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Tensions between the near infallibility of religious rule and popular demands for democracy had been present throughout the revolution, and the drafting of the constitution brought them to a high pitch. Sticking with the insensitivity to Iranian domestic politics that had characterized America’s relationship to the country in the years leading up to the revolution, President Carter picked this fraught moment to allow the shah to enter the US for cancer treatment, thanks in part to an intense lobbying campaign organized by executives at Chase Manhattan Bank, of which the shah was a highly valued client. (Not satisfied with securing his entry, the Chase team, led by bank chairman David Rockefeller, also acquired visas for the shah’s associates and found a mansion for him to live in.) American officials justified the decision on humanitarian grounds, but they treat cancer in other countries, too. Politically, it was idiotic, providing a boost to the militant wing of the Iranian government at a moment when the shape that government would take was still unclear. Hard-liners seized on the gesture as evidence of a plot: America was biding its time and preparing to reinstall the shah, with the CIA running operations out of the American embassy in Tehran. On November 4, 1979, some four hundred university students overran the embassy and took the Americans hostage.
lol
This may sound like the mindset of a comic-book villain, but America’s investment in surplus imperialism has a concrete, material basis. Since the end of World War II, the United States has been not only the world’s most powerful capitalist nation but the global custodian of capitalism itself. (That task had previously fallen to the system of European colonialism, which at its height occupied some 80 percent of the world.) In exchange for the privilege of enjoying the highest rates of consumption on earth, the United States also invests more than any other country in the direction, supervision, and maintenance of global capital flows. These investments take many forms, including the spearheading of free-trade agreements, the establishment of financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), support for governments that adhere to the capitalist consensus and the undermining of those that don’t, and the use of military force to pry open markets in cases where diplomacy and economic pressure aren’t enough. The “surplus” aspect of America’s imperialism is crucial, because capitalism requires stability and predictability through time in order to function smoothly. Investments need months, years, or decades to produce their returns, and people are only willing to invest their capital if they feel confident that the future is going to unfold in the way they expect. You don’t start producing almonds until you’re confident that almond milk isn’t just a passing fad, and you don’t move one of your factories to a new country if there’s a chance a leftist government will come to power and expropriate the factory. Financial markets move every day in response to changes in these ephemeral moods, and the financial press has names for them: uncertainty, consumer confidence, business expectations.
The overlap of treatment and punishment in the sex offense legal regime is a part of a process critics refer to as medicalization: the reconception of differences or problems as medical or psychiatric disorders — frequently constructed as biologically caused — that need to be prevented, diagnosed, or treated. Marginalized sexual desires or acts considered immoral at a given time, like homosexuality, are often subject to medicalization, turning “badness to sickness,” as sociologists Peter Conrad and Joseph Schneider write in their 1980 classic Deviance and Medicalization. But the slippage is not just between nature and culture; it is also between the moral and the legal. Asked how she defined sexual deviance, the therapist in Dallas replied, “Deviance is anything that’s against the law.”
PEOPLE WHO COMMIT sexual harm have commonly experienced trauma as children or adults. Like most of us at some point in our lives, they could use therapy. But civil commitment is prison, and incarceration is psychologically destructive; indefinite detention borders on psychological torture — the opposite of therapy. Furthermore, the “treatment” arm of the sex offense legal regime asks us all to collaborate, recruiting the public, helping professions, schools, religious institutions, and even families to police the state’s boundaries between sexual normalcy and deviance. The radical approach to civil commitment is to stop thinking of sexual violence as a sociopathology from which the community must be safeguarded, and to turn instead to social and environmental approaches that engage the community in helping people who have done harm to live nonviolent lives.
What we need are paradigm shifts: from justice as retribution to justice as healing, from conviction to accountability, punishment to repair, and rehabilitation to transformation. Movements for transformative and restorative justice are not just for institutions, nonprofits, or, simply, someone else. All of us need to step away from the systems to which we have outsourced the responsibility to deal with harm and make us safer.
If we want to end violence, we have to divest from the industries of punishment and surveillance and invest in what allows people and communities to flourish. And to invest in economic, political, and social systems that put people — all people — before profit, we must never abandon children, or anyone else, to endure or defend themselves when they are subjected to sexual harm. But the United States abandons people in countless ways — leaving them without decent housing, health care, clean water, and so much else. The sex offense legal regime displaces real protection with a false sense of security at the same time as it incites terror to justify itself. Like the rest of the criminal legal system, it disproportionately targets people of color. It exiles a permanent class of sexual pariahs — now nearly a million — from the rights of residency, citizenship, and humanity itself. It is long past time to overthrow the regime.
“My father lives with another wife,” Murad, 26, explained to me in April 2019, “so I live with my mother in one room.” His family’s shack is on the shabby edge of Gaza City, the toilet separated from the eating, sleeping, and living areas by only a thin curtain. There is no kitchen, just a small gas stove, but after Murad’s injury there was little to cook. Before Murad was shot on May 14, 2018, he used to make 20 NIS, or $5.80, a day as a self-taught electrician. He has not worked since his injury, and the aid he receives from the authorities isn’t enough to keep him and his mother afloat. The help offered to him by his family has been scant. “I can only afford to buy biscuits,” he said. “Last night we just ate stale bread for dinner. We have nothing. We’ve not had gas for a month.”
If we conjure the political will to create socialized medicine under the argument that health care is a human right, what forms of becoming gendered will be covered? To say that only bottom surgery would qualify is to reinscribe precisely our enemies’ reductive biopolitics of genital obsession. But what if becoming woman is a process not simply of jumping across a gendered binary, but one constantly occurring within gender itself? Do we then lean into or out of the medicalization of the gendered body? Do we have a right to be hot? Why should the socialist state cover one woman’s acquisition of breasts and not another’s augmentation of them? What is the space of nonequivalence between these two visions of “rights,” the right to purchase a commoditized medical service and the rights of an individual within a sociopolitical collectivity? If the welfare state is staked on the ethical wager that the plastic body is sponsored by the collectivity to help realize a collective vision of the good, what is the relation between rights and desires? And if the body is not private property to be managed as an investment, then how do we relate to it?
this essay got a lot of backlash (mostly due to quotes taken out of context) but i like the way it framed these questions
[...] There was Bernie Sanders, a socialist from a Brooklyn immigrant family who does not appear in Romance. He became the mayor of a small city in Vermont, then a senator, and finally ran twice for President. “I have cast some lonely votes, fought some lonely fights, mounted some lonely campaigns,” he wrote in 2015. “But I do not feel lonely now.” I don’t feel lonely anymore, but it isn’t nearly enough. An infinite amount of care seems necessary. While we gather our strength, the lucky ones among us will grow old.
WE DO FEEL READY to blame someone. Clinton’s campaign was doomed from the start. “Not our President”? Not our Party either. The Democrats — festooned this season with celebrities and capitalists to an unthinking degree — rarely talked about what workers and the dispossessed needed to build their lives. Most voters could hardly name a thing Clinton was for. Instead, the campaign piped into every swing-state living room a nonstop stream of American success, the sunshine pabulum of the DNC: “America is great because America is good,” “America is already great.” Anger, loss, and economic trauma could be overcome by a genial disposition, an endless exhibition of proper behavior with an extra helping of negative ads correcting Trump for his crude (never “criminal”) actions.
And there was something more: Coetzee seemed so dubious about the possibilities of language-as-communication, preferring instead to consider words as a species of music (cf. Disgrace and Foe for articulations of this properly Viconian idea), that Diana wondered whether she should not give up writing. After finding out, two years after meeting Daniel, that he would support her, she had wondered whether she should not simply content herself with the animal sufficiency of their life together, and abandon writing. Really: why write? Speak of the darkest matters, and still you have only produced a decoration for a comfortable room. Adorno said it long ago, when domiciled in LA: even Kafka’s books have become so much furniture.
Diana finds herself thinking again what she has thought before: she should be an activist, not a writer. The thought is never serious. Still, she does not see that it avails anything to write highbrow book chat. Her reviews communicate nothing, convince people of nothing. They are a talented girl’s brittle recital, more or less pleasant on the ear. Sometimes people offer that she writes well; never do they say she has induced them to think.