"[T]he point is to call for an equally livable life that is also enacted by those who make the call, and that requires the egalitarian distribution of public goods. The opposite of precarity is not security, but, rather, the struggle for an egalitarian social and political order in which a livable interdependency becomes possible -- it would be at once the condition of our self-governing as a democracy, and its sustained form would be one of the obligatory aims of that very governance." -- Judith Butler
Sunday, June 18, 2017
Queer Resistances and Abolition Democracy
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Speaking of democracy, there was an astonishing article
in the New York Times the other day:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/17/us/michelle-oconnell-jeremy-banks.html
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A Mother’s Death, a Botched Inquiry and a Sheriff at War
By WALT BOGDANICH
JUNE 17, 2017
. . .
St. Augustine forms the core of a very red county that in 2016
voted overwhelmingly for Donald J. Trump and for Sheriff Shoar,
re-electing him to a fourth term with 85 percent of the vote.
The sheriff’s persona plays well on this political stage. Speaking
to a Christian prayer group in 2015, he railed against gun control,
separation of church and state and especially Washington.
America’s problems began, he said, when the government
“tried to outlaw our faith.” He blamed the media for
“burning down Ferguson” and spreading the “false narrative”
that police officers are bad people who must be watched
with body cameras. Along the way, he sprinkled in a little
Shakespeare on the brevity of life.
Sheriff Shoar, who declined to speak for this article,
draws support from an important Florida constituency:
law enforcement and the military. He is a former member
of the Florida National Guard and a past president of the
Florida Sheriffs Association, where he recently welcomed
his newly elected brethren with an ethics lecture titled
“Keeping the Tarnish Off the Badge.” . . .
====
The rest of the article reads like something out of a Tennessee Williams play.
(Certainly the scenery is right out of a Tennessee Williams play.)
Of course, the Failing New York Times (TM) portrays this authoritarian,
alleged-office-abusing Florida sheriff as the bad guy. But note that
he was reelected last year with 85% of the vote.
The stereotype of the corrupt, "good old boy" southern sheriff comes
to life!
It would seem that in a lot of places, local politics isn't much better than what
we're currently seeing at the national level. Chest-beating strong men who brook
no opposition (as Henry VIII says to Thomas More in _A Man For All Seasons_)
seem to be the kind of guys (of course they're guys) a lot of the public wants
barking the orders (and pointing the guns).
Either white supremacy is history or we all are.
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