I Can See Clearly Now
When I was maybe 6 or 7 I came upon a photograph of an inmate in one of the Nazi concentration camps, taken by liberating troops. He was dead, it looks like he tried to slide under a door. It was a book from Life or Time about the war, and I have no idea where it is now, but no matter. I never have to see this picture again because it is burned in my memory since, this starved, emaciated person almost fit under the door, the sharp cheekbones, shaved head, every other bone in the body prominent. I wondered how people could do this to one another, whatever it was that led this person to this physical state.
I studied World War II and Nazi Germany to understand how this happened, not like an intense school thing but a lifelong thing. Reading books, asking questions, watching films, like somehow if I could understand it it wouldn’t happen again. One winter in 2008 I bought a book on Bedford Avenue, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust”, over 600 pages with extensive footnotes of evidence finally laying to rest the notion that ‘ordinary’ Germans were ignorant to their government’s actions. Were they complicit or weren’t they? They were.
And here we are, here I am, complicit. We’re watching it, we’re paying for it, this genocide in Gaza and the escalating violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. The difference is we are watching it, we have more immediate information. The globalization of the world through the internet and social media has exposed who we really are: isolated enablers with no conscience. Not in my backyard, not a problem.
I’ve always been critical of this country, but I was also indoctrinated into a certain mindset here. I would say over the past decade some of that is unravelling, albeit slowly. Propaganda is powerful. Part of its power is how much we underestimate it. They’re *just* words. I’ve been made to be an American, that I see, my assumptions of this country’s good, even knowing it is bad. I see more and more how I’ve been constructed as a pawn of this country, I realize my own culpability. That to grow up and live here, in the United States, is it be part and parcel an obstacle to liberation, including my own, to be an agent of the state. My happiness and success, or even the slightest notions of them, usually come at a cost to others. That is the American Way, you’re either winning or losing.
I have been molded by this country, public schools, white suburbs, mainstream society but also counter-cultures that spoke to me, vital communities I have been a part of. For example, the independent music community in Chicago in the 90s and early 2000s, incredible ethical and full of integrity and also very white, straight and male. Chicago has been on my mind a lot since the sudden death of musician and recording engineer Steve Albini on May 7th. A majority of my life has been spent and influenced by the music he played and recorded, along with his opinions and writings. He was very opinionated, and very intelligence. He did not mince words. At all. All of the tributes to him and interviews with him fascinate me, but part of this fascination is the knowledge that he evolved as a person, and he took himself to task publicly.
On his Twitter account on October 12, 2021, Albini publicly denounces some of his past certainties and offenses, one of them having a band called Rapeman, apologizing for his previous “edgelord1” behaviour.
“A lot of things I said and did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful and I regret them. It’s nobody’s obligation to overlook that, and I do feel an obligation to redeem myself…A project I’ve undertaken piecemeal as I’ve matured, evolved and learned over time. I expect no grace, and honestly feel like I and others of my generation have not been held to task enough for words and behavior that ultimately contributed to a coarsening society. For myself and many of my peers, we miscalculated. We thought the major battles over equality and inclusiveness had been won, and society would eventually express that, so we were not harming anything with contrarianism, shock, sarcasm or irony.”
When I read this I realized that I could also be described as Albini characterized himself—someone who thought some of the major work was done, it needed to be tweaked, or, conversely, wasn’t capable of ever being achieved so why bother. I can’t tell the difference, and it doesn’t make a difference, because what I know is true is that under this system in the United States we will never achieve true liberation for everyone. This system does not allow for it. For decades I have lived in the caveats constructed by me and for me that have allowed my own ignorance and absences.
This is a life-long process, changing the product of this society I have become. That’s not a complaint, that’s a fact. I never paid attention to the Middle East for so long because I accepted the unspoken notion that, as a white American, it was none of my business, something that couldn’t be solved because no one wanted to, it wasn’t logical. We keep watching the same violence that speaks to power, that kills and oppresses people in our names. For phones, for cars, for gas and oil, for certainty and moral supremacy.
No more. We are always wrong.
Earlier this week activist Aja Barber said the following in a pointed IG post about erroneous thought patterns, arguing false equivalence and those who languish in anti-intellectualism.
“All violence is violent but all violence is not the same.”
Whew. This sentence hasn’t left my brain since, this perfect combination of words that says what needs saying. A sentence for the past, present and, sadly, the future.
edgelord
/ˈejˌlôrd/
noun
INFORMAL
a person who affects a provocative or extreme persona, especially online (typically used of a man).
"edgelords act like contrarians in the hope that everyone will admire them as rebels