the white holes of america

 

THE WHITE HOLES OF AMERICA

"Cruelty has been refined to tragic pity, so that it is denied the name of cruelty.  In the same way sexual love has been refined to amour-passion; the slavish disposition to Christian obedience; wretchedness to humility; a pathological condition to the nervus gympathicus , e.g., to pessimism, Pascalism, or Carlylism, etc."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power,  312 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. Spring-Fall 1888)

Using Nietzsche's eyeglasses  to  "read" the 21st-century "text" of the United States of America  yields amazing results.  One gains insights about the nation, its citizens and institutions, its fetid ideologies of disunion and divisiveness.  For us, Nietzsche's use of the word "refine" is a cloaked reference to "re-define," the  endless spin to which we subject language and make things mean what they never meant. We have a penchant for uncertainty and a lust for confusion.  In the background we hear Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, the vulgar proponent of absolute freedom, singing the praise of sexual violence derived from the innate violence that marks how the doctrine of discovery was used in the illicit appropriation of North America, used in the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, used  to evolve  deceptive and exclusionary propaganda about "democracy."  Refining and re-defining secure a uniquely American entitlement to pursue death, un-freedom, and gross unhappiness.

The thoughts expressed above are deliberately crude and reflective of the profound evil from which there is no exit.  They are most appropriate in any attempt to make sense of NBC's "Dateline"  (February 26, 2021) on the subject of collateral damage, the case of NXIUM and Keith Raniere. The program revealed many hidden dimensions of white collective character.  It was a rare instance of white women making a desperate effort to interrogate white women with a modicum of honesty.  As the British might say, the program was a "bleeding" mess.  It defied the theory of how white holes behave and spilled the beans about the soul of white American folk. Insofar as the program addressed the matters of cult, the lies perpetuated about white female fragility, the multiple guises of master/slave relationships (especially in dealing with DOS [Dominus Obsequious Sororium] or master above female slave relations), and  how "harm" can be refined to mean "bliss"  ----  insofar as the program deconstructed victim impact statements, it directed  attention to lucid justifications for slavery and enslavement  in the philosophy of Aristotle.

 In Aristotle's  Politics, Book I we find an illuminating proposition regarding masters and slaves

"Let us first speak of master and slave, looking to the needs of practical life and also seeking  to attain some better theory of their relation than exists at present.  For some are of the opinion that the rule of a master is a science, and that the management of a household, and the mastership of slaves, and the political and royal rule, as I was saying at the outset, are all the same.  Others affirm that the rule of a master over slaves is contrary to nature, and that the distinction between slave and freeman exists by convention only, and not by nature, and being an interference with nature is therefore unjust."

 Aristotle argued his way to a conclusion which is sweet music to the ears of America's most radical conservatives

"Further ,as production and action are different in kind, and both require instruments, the instruments which they employ must likewise differ in kind.  But life is action and not production and therefore the slave is the minister of action.  Again, a possession is spoken of as a part is spoken of; for the part is not only a part of something else, but wholly belongs to it' and this is also true of a possession.  The master is only the master of the slave; he does not belong to him, whereas the slave is not only the slave of his master, but wholly belongs to him.  Hence we see what is the nature and office of a slave; he who is by nature not his own but another's man , is by nature a slave ; and he may be said to be another's  man who, being a slave, is also a possession.  And a possession may be defined as an instrument of action, separable  from the possessor."

Aristotle's convoluted argument is like "race."  It is a bogus concept that has enormous power in the contemporary conduct of social life in the United States of America.  What may frighten us is how much service Aristotle's notion that the relation of master and slave is quite nature can render to fascism and white nationalism and the post-truth of  white supremacy.  He speaks from another time and space about how crucial it is to identify the underpinnings of  NXIUM  as one of the white holes of America.

Just as theories about white holes are used in quantum mechanics to speculate about the BIG BANG, they  are useful in speculating about female complicity in male toxicity. After all, it was a white female doctor, a woman who appears to have more than a demitasse of intelligence, who branded "consensual slaves" within the NXIUM cult and who proclaimed in the "Dateline" program that pain and harm are two different things.  Really?  As the paragon of a symbolic male, the doctor argued she was not practicing medicine.  Indeed she did not. She practiced what the possessor  does in dealing with an instrument of action.  If one recalls pain-filled scene from the film Django Unchained, one has a good idea of what kind of human being the doctor pretends to be. In my chapter for Black Hollywood Unchained (Chicago: Third World Press, 2015), I concluded

" Django Unchained was perfectly timed to provide 165 minutes of violent entertainment and to cast light on the nature of America's soul unchained.  That soul, which we all possess, is incapable of authentic grief.  It has 'normalized' violence.  Violence is salvation.  Our souls have mastered the art of indifference, and we are post-humanly happy to have a tragic catharsis on the plantation of life and to walk hand in hand with blind fatalities and unqualified love for our country.  We are patriotic."

The "Dateline" program suggests we are insufficiently patriotic unless we confront  and push back against the many white holes that function as inevitable pandemics  in our nation. NXIUM is merely the tip of a most destructive white iceberg.  We may not be able to enter white holes, but we can use critical metaphoric reasoning to name what occurs within them.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            March 2, 2021