or burning the child’s hands while displaying pictures of men touching. Twenty years later, he remained sexually attracted to men, but so terrified of physical contact with them that he could barely contemplate a friendly hug. He was also plagued by ongoing psychological issues such as thoughts of suicide, which, according to a 2009 study released by the APA, is almost nine times more common among people who have been through conversion therapy.

Matthew Shurka and Michael Ferguson, two other men who went into SOCE programs, report other toxic techniques. Shurka was forbidden to interact or even speak with his mother and sister for three years, on the ground that they were ‘feminizing influences,’ and was prescribed Viagra at the age of 18 to facilitate sexual intercourse with women—which, far from diminishing his same-sex impulses and despite his achieved popularity with other men, left him depressed, gaining weight, reluctant to leave the house, and abusing drugs. Ferguson was encouraged to cultivate rage against his parents, whose flawed upbringing methods (he was told) were responsible for his homosexual attractions; the notion here was that a sufficient degree of anger would allow him to break his attachment to his parents, and realize the heterosexuality they had effectively suppressed in him. And these are normal practices and narratives in the ex-gay world—the late Dr Joseph Nicolosi, head of NARTH (which Desert Stream recommends), told his male patients that their sexual desires came from flawed family dynamics, and that healing involved socializing with other men and trying to cultivate interest in typically masculine pursuits like sports, and to avoid the interests and company of women except for intercourse.

Love In Action (a ministry which no longer exists—solely because it has adopted the name Restoration Path) was founded in 1973, three years before Exodus International. However, one of LIA’s founders, John Evans—who is conspicuous by his absence from the ‘History’ section of Restoration Path’s current website; such omissions will become a theme—dropped out of the organization after his close friend and fellow member, Jack McIntyre, committed suicide when he could not change his orientation. John Smid, who ran LIA from 1986 to 2008, eventually dropped out of the ministry as well; in 2011 he stated publicly that he did not know of a single case in which someone had experienced a change from homosexuality to heterosexuality. 

Similarly, Exodus, which had been the biggest ex-gay organization in the world (serving largely as an umbrella group), was shuttered in 2013 by its head, Alan Chambers, a self-professed ex-gay man. In the apology that he issued upon closing down the ministry, Chambers too stated that he did not know of any successful cases of SOCE. This was a man who left an active gay lifestyle behind for the sake of Christ, married a woman, and devoted his career and his whole reputation to Exodus. He was not a man uninformed, prejudiced against ex-gay efforts and groups, or merely flowing with the times. He was personally, professionally, and theologically invested in SOCE. He wrote:

Our ministry has been public and therefore any acknowledgment of wrong must also be public. … It is strange to be someone who has both been hurt by the church’s treatment of the LGBT community, and also to be someone who must apologize for being part of the very system of ignorance that perpetuated that hurt. … 

I have heard many firsthand stories from people called ex-gay survivors. Stories of people who went to Exodus affiliated ministries or ministers for help only to experience more trauma. I have heard stories of shame, sexual misconduct, and false hope. … And then there is the trauma that I have caused. There were several years that I conveniently omitted my ongoing same-sex attractions. I was afraid … They brought me tremendous shame and I hid them in the hopes that they would go away. … The good that we have done at Exodus is overshadowed by all of this. 

Friends and critics alike have said that it’s not enough to simply change our message or website. I agree. … I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced. I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change. I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents. I am sorry that there were times I didn’t stand up to people publicly ‘on my side’ who called you names like sodomite—or worse. … I am sorry that I have communicated that you and your families are less than me and mine. 

More than anything, I am sorry that so many have interpreted this religious rejection by Christians as God’s rejection. I am profoundly sorry that many have walked away from their faith and that some have chosen to end their lives.

These examples are not exceptional, Your Excellency. They are not statements that no person experiences some fluidity in their attractions, nor that a same-sex attracted person could never sacramentally marry someone of the opposite sex and lead a happy, holy life. These things are rare, the latter particularly so, but they do happen. But the history of these groups—including Desert Stream specifically—is not one of changed sexual orientations. It is a history of fruitless efforts culminating in resentment and despair, of psychological and physical torments, of promises broken, of double lives and clandestine abuse, and of perhaps the second-grossest scandal to the world that Christianity has produced in our age.

Turning from the sorry long-term results of most ex-gay ministry to its theoretical basis in theology and medical science, we may look to NARTH, which as noted before is suggested on Desert Stream’s website as an additional, specifically psychotherapeutic, resource. In addition to criticisms from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Psychological Association, and the revocations in 2011 and 2012 of its right to provide continuing education credits to therapists and of its tax-exempt nonprofit status, NARTH’s theory of the development of sexuality is not accepted by the broader medical, psychological, or psychiatric communities (in this country or abroad). Furthermore, the APA has declared that the practice of SOCE—the entire purpose for which NARTH exists—has shown no sound experimental evidence of working, and notes that some patients have later claimed to have been harmed by NARTH and its therapies. According to this APA document, studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s (when SOCE were still fairly mainstream) showed a high correspondence between these efforts and such negative effects as anxiety, depression, and thoughts of suicide.

The theory that ex-gay organizations usually advance of the etiology of homosexual attractions is that young men, growing up with an emotionally distant father and an overbearing mother, form an unmet need for male-male intimacy and an unduly feminine self-concept, usually exacerbated by peer rejection over ostensibly un-masculine traits. In puberty, this need becomes sexualized—a development that may be accompanied by same-sex sexual abuse and concomitant confusion—and attraction to men rather than women develops accordingly.

Now, there is no doubt that family and peer dynamics, and even a history of abuse, can influence a person’s sexual experience. But as a general account of the origin of homosexuality, this theory is quite useless. To begin with, plenty of heterosexual men share many or all of these experiences without developing any sexual interest in other men; conversely, there are many homosexual men who lack one or more of these supposedly key elements in the development of homosexual interest. Nor, to my knowledge, is there an explanation provided by any prominent SOCE advocate of why an unmet need for male intimacy should consistently be transformed into sexual attraction at puberty. After all, everyone experiences unmet needs and grave wounds in childhood, without necessarily looking to sex as a solution once we discover it. (This relates to the fact that many claims of ‘father wounds’ and the like in SOCE literature are phrased so generally that they amount to being Barnum statements: assertions that most people, on a casual reading, would tend to say were true of themselves.)

When we turn to female homosexuality, the argument becomes even muddier. Explanations of lesbianism from SOCE proponents include: a distant mother and an over-identifying father, mirroring the explanation for males; an abusive father and/or a timid, complacent, or complicit mother, leading to a loathing of men and a longing for authentic female intimacy; an experience of sexual assault from a man, causing fear and hatred of men and a compensatory turning to women; or an experience of sexual assault from a woman, prompting self-blame, curiosity, and experimentation. The explanations of lesbianism multiply to the point that almost anything seems apt to cause it. One begins to think that the explanations do not explain!

The point here is not to discredit, still less to embarass, individuals who personally report a change in their attractions; some people do experience natural fluidity, or find a single person who does not match their normal pattern of attraction but with whom they find a deep and lasting connection. The point is, these things cannot be compelled, cannot be reduced to a psychological technique, cannot be ‘prayed away.’ And organizations or individuals that claim to be able to deliver people from homosexual attractions are, at best, making a claim that hasn’t been demonstrated, and at worst is flatly false.

These therapeutic approaches are not only based in a theory of the origin of homosexuality that the professional mental health community does not endorse; the rhetoric that accompanies them is profoundly misleading, and frequently very damaging to young people. Take the banner saying that Satan delights in homosexuality. How many adolescent Catholics, perhaps just discovering same-sex feelings, saw that banner and thought, I am so disgusting I make Satan happy, or The Church doesn’t want me because I feel like this, or If I ever fail I’ll go to hell, or I can never tell anybody what a monster I am? Did Your Excellency stop to consider this? The shame, terror, and hurt that phrases like this—phrases practically never used of other sins at least equally grave—cause in young people is neither healthy nor holy. How many parents, frightened by the prospect of the devil getting his claws into their children, have pursued this line of thinking to the extreme, resorting to transgressions of privacy, threats, rejection, physical abuse, even expelling their children from their homes, in a desperate attempt to get them to ‘repent’ of something they never chose? These concerns are not alarmism; these things happen. I know young men and women who have been disowned or beaten, who have attempted suicide or cut into their own flesh. Hatred and violence directed at gay-identified people are not rare phenomena, nor harmless ones, as we learned all too bitterly in Orlando in 2016, and language like the language on this banner emboldens them.

Furthermore, the language of ‘healing’ and ‘victory,’ though rarely spelled out in so many words, all but invariably means ‘becoming heterosexual’ in the ears of those listening to this rhetoric. The speakers do not spell it out, because they know very well that homosexual desires do not simply go away—but rather than honestly acknowledging this, they continue to imply a radical change in attractions and ‘leaving homosexuality behind.’ Yet if challenged, they admit that a change in self-concept is what they really meant all along, and that there will still be ‘residual’ interest in the same sex. Which prompts two questions: first, what this ‘healing’ is of, if it is not of homosexual desire; and second, why they did not make themselves clear in the first place.

The frank, sorrowful renunciations of men like John Smid and Alan Chambers show that ex-gay ministers did not make themselves plain at first, because they have quietly moved the goal-posts: forsaking an orientation change that they realized they could not alter by effort, in favor of a new frame of mind that could be accomplished in an afternoon. Not that it would make anybody’s life easier if it were so accomplished. Call same-sex attractions what you will, the difficulty of living chastely with them will be much the same; save that, if one has to be secretive and dissemble and evade authentic discussion of one’s real feelings, that added burden may well break the proverbial camel’s back.

I beg Your Excellency: reconsider, investigate, and break off the archdiocesan connection to these so-called ministries. They will hurt your flock. I am speaking from my own experience; I am speaking from the experience of friends; I am speaking from the bulk of the psychological and psychiatric professions, who have rejected SOCE. The deliverance promised by these groups is a lie. The grace of chastity is possible, and the hope of glory, and strength to carry the crosses God gives us all. But that is not what these organizations have to offer; they are concealing a history of tears and even of blood, shed over a sexual orientation our Lord neither commanded nor promised. Please, Your Excellency, seek the truth and find it. Many hearts are depending upon you.

Of your charity, pray for me; I have prayed for you, and shall. The Lord be with you.

Gabriel I. M. Blanchard

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Men and Monsters, Part II

Anybody can enact that murder shall not be punishable by death; nobody can enact that the swallowing of a tumblerful of prussic acid shall not be punishable by death. In the former case, the connection between the two events is legal—that is, arbitrary; in the latter, it is a true causal relationship … When the laws regulating human society are so formed as to come into collision with the nature of things, and in particular with the fundamental realities of human nature, they will end by producing an impossible situation which, unless the laws are altered, will issue in such catastrophes as war, pestilence, and famine. Catastrophes thus caused are the execution of universal law upon arbitrary enactments which contravene the facts; they are thus properly called by theologians, judgments of God. …  

At the back of the Christian moral code we find a number of pronouncements about the moral law, which are not regulations at all, but which purport to be statements of fact about man and the universe, and upon which the whole moral code depends for its authority and its validity in practice. … If they are true, man runs counter to them at his own peril. He may, of course, defy them, as he may defy the law of gravitation by jumping off the Eiffel Tower, but he cannot abolish them by edict. Nor yet can God abolish them, except by breaking up the structure of the universe, so that in this sense they are not arbitrary laws. We may of course argue that the making of this kind of universe, or indeed of any kind of universe, is an arbitrary act; but, given the universe as it stands, the rules that govern it are not freaks of momentary caprice. 

—Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

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At first I’d been thinking of beginning with the sociological side of my first post; however, my language of divine judgment provoked more reaction than I’d expected, and anyway, on reflection it makes far more sense to begin with the spiritual. That spiritual side of things is the suggestion I made, or the suspicion I harbor, that the United States is a nation under judgment, due very largely to the war crimes of which we are historically guilty—but that notion needs a lot of unpacking.

To begin with, let’s consider what is meant by judgment. Usually, the image this summons to the imagination is one of God-as-cranky-old-man hitting people with bolts of smite because they’ve annoyed him in some way. This image actually does have a good use, to which we shall return later, but for the most part it’s stupid and terrible, and most of what it says to our minds and emotions should be discarded without hesitation.

A proper understanding of judgment is, rather, grounded in God’s character as the Creator, and the corresponding integrity of creation. In making the universe, God made an ordered reality, a universe in which cause and effect relate to one another in regular harmony. Why he did this is a question I can’t answer with certainty, and I have a hunch that it’s secretly nonsensical, like asking what the shape of yellow is, or whether eleven is solid, liquid, or gas; if God the Son is the Logos, then order is grounded not just in the choices, but in the being of God. At any rate he did make an ordered universe, and creatures like ourselves that not only rely on order to exist, but can’t even really imagine a world without it. The closest we can get is by mixing known elements of our world at random, but even this depends on our understanding of the order and defined things that we know.

This orderly creation in which we live is, also, the prerequisite for free will, which is itself a sine qua non of love. A world of pure chaos would be incomprehensible by definition, and no self-awareness or meaningful choice (which are the things we mean theologically by free will) would be possible. Accordingly, love, which is the most divine choice, would not be possible either.

But if the universe is ordered and governed by cause and effect, and if there are free agents in it, then suffering and evil become real possibilities. Through ignorance or inattention, any free being could run up against the order of the universe in a painful or damaging way; and through deliberate malice, any free being could attempt to violate, break, or circumvent that order. But freelance modifications of creation would require the same power (in the double sense of authority and ability) that the God who made it possesses; and we don’t have that. Accordingly, the effect of such attempts will naturally be as painful and damaging as mistakes made through ignorance, if not more so. And the more a creature perseveres in its error, the worse the consequences will be, until that creature is either destroyed or corrected.

Thus, judgment is not an arbitrary act of God, intruded into creation as a punishment for behavior he doesn’t like. Rather, it is a name for what happens when a creature defies the inner logic of creation, and is met by the self-consistency of that logic, experienced as hostile because of the creature’s own hostility. Judgment may, in that case, sound like a strange choice of name; which leads into the one great advantage of the ‘cranky old man’ depiction of God. By representing the Creator as a Person, this image can remind us that forgiveness, patience, restraint, and mercy are possible, too. C. S. Lewis, in his epistolary on prayer, Letters to Malcolm, wrote:

You suggest that what is traditionally regarded as our experience of God’s anger would be more helpfully regarded as what inevitably happens to us if we behave inappropriately towards a reality of immense power. As you say, ‘The live wire doesn’t feel angry with us, but if we blunder against it we get a shock.’ My dear Malcolm, what do you suppose you have gained by substituting the image of a live wire for that of angered majesty? … The angry can forgive, and electricity can’t. 

And you give as your reason that ‘even by analogy the sort of pardon that arises because a fit of temper is spent cannot worthily be attributed to God nor gratefully accepted by man.’ But the belittling words ‘fit of temper’ are your own choice. Think of the fullest reconciliation between mortals. … Anger—no peevish fit of temper, but just, generous, scalding indignation—passes (not necessarily at once) into embracing, exultant, re-welcoming love. That is how friends and lovers are truly reconciled. Hot wrath, hot love. Such anger is the fluid that love bleeds when you cut it. … Wrath and pardon are both, as applied to God, analogies; but they belong together to the same circle of analogy—the circle of life, and love, and deeply personal relationships.

Fine, fine. But what has all this got to do with describing America as a nation under judgment?

Our nation has, from its inception, been soaked in blood. With the exception of Rhode Island and parts of Pennsylvania, every square mile of US territory was either taken from its indigenous inhabitants by compulsion, or purchased from European powers that had done the same thing—England, Spain, France, Russia. The insultingly named ‘Indian reservations’ (as though they were parks maintained for endangered animals!), whose rights we regularly violate despite their technical status as independent nations, are an embarrassing continuation of colonialism. Our history in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries was imperfect even in relating to other Western powers; but we’ve really taken to war crimes since World War II. Interfering with other countries’ internal affairs, [1] killing foreign soldiers with no declaration of war, killing foreign civilian men, women, and children en masse, torturing prisoners of war … And all this is only about how the US deals with other countries, let alone immigrants and internal injustices like slavery, capitalist oppression, racism, and abortion.

John Gast, Spirit of the Frontier, 1872

I believe that, by this history of atrocities and by our general acquiescence to them (if not in many cases outright, vocal approval), we have invoked judgment upon ourselves. This violence indicates contempt for human life as such, and the nature of judgment is to work backwards, so that contempt of human life falls upon us. It certainly has: in the schools where we’ve taught children that destroying First Nation civilizations and killing or deporting them by the thousands was a historical footnote; at the military bases from which we’ve sent our brave boys to bomb Japanese or Vietnamese or Iraqi civilians with nuclear and chemical weapons, whose long-term effects we could never hope to control; in the office towers where the goods of clientele and employees alike are ruthlessly subordinated to profit.

Does this mean the individuals upon whom these judgments have fallen were the most guilty? No. It doesn’t mean they were guilty at all. Societies are vast webs of coïnherence, and as many people suffer for others’ sins as thrive on others’ virtues. This should be no new idea for the Christian: for as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. The Last Judgment, the final settling of individual accounts, is yet to come, and while it tarries we still have an opportunity to invoke mercy, both for ourselves and for our society.

What does this invocation of mercy involve? First of all, individual repentance, because nothing can be done until and unless individual people—that is, you and I—own our thoughts, words, and behavior. To the extent that we’ve involved ourselves in social sins, whether by active approval or passive indulgence, we must repent: i.e., say that we’ve done wrong and that we’re sorry, ask for forgiveness from anyone we’ve wronged (God or neighbor), and resolve to do better.

Source

And then, as far as possible, we must participate in societal repentance. Now, maybe our own influence on society is a very small thing. Maybe all we can do is swallow our pride by letting someone win a Facebook argument and switch to fair-trade coffee. But, in truth, those things aren’t nothing. Small decisions to foster peace are where the power to make biggers decisions for peace comes from; it’s like lifting: you don’t start with benching 350 pounds. Then again, maybe our influence on society is a bigger thing than we think. Maybe we can sponsor the education of a child in a war-torn country, or write music that celebrates kindness and honesty, or help organize an anti-war campaign, or all sorts of things. But it’s always those little things coming from us individual people that multiply and grow and finally start moving whole cultures. Bartolomé de las Casas, William Wilberforce, Susan B. Anthony, Cardinal Manning, Eugene Debs, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr made things happen because they did not wait for others to act. They went and did something. It was that which inspired others to do something too.

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[1] I’m not saying that this is never justifiable. I am saying that we are way too ready to dictate to other states what they may and may not do.