Screwing Up the Binary Narrative
Welcome to Super Tuesday.
Yeah, I don't really care either. The Establishment has spoken: Biden gets to win. Of course, I wasn't thrilled at Bernie winning, and Buttigieg makes me . . . uncomfortable. But I'm not an establishment guy at any level, so a Biden victory leaves me cold. Content, since we're all comfortable with what we know, and we know The Establishment, but cold.
The Establishment did everything possible to downplay Buttigieg's thrashing among black voters. They're emphasizing that it's because he fired South Bend's first black police chief. Yeah, okay. It has nothing to do with the fact that the average black person is Christian and more opposed than Oral Roberts to gay sex.
You see, when something like that happens (minority groups dissin' other minority groups), The Establishment Left gets rattled. It destroys the binary narrative that is their entire worldview. White Heterosexual Men: Privileged. Everyone Else: Not Privileged. The active radicals want to inverse the binary, putting the WHM into the unprivileged position and thereby remedy 500 years of WHM hegemony and abuse. The passive radicals merely want to smash the binary, eliminate it altogether.
The active radicals (invert the binary) are in the tradition of de Saussure and the Structuralists, for those who follow the TWE podcast.
The passive radicals (smash the binary) are in the tradition of Jacque Derrida and the post-Structuralists.
I kind of like the Derridians, at least when they're logically consistent, which is rare. Even Derrida wasn't. He eventually recoiled at the politically-irrelevant upshot of his philosophy and tried to make it politically relevant. Which, of course, is the path of every would-be nihilist who doesn't commit suicide (actual suicide with a bullet or torpor suicide through drugs and video games). Life without relevance isn't life. Political relevance is a pale substitute for actual relevance, but it's relevance at some level.
The need for relevance: That's something the nihilists can never get around, no matter how compelling their logic is otherwise.
Photo: Gage Skidmore
