July 08, 2003

According to the Big Book Of Words, "hypocrisy" is

The act or practice of a hypocrite; a feigning to be what one is not, or to feel what one does not feel; a dissimulation, or a concealment of one's real character, disposition, or motives; especially, the assuming of false appearance of virtue or religion; a simulation of goodness.

Although derived originally from the Ionic Greek hupokrisis, meaning simply a "reply or answer," it is the the later Attic Greek usage that I find most provocative. In Attic hupokrisis primarily indicated the playing of a part, as on a stage, or, literally, an "outward showing;" it was also used to indicate an orator's "delivery." It wasn't until the New Testament, written in Koine Greek, that the word was metaphorically used in its modern derogatory sense (as in Matthew 23:28).

It's interesting to me that this word has its roots in performance, for so much of our modern information culture is bound up in stagecraft and the manipulation of perception. A further consequence of that information culture--especially for public personas--is that past pronouncements and activities can and often do become part of the overall searchable "soup" of facts and factoids. This means that it is becoming easier and easier for people to compare today's performance with yesterday's, and to make public accusations of hypocrisy, particularly with regard to the "concealment of one's real character, disposition, or motives" and "the false appearance of virtue."

I've been thinking about this because of my own apparently hypocritical stance as the Paxil-popping creator of satirical anti-depressant advertisements. It's easy to observe, from my various writings and my cartoon, that my relationship with psychiatric pharmaceuticals is ambivalent at best. I choose to call it a "complexity" or a "contradiction," but the case for hypocrisy may seem to be easily made.

I'm also thinking about hypocrisy because of Amiri Baraka (née Leroi Jones), who recently came up in an inebriated conversation I was trying to have with a poet friend of mine. Baraka, you may recall, wrote "Somebody Blew Up America" [full text here] shortly after the September 11 attacks. He was Poet Laureate of New Jersey at the time, and the work caused controversy because of just a few lines:

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers To stay home that day Why did Sharon stay away?

I find Baraka to be well-soaked in the post-modern idea that "truth" is just a word, subjective at best. This has furnished his mind with a somewhat tweaked idea of what Keats and Dubois meant when they called for poets to bring forth Truth and Beauty. Although he claimed that subsequent calls for his resignation were "an attempt to repress and stigmatize independent thinkers everywhere," his credulous repetition of this particular conspiracy theory--and his repetition of many others--is based on bits and pieces of information gleaned from the Internet, most of which, apparently, he couldn't source. Unfortunately for him, the independence of one's thinking is not actually measured by the outrage it causes in the establishment, which is an idea often held by veterans of the various 60s "revolutions."

The entire stink was given fuel and vigorous fanning by the Anti-Defamation League, which obscured some of the more important issues raised in Baraka's work by wrenching a few lines out of their context.

The poem is, in fact, a mostly consistent litany of complaints against those in power, from a perspective typical of the far left (Baraka is a self-described "Third World Marxist"). True to post-modern academic form, Baraka is not necessarily peeved about skin color per se (witness his condemnation of the blacks in the White House), but about the structures of power that oppress the poor and the lower classes world wide, most of whom happen to be non-white. His poem is an attack, he says, on "Imperialism, National Oppression, Monopoly Capitalism, Racism, Anti-Semitism." Thus, he can quite un-self consciously pick and choose the information tidbits from the media and Internet soups that support his assertion

I WAS NOT SAYING ISRAEL WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ATTACK, BUT THAT THEY KNEW AND OUR OWN COUNTERFEIT PRESIDENT DID TOO!

The poem is about hypocrisy--or, at least, it's intended to be. How can white America start a War on Terrorism when power-elite whites wiped out Indians, Jews, blacks, Vietnamese, and any other fashionably oppressed ethnicity you might care to name? How can the elites claim moral cause when they "invented AIDS," doped up the Chinese, and killed Lincoln, Kennedy, and every important black leader ever? Clarence Thomas, Condoleeza Rice, and Colin Powell are all traitors--house Negroes. And on and on. There is, in fact, nothing in this poem that truly contradicts Baraka's previous assertions that blacks can't make their own world until "the white man is dead" ["Black People," 1967] and that white people "are a cancer" who can best help black people by dying [The Autobiography of Leroi Jones, 1984]--this, from a man who now loudly objects to Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon's description of the Palestinians as a “cancerous manifestation."

I say there is nothing here that "truly contradicts" his prior racist assertions because Baraka, like most people, has grown and changed as he's gotten older. Simply pointing out that he advocated the death of white folks in 1967 and now claims to write against racism, and crying hypocrite! is to avoid looking at another possibility; namely, that what Baraka called "white people" in 1967 has evolved in his mind into "power elites." His outrage is the same, but perhaps he has come to realize that it is not just the melanin content of one's skin that makes one an oppressor, but rather the ideas one holds and the actions one takes as a result of those ideas. His evolution as a writer is roughly divided into a "Beat" period, a "Black Nationalist" period, and a "Third World Marxist" period, and his ideas about who the oppressors of the world are have changed throughout each of them. In the preface to The Baraka Reader he writes

My writing reflects my own growth and expansion, and at the same time the society in which I have existed throughout this confrontation.

I don't doubt his sincerity because, frankly, he'd have to be a blithering idiot not to see the glaring contradiction between calling for white blood and claiming to be against racism, and as a thinking person the way that he has chosen to resolve that contradiction is to identify what offended him about the "white oppressor" and to attempt, to some degree, to remove race from that quality. He fails to do so in this work--these days, far more Africans are being killed by other Africans, in the most brutal ways, than are being killed by whites; and far more Arabs were killed by other Arabs than were ever killed by Israelis. But I suspect that he would still have difficulty placing those murdering Arabs and Africans among the power-elites.

It's not really my intention to engage in a line-by-line critique of this particular work, or to defend the Anti-Defamation League's shrill accusations, or to point out that the man who refused to "apologize to Evil" and who has serious problems with the white capitalist government establishment was happy to take an official, paid position with that government (New Jersey Governor McGreevey saw to it that Baraka never got that $10,000, but Baraka certainly didn't know that would happen when he signed up). I won't question whether a person ought to be able to "grow and expand" at the taxpayer's expense. My simple point is that contradiction is sometimes an indication of complexity.

But very often, I read what passes for critique out there among the juicy fact-bits and the bobbing factoid-dumplings: so-and-so said this, but look: five years ago he said the opposite! There was a recent spate of this as various Google-savvy bloggers dredged up a nice gooey haul of past quotes from prominent Democrats, all calling for action against Sadaam Hussein becuase of his WMD programs. And these very Democrats are now yelling for an investigation into the Bush administration, for attacking Hussein because of these "purported" WMDs!

Imagine that.

No, my point is: so what? Merely throwing up a pair of snipped quotes and going ta-daa! as though something requiring thought or insight has been accomplished is unimpressive at best. The information soup is rich, and full of crap. Such a presentation of mere contradiction is tantamount to yelling, hypocrite! and, as I have hopefully shown, hypocrisy is an issue of character, not of the validity of ideas or the content of a given argument. If your goal is to edge closer to the truth, yelling hypocrite! is an ad hominem attack and a logical fallacy.

The exposure of contradiction, if treated with a Socratic sensibility, is an occasion for satisfaction, because it indicates progress in an argument: here are two possibilities, both of which cannot be true at the same time. Therefore, we are on the cusp of eliminating an error in our thinking. It is not the end of the process, merely one step in it. Unfortunately, proper execution of the Socratic method requires a "congenial soul;" that is, one who is amenable to the process. It can't be done alone, or with someone whose goals are not your own. It can't be done via the Internet unless you're actually exchanging e-mails with the party in question. And it most certainly can't be done by a poet chanting words before crowds that, by and large, already agree with him.

Thus, when Baraka's spoken words--and "Someone Blew Up America" is meant to be heard, not read--rattle off rhythmic denunciations of all the contradictions that litter American history in particular and Western history in general, my final response is: so what? I used to piss in my pants, but I don't anymore. Oh, the contradiction of my childhood as compared to my adult nature! All of these things are obvious. Yes, Americans owned slaves. Yes, we are a racially divided culture. Yes, yes, yes! But cultures--being composed of and created by human beings--are rife with contradictions. And cultures--again, being composed of and created by human beings--grow and expand.

Ask a lower-class black American whether he'd rather be poor here, or poor in Africa. Ask a Rwandan about racial tolerance. Ask a Jew living in France about anti-Semitism. Ask a Saudi woman about misogyny. Ask an Egyptian Christian about freedom of religion. Ask the millions of immigrants why they came to this racist, imperialist, capitalist hellhole of oppression and misery. The answers will illustrate the difference between the failure to live up to some Marxist, utopian ideal of human perfection, and the reality of what America is.

So, in the Attic sense, Baraka is a hypocrite. He is an orator, delivering rhetoric. He is a player on a stage, as evidenced by his adoption of a black patois for his script. And though I question his virtue, and certainly reject his ideology, I can't in good conscience call him a hypocrite in the Biblical sense without applying that label to myself.