our lady of perpetual emotional comfort
White people, and especially Americans, tend to hold some pretty weird beliefs. But top of the list may be the belief that we have a basic right to permanent emotional comfort. This is a confusion of basic human rights with elitist privileges. A particularly bizarre dramatization of this belief is that paying audiences for the arts have a right never to experience any emotional discomfort. Another is that our lawmakers and other celebrities seem to have an extra-special right to be buffered from ever having to exhibit any human values. So it’s a relief to watch these absurd beliefs starting to crack, as Ed Sheeran goes down in flames.
Ed Sheeran is the Democratic party. Like Joe Biden, like Hillary Clinton, like Kamala Harris, he is spineless, selfish, insecure multi-millionaire pretending he's just a nice guy whose “hands are tied,” but in fact would rather tens of thousands of children be slaughtered in front of everyone than potentially offend a member of the far right. Like them he is a pathetic money-grubber whose allegiance to corporate CEOs is more faithful than to his own supporters.
We come down hard on Ed Sheeran for kowtowing to some blowjob billionaire and rightly so, but how many other artists get away with their silence simply because they didn't invite Macklemore onto their stadium tour in the first place? How many politicians get away not only with silence, but with voting to give billions to genocide and ICE and illegal wars, and we just keep supporting them because they "seem nice?" We get too distracted by “great men” and miss the systems they epitomize — systems that supply Sheerans and Trumps and Bidens and Krafts as needed.
Liberals will fight bitterly against their own economic interests for the cause of…their right to not have an opinion. Their right to prioritize decorum over substance. Their right to overlook atrocities when committed by their “team.” Ed Sheeran is the Democratic party. Just like Biden, just like Harris, Sheeran was faced with literal fascism, and chose career suicide over giving one inch to the left and admitting he might have any power whatsoever to influence events for the better. Just bow down to the first genocidal member of the rich and famous that looks in his direction. Then follow it up with some weak statement centering his own sad feelings about it.
What both Ed Sheeran and Democrats seem not to remember is that when an old sex offending weak ass narcissist comes trying to tell you what to do, you're supposed to tell them them to fuck right off. Not start licking their boot and then watch all your support vanish overnight. It’s not just OK to hurt the feelings of genociders, fascists, war profiteers and war criminals. It’s imperative. History demands it. This is what we are supposed to have learned from the Holocaust.
Moral superiority and people-pleasing may be the Democrats’ brand, but if they had any actual interest in morality or pleasing voters, they would use their tremendous wealth and power and name recognition to take our 250-year old, decrepit, obsolete government, based as it is on genocide, slavery, white supremacy, sexism, elitism, corruption and capitalism — all traditionally legalized and publicly rewarded and buffered from any consequences — and replace it with something better. Preferably something our species might survive.
A key part of this necessary revolution would be the utter rejection of Israel's claim that it has the right to be cruel, irrational, dehumanizing, and lawbreaking. Rejecting its claim that it has every right to base its government on genocide, land theft, chauvinism, ethnic or religious supremacy, and unlimited greed, because Europe and America did it, and it would "antisemitic" not to let Israel indulge in the same cruelties and crimes. Of course it’s transparent that antisemitism was never the offending issue, neither for today’s Zionist politicians nor for that witless stadium owner, both of whom have been perfectly happy to team up with Kanye West. The offending issue is of course the claim that Brown people are human.
Putting all the blame on Netanyahu or Trump is popular but disingenuous. As long as the U.S. delays reckoning with its own historical facts, its moral claims about other parts of the world land as utterly hypocritical. We can laugh all we want at the Netanyahu-and-Epstein-loving football stadium guy, but until we have a bona fide movement that actually stands explicitly against genocide and apartheid and sex trafficking and patriarchy and gladiator sports for Black people, we're just the ones turning that disgusting man into a billionaire who can control the entertainment industry with the snap of a finger.
It makes zero sense to sanction or bomb other peoples because they are undemocratic, or terrorists, or have weapons of mass destruction, or break international laws, or oppress their women, children, and ethnic minorities, as long as those descriptions continue to apply first and foremost to our own country.
Since the days of colonization and slavery, white advantage in America has always included the right to be cruel, the right to be irrational, the right to dehumanize. Our system has always equated money and power. It has always exploited and lynched and over-policed Black people at its leisure. It was founded explicitly on denying non-whites, women, and the poor any right to participate in our so-called “democracy.” The MAGA movement is not an American aberration. It's really more an outing of an American guilty pleasure. It’s a debunking of an American myth.
George Washington was the richest man in America: a slave owning racist Englishman who did not consider Africans, or Americans (whom he called "Indians") to be human. He was Donald Trump. He was MAGA. And the answer to MAGA, Zionism, American exceptionalism, and every other far right movement trying to push everyone else around, is not to become more accommodating or more patriotic or more conservative or more reverent to the “Founding Fathers.” Such inane values are what have made liberals intolerable. The answer to the far right is revolution. Create a movement, a government, a way of operating, that's based on humane beliefs that people actually hold.
According to time-honored American tradition, we have one political party that hides our dark truth, and one that revels in it. Two strategies work together to sustain and recreate that dark truth decade after decade. What we need is a political movement that rejects that dark truth for what it is: Inhumane. Greedy. Genocidal. Elitist. Corrupt. Extremely violent. A threat to all life.
If we back another elitist corporate liberal who hates poor people, who kills Brown people so that some AI or weapons or oil CEO can get some more money — someone in the tradition of Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton — we guarantee that they either lose their election to the far right, or give way to an even worse far right in the following election, or simply become far right themselves. All the wishful thinking and clever speechwriting in the world won't change that fact. People are sick of the Bidens and Sheerans of this world. If corrupted, corporate shills like them can’t bring themselves to do the bare minimum, our survival demands we take our business elsewhere.