“Not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois.”
Leon Trotsky, “What is National Socialism?”
“They murder so that whatever to them seems living, shall resemble themselves.”
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia
kamala harris says to oprah, “if somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.” she laughs in the only way she can, nervously, her tick turned brand, although it has become less frenetic since she became the nominee and the team cut her pill allowance in half. then she says, “probably should not have said that!” oh, cheekiness! a confession, a libidinal intimacy, violence voiced instead of repressed, sublimated, or consciously confined to thought. the taboo desires buried within the viewer relates and we are titillated by the thrill of transgression. laughing. teehee! teehee! kamala harris has spent her career as a cop. she knows she can shoot anyone she wants. what are they gonna do, arrest her?
the woman cop is a specific fantasy, combining the superpowers of the woman’s empathy and the cop’s dutiful competence (lol) to create the ideal authoritarian. the woman cop is bisexual, in the Freudian sense (in the Freudian sense, we all are), as in both male and female. Wielding phallic power and maternal care, she is protector and caregiver in one, both mother and father, at once erotic in her female dominance and an asexual non-person, a superhuman entity immune to those tricky human traps of attachment or libido, those root causes of criminality. her separateness is in fact self-constituting: she is only able to be the ubermensch Woman Cop because she is impervious to the human flaws that lead to criminality. she can love only in a general way. the only violence she craves is righteous. the Woman Cop claims to be the impossible: a cop with a moral compass.
her archetypal male counterparts are also competent; they have extraordinary skills, intelligence, and intuition but they’re ultimately cowboys, rugged and willing to defy orders when they know better than their tangled bureaucracy. man cops get a beautiful love interest, as heterosexual men must in order to prove their gender to other men. they brood and self-destruct, haunted by a past tragedy, the source of their intense dedication to the case and also their insistence on solitude. the Woman Cop is not a source of darkness; her internal world is not so complicated. she is the fixer, her interminable will to deliver justice challenged by the sheer brutality of the very injustices she encounters. is the world too cruel for her cleanse? the man cop, part brute himself, is less surprised by human monsters. they took something from him, a daughter or a wife, and his work is an attempt to bring that loved one back to life through penance. the Woman Cop works for something selfless and impersonal, to better a vaguely mean world filled with a faceless hoard of bad men. the man cop gets to be specific, as a good character should be. the Woman Cop, like a Tom Wolfe character, is a kind of person.
the Woman Cop is often type-a; in the michael-shur-obama-verse she’s the leslie knope or amy whatever from brooklyn 99.1 she is initially in conflict with her love interest, as her stubborn maleness provokes a dick-measuring competition— the love interest is somehow an obstacle to her mechanical pursuit of a righteous worldview and the two lock horns over who is the better cop, who gets to swing their baton. but the male love interest of the liberal imagination eventually bends to Woman Cop’s phallic will, willingly loses the dick-measuring contest and is sexually aroused by doing so; he identifies her competence as erotic and submits to her authoritarian rule. the Woman Cop does not fuck; she gets married. she is not a cowboy, nor is she rugged. her only flaw is being too dedicated to her duties, and a Woman Cop’s duty includes the duty of all women: domestic reproduction within the nuclear family.
liberalism relies deeply on this chimera of the moral cop. to invest in our geopolitical and legal system as a humanist is to delude oneself that it is possible to enforce the law ethically. (i believe the word “faith” in its spiritual definition is fitting here, a firm belief in something which we can neither see nor prove, and which, according to the belief system, makes believers better people of stronger character.) the foundation of a fair and just society already exists in our laws and the procedures that create more laws. violence is rooted in the poor enforcement of these codified protections for the vulnerable— specifically, for white women— due to the hubris of men, who are incapable of empathy or understanding. it is the emotional stunting fundamental to the male character that obstructs justice, mostly by accident due to male ignorance of the female experience, and for which the Woman Cop compensates, thereby redeeming the system.
in the netflix miniseries unbelievable, kaitlyn dever is raped in her home, an apartment in a complex for those aged out of foster care. the two white male cops that take her case are indelicate and dubious to the point of bullying. the older cop believes that she is making the story up for attention, while the younger is initially uncertain but swayed into agreement. they get kaitlyn dever, a small and unassertive person, to say she made the story up, for which the police department sues her for wasting their time and resources. she becomes a social pariah, losing her friends and housing, and what is, for her, a significant amount of money in the suit.
in another state a couple years later, toni collette and merritt wever’s investigation of a serial rapist takes a turn when they find his stash of photographs, trophies he keeps of his victims bound and wounded, which includes pictures of kaitlyn dever. they identify her and call up the cops who handled her case. on the phone with the younger male cop, who barely remembers the case, toni collette emails him the photographs. he opens them on his computer and gapes, speechless, at the wounds on the girl’s body. this cop was the slightly more empathetic one, the one who maybe could have believed her; such a mistake disrupts his entire worldview, that his callousness resulted in an immense harm. toni collette invites him to her police station, much larger and more beautiful than his, to share her information. she leads him to a conference room filled with meticulous piles of photographs, evidence, maps, and documentation, but he has nothing to offer and is humiliated. as he leaves he tells toni collette, “this is very good work.” she is unmoved. she knows it is good work. all her work is good work, it is her duty to do work this good. she expects no praise, no prize. she is the silent protector. she fixes motorcycles. she owns large dog. she fights for women. she is filled with joyous relief when the rapist gets sentenced. she has the no-nonsense affect of a professional, persuasive, rational, and clearheaded, with the empathy and passion of a woman, which allows her to (non-hysterically) advocate for society’s vulnerable.
kaitlyn dever sues the police department and they offer to settle for a lot of money. her lawyer tells her they could get millions more with a counteroffer but she says no, this is enough to start a new life and that’s all she really wants. money isn’t important to the liberal who has enough. bad guys are concerned with money, the corrupt, the greedy, the thieving; a preoccupation with money indicates wickedness. the liberal cares about feelings, personal well-being, selflessness, representation, and identity— as long as all of these things are immaterial.
i admit, i rewatched the scenes of toni collette humiliating the bad cop, as i did the court scene from season two of big little lies when they play the videotape of alex skarsgaard abusing nicole kidman and she is finally believed. i do get emotional. i feel the vindication, the satisfaction of revenge, the good acting, the score. you do just want to be protected. that single infantile wish that stays with us forever. and i also want women to be protected against bad violent men, of which I know there are many. the Woman Cop is not how we will achieve this but she can evoke such relief and hope just by offering herself as a solution. the world is scary. one wants so badly to be convinced. this is how the alt-right pipline works.
love of the police remains entrenched within the democratic party, which over the past decade has been easily taken over by Law and Order Bush-era republicans whose embrace we are told to see as unity instead of pollution. with her lincoln project millions harris can talk empty platitudes while supporting fracking, war-hawking, and cop cities. a nine year old girl’s face was exploded by a pager. blood everywhere, her dad said. three Palestinians were thrown off the roof of a building by IOF soldiers who were supposedly unsure if the people were alive or dead. that’s also what i do when i come across someone so physically incapacitated i’m not sure if they’re alive or dead. if i view them as a human being with a human life that has value and also i live my life in accordance with the geneva convention, i throw them off the roof of a building. i do this all the time. i log on twitter and people are debating whether or not the pagers being bombs that killed people including a nine year old girl who had her face exploded is technically an act of terrorism. this matters a lot because i don’t know how i should feel about a nine year old girl’s face getting so exploded by an israeli bomb that she dies and is dead forever until we decide whether or not it’s terrorism. i log onto twitter and kamala harris is giggling cheekily because she shouldn’t admit to us that she would shoot someone to death with a gun if they committed a misdemeanor on her property. look at her laughing! and the people love it! look at them! look at them eating it up! eating it up with their little paws, slurping up the slop yum yum! and they all go teehee! teehee!
as president— as in her vice presidency, as in her role as one of the ultracops, state prosecutor— she will do nothing but condemn more people to death; she will send more bombs, like the pager bombs that exploded children and the larger bombs that have exploded so many children there are whole tomes just of the names of the dead. and the many more dead yet unknown, unfound— because of the collapsed stone in its immense tons, because of the assassinated journalists who can no longer witness or report or breathe, because the physical annihilation wrought by these weapons is so pure it results in the total disintegration of the body, a person split into many millions of microscopic parts. they died as they lived, the only way they could have lived under the colonial rule of an apartheid state: a non-person. uncounted. body into dust, as if they never existed.
it is difficult to look at the evidence and not come to the conclusion that kamala harris loves killing people. even if the only evidence we examined was the time she said that she would kill someone for infringing upon her right to private property, and laughed, it is the only conclusion that kamala harris loves to kill people. it is more important to kamala harris to protect the sanctity of her property than to preserve a human life. and the confession, like a schoolgirl: i probably shouldn’t have said that! this is the true selfishness and cruelty of the liberal laid bare. ultimately, they are wedded to a world order of property and asset protection. their politics, the entirety of their self-identity as empathetic, generous, and kind, is entirely constituted by what they say. Their speech is never a speech act— the kind of speech that actually does something in the world, like saying I do or guilty— but aesthetic, impotent.
they say that they are generous but sacrifice nothing, that they love democracy but rule their families and properties as tyrants; that they are inclusive but live ensconced in economic homogeneity, they condemn violence but champion the death machines of the military. some maybe even verbally condemn billionaires, but they sideline labor efforts and lash out viciously at anything that would endanger their own class position. they feel, but they do not allow feeling to move them to meaningful action.
the Woman Cop does not become a cop out of a righteous and self-sacrificial sense of justice, but for the reason that a lot of people become cops: she wants the opportunity to commit violence in a socially acceptable form. harris says she would shoot someone who trespasses into her house and I believe her. the emperor cop knows it is all her house. occupied Palestine is her house. Lebanon is her house. israel is her house and israel believes it owns the entire property of Palestine. we shouldn’t admit it so directly but we shoot trespassers here, and we shoot to kill.
— i don’t really care about kamala harris or write about electoral politics so don’t worry this won’t happen again.
— i saw Klute and i am going to write about Klute. Klute is a movie about jane fonda wearing mid-calf boots. more to come.
— i am very, very sad about the death of fredric jameson. a titanic genius is gone. he changed everything for me. i am going to write about him but it will require me doing a lot of (re)reading so it might take a while. i am sad.
Recently: the film Days of Heaven by Terrence Malick, the album Manning Fireworks by MJ Lenderman, the songs“Fuck and Run” by Liz Phair and “Stonemilker” by Björk, the books Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame and Psychoanalysis: the Impossible Profession by Janet Malcolm.
sorry to my fellow white latina for forgetting your name but idgaf