Radical grief. So I come to check the blogs of a silly Saturday, when you don't expect much to be happening, and hey lookee, there's been something of a dust-up: at The Poor Man, The Editors has administered a righteous and thoroughly deserved ass-whupping to John Cole, on the occasion of this rancid little screed re: Cindy Sheehan, in which Cole rips off the mask of thoughtfulness and civility that had seduced a few lefty bloggers (er, ahem, harrr) into thinking he was some sort of reachable conservative. So thoroughly did The Poor Man eviscerate the poor man, so petulant and incoherent the victim's response, that anything further from me would be piling on.

Allow me, then, to pile on. I'm struck by the end of Cole's post, where he summarizes his position (if a series of angry, spasmodic twitches can properly be called a position) on the Cindy Sheehan matter:

I think the pimps in the anti-war left who are cynically exploiting this woman’s tragedy are evil. Even if she wants the attention to aid her cause. Atrios and the human debris such as he know what they are doing, and they represent the worst of the Democratic party.

"Cynically exploiting"? The anti-war left now rallying arouund Cindy Sheehan—and being rallied by her—has persevered in opposition to the war for three years and more, since the bully adventure was first bruited: in face of the contemptuous indifference of the corporate media, in face of repeated accusations, widely disseminated in that same media (as well as by John Cole's right-blogging compatriots), full of "objectively pro-terrorist" this and "borderline treasonous" that. We have been abused and vilified, and have held fast anyway to a deep and principled belief that what we've done in Iraq is wrong. Nobody's against the war because it's such a great way to make out. We might be guilty of an impractical excess of sincerity, but by what sane measure can the anti-war left be accused of cynicism here?

Is Cindy Sheehan being used? Yes, obviously: exactly because, and just to the extent that, she has worked for the last year to make herself useful. To whom? To the very people who are supposed to be "cynically exploiting" her—and would be guilty of it, according to Cole, "even if she wanted the attention to aid her cause." Slick work with the pronoun there, John, but ultimately too little too late: it's not possible to forget that "her" cause is the cause of the antiwar left, that they're one and the same thing.

Cindy Sheehan is a conscious political actor, as Cole himself is able to acknowledge (and does, several times in the course of his rant, in an injured tone) when it suits him polemically. Able to acknowledge, but painfully unable to comprehend. The "cynical exploiters" frame Cole recurs to—regardless that it would refute his argument that Cindy Sheehan has made herself a public figure who "gets no free pass" (at least Cole knows enough to stay away from the phrase "fair game")—is an index of what I take to be an ingrained, almost unconscious elitism. (A word that's supposed to be reserved solely for winger usage, I know, but it's too apt here to pass up.) Cole mutters darkly about how Atrios and the rest of the anti-war scum "know what they are doing": and their knowing is the obverse of what Cole assumes is Cindy Sheehan's unknowing. In this little drama of left-wing perfidy, Sheehan is a strayed and endangered naif, a woman addled by grieving; nothing in Cole's imagination allows him to credit an ordinary American citizen, a housewife and mother no less, with having taken real political agency for herself.

Which is to say that John Cole has no genuine notion of citizenship in a democratic republic.

So what do I think of the whole situation? I think she should be left alone and ignored. She is a grieving mother, and she can do or say what she wants, and hopefully, some day, she will find her peace.

But she doesn’t have the right to set policy, she doesn’t have the right to make demands of the President, and she most certainly doesn’t have the right to be used as a weapon by people, who, like herself, want only to savagely attack this administration and expect that everyone will just sit back and take it and not respond.

[Let's pass in silence the ludicrous, self-cancelling illogic of an expression that has Sheehan being "used as a weapon" by people like herself. Not to mention the ludicrous idea that the attack dogs of the right have to be defended against her, lest us overbearing lefties cow them into embarrassed, morally constrained silence.] Apparently, I was brought up wrong. Somewhere in my young life I picked up the idea that the great glory of America was that this was a nation of Cindy Sheehans—all of us with not just the right and opportunity but the obligation to consider policy, to agitate for our understanding of the public good, to hold the leaders of our government—officials elected by us, or appointed in our names—to account. I have to thank John Cole for pointing out how dangerously such an idea approaches to lèse majesté: I mean, to think of some nobody demanding things of His Highness the President!

The Sheehans may hail from California, but as far as Cole and his ilk are concerned they're flyover Americans: the sort of suburbanites that make good political props, and otherwise exhaust their usefulness in voting Republican and supplying young men and women to die in the latest crusade. Cole makes the requisite sympathetic noises about Cindy Sheehan's tragedy and her grief, but it's a little hard to take "I sympathize" all that seriously when it's followed immediately by, "Now shut the fuck up." In any case it's clear that these noises are merely a rhetorical ploy. Cole has no genuine respect for Mrs. Sheehan's grief, and can't, because he has no template for understanding it. This is not a private grief being exploited for some (almost by definition illegitimate) public purpose. Cindy Sheehan's grief isn't being used to advance a politics, whether hers or someone else's: Cindy Sheehan's grief is her politics. Politics was the cause of it, and politics is the necessary site for its resolution.

After years of practice reducing all national discourse to the affective plane—insisting that everything be justified, or condemned, with respect to the wound we suffered on 9/11—you'd think the wingers would have a better grasp of Cindy Sheehan's politics than they seem to. But maybe it's just that disorienting to see your own central propaganda move turned against you. Add John Cole to the growing list of evidence that the war party recognize the threat in Cindy Sheehan, and what she represents, and have no remote idea what to do about it.

posted by michael  1:03:38 AM  
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