A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  Men themselves have wondered

  What they see in me.

  They try so much

  But they can’t touch

  My inner mystery.

  —Maya Angelou, ‘Phenomenal Woman’

  Hideous. Not quite so hideous, of course, as the inner mystery of the Sydney University Safe Space for Women. The mystery was that I abused my student privilege to found a personal on-campus fuckpad. But still. Maya was pretty bad. Yes, I know that Angelou worked in poetry’s oral tradition and we can’t expect the James Earl Jones of doggerel to look as good on the page as she did showered in the credulous ejaculate of liberal gratitude. But, bugger me, someone has to say it: Maya Angelou was a wonderful activist but a genuinely terrible poet and someone should have broken her pencils. Of course, I cannot say this because she is dead and THAT MIGHT BE TRIGGERING FOR YOU.

  When she was alive, I used to dream of breaking into a State occasion she threatened to ruin with her rot, hacking the teleprompter and replacing her nonsense about ‘summer puffs of wind’ or whatever with the words from the Mentos ad. Her voice was wonderful but her poetry no nobler than:

  It doesn’t matter what comes, fresh goes better with life,

  And Mentos is fresh and full of life.

  Nothing gets to you, staying fresh staying cool,

  With Mentos, fresh and full of life.

  Fresh goes better, Mentos freshness, fresh goes better

  With Mentos, fresh and full of life.

  Are you triggered? Sorry. I should say that I acknowledge Angelou as a significant figure. I should also say that at one point in my life, I had actual need of a safe space. (As Maya certainly must have when enduring the Stupid of racism.) I was a Queer Teen and my mother wasn’t exactly Celebrating My Difference. We argued quite violently about my Lifestyle Choice, which I denied with my lips but affirmed with my haircut, so she sent me to a homophobic psychologist. The homophobic psychologist assured me that her offices were a safe space and so I conceded that I had Feelings for Ladies—one in particular who had a motorcycle and remains the only lezzer of my acquaintance who had good taste in music. The homophobic psychologist rang my mother and, reportedly, said, ‘I am so sorry about your daughter. She is a homosexual.’

  If I had not been genetically burdened with an ego the size of a small moon, I may have become quite self-loathing at that point. My mother shrieked that I was sick. She raved about perversion and theorised that marijuana, a gentle father and Boy George were to blame. Being a smart-arse, I told her the delicious taste of vagina was to blame. Things didn’t go well after that. I sought asylum from her disgust; chiefly at an ultra-leftie community radio station, but a few times at a place set aside for kids just like me.

  Years later, as I was writing the editorial about the safe space of the gay arts festival, I remembered my need for an actual gay safe space; a genuinely safe space free from duplicitous psychologists and angry mothers who urged their children to hate themselves. I felt like queer itself had turned its back on the most urgently needed safe spaces. I know there are kids hearing the same selfish, unsafe shit from their parents, and what they need, more often than not, is a place to go. I ran away from home for a brief spell; I have had the merest experience of homelessness but many other kids endure it for longer. And they need a safe space to run to. But this is no longer a preoccupation of a movement itself absorbed with re-creating the conditions of the Sydney University Women’s Safe Space.

  A few years after I had written my first truly offensive editorial about the new, safe preoccupations of the queer movement, I had another piece published by an online newspaper. It was on a more general theme of These Social Justice People Are So Concerned With Making the Culture Nice and Safe They Don’t Look Out For Material Danger. It wasn’t especially good and I can’t remember for whom I wrote it and how much I was paid. But I copied and kept one of the comments from a young queer man:

  Your argument reminded me of a queer student activist meeting where queer homelessness, youth poverty and housing shortages were raised. Neither the discussion, nor the plan decided upon, had anything to do with the material problem. Instead, the focus was entirely on ‘the heteronormative language used by real estate agents’, and the symbolic ‘critique’ we were going to use to ‘combat’ it. I sat there thinking, what the f*** does this have to do with anything? Why aren’t we asking how many queer youth are in financial difficulty, un/underemployed, struggling to find accommodation, or homeless? How does this compare to the rest of the population? How do we get resources to people who need them?

  Instead, the focus was, ‘White picket fence language is discriminating against gays, let’s put up anti-heteronormative satirical posters around campus.’ When my mate suggested we at least depict the goals we were trying to achieve/who we were trying to help, the reply was, ‘We’re not really into that, we’re really into, just, like, critique.’

  They decided in the end to stick a ‘male’ mannequin in a dress outside [real estate agent] Hocking Stuart.

  He is much, much more promising as a human and a scholar than I ever was. I liked my space for activism safe at his age; almost certainly, I would have helped pick out the mannequin’s frock. Which is peculiar, really, given that I had an experience of homelessness just a few years before I segued into the pointless, safe work of cultural critique. I would like to be able to say that my insistence on a safe space for women at Sydney University sprang from my own rather vicious experiences at home, but by then, I had forgotten the terrible feeling and I quickly became mired in, rather than awed by, the privilege of actual safety. Life at a university good enough to make my mother proud of me again did not turn me into a good student. I was a bad student and a sloppy thinker who sought only the safety of agreement and the solace of sex in a room I’d disbursed my youthful energies defending when I could have been reading books about economics, which could have turned into action a bit more decent than the care of the self.

  I read Derrida instead. And he is certainly remarkable but dangerously safe for a selfish young mind. Postmodern critique provided even more padding to the ennui of the women’s safe space. Oh, it’s all just culture, I said and turned my spotty adolescent back on material danger for the safety of any literary criticism that wasn’t Harold Bloom.

  This is not to say there should not be literary criticism. This is not for a minute to suggest that we should not be ‘critics after dinner’, as Marx famously promised we could be after a day of working in the fields. The thing is, though, I had deluded myself into believing that my feeble ‘deconstruction’ of literature written for a tutor unlikely to do anything but encourage my onanism was Making a Difference to the Real Political World. I’m telling you: you’re not going to change shit ‘unpacking’ a ‘text’. Which is fine. I just happened to believe that I was changing the world from my academic safe space. I saw danger where there was none.

  It took all of my youth to acknowledge that I had long preferred safety over rigour. And I still hadn’t acknowledged the toxic nature of my love for ‘safety’ when Kylie and I arranged to meet for yoga.

  I am not proud but I am obliged to tell you that this was a date for ‘hot’ yoga; a ninety-minute endurance test of copyright-protected bullshit enforced with a thermostat set to thirty-seven degrees by a wafer-thin bint whose $7000 student fee paid to the Bikram Academy of Yoga entitled her to talk in faux Hindi about the ‘known’ connection between the human immune response and chakras.

  Look. I know. That two reasonable adults had spent money for the ‘wisdom’ of a dodgy franchise whose most notable contribution to the world was emissions from an over-worked heater is woeful. I had read on a HOLISTIC website that Kylie’s multifocal motor neuropathy is a condition that responds well to heat. Because yes: I was once the kind of person who decried Big Pharma and urged a return to holistic approaches. You know that shit. It believes there was a Golden Time when humanity Followed Its Instincts and that ‘herbs’ provide a system of
treatment better than that offered to us by evidence-based medicine. The success of so-called holistic ‘medicine’ does not inhere in its chemistry but in the way it is able to flatter its patrons much more than science (SO TRIGGERING) can. Generally, a GP has neither the time nor the professional inclination to hold your forearm warmly as an aromatherapy humidifier upchucks ylang ylang into air thick with the irresistible question, ‘So how are YOU?’ The attachment to ‘wellness’ I had developed came from vanity and the urge to be ‘understood’ and safe.

  The desire to be understood and truly known is, I’d guess, fairly widespread. I’m also going to say it is fairly unwholesome. It is a nasty craving that has driven me to do some pretty silly stuff at times, including:

  1. Asking my partner if he really understands me

  2. Telling a therapist my mother has never understood me (which is true but boring)

  3. Choosing a career that is entirely based on my need to be heard and understood by people I have never met.

  I had heard from an associate—who has since been lost to the cheap meth of personal development seminars and whose every utterance is riddled with phrases like ‘I have invented a possibility for myself’ or ‘I would like to enrol you in my possibility’—that the Bikram yoga instructors really understood. And the need to be safely understood drove me to yoga. Actually, Kylie drove me to yoga. Which was a little unnerving as I wasn’t entirely confident that her dodgy foot could work the brake. But she was, as I have told you, a practical lady and she had the car retrofitted.

  The car accommodated her but the chicken tikka spray-tan lady didn’t. Kylie told her, as per the request on the Indemnify the Safe Space form, that she had a bung foot. And she said, ‘So don’t be surprised if I can’t do all the postures.’

  ‘Don’t be surprised if you can,’ said Red Rooster.

  ‘No,’ said Kylie, ‘I will definitely not be able to do tree pose. I can’t stand on one foot because of the nerve damage.’

  ‘We have had people get up from wheelchairs,’ the instructor said. ‘You need to believe. If you don’t believe in the power of Bikram, you will never recover in your pain body.’

  By this stage, I was a scarlet so vivid as to make Miss Safe Orange Space seem pale. I asked Kylie if she wanted to fuck off and she said no, she’d give it a go. She’d been trying a meditation class here and a cupping therapy there, she said, to see if it helped with the anxiety her condition had produced. Some of the stuff was soothing. The massage in particular took her mind off limbs that sometimes felt dead. But a lot of it was pretty irritating and she was, by now, habituated to hearing wankers tell her that her nerve damage was ‘all in the mind’. Besides which, we had both heard that you could lose a kilogram or two in sweat and she was going out on a date that night.

  There was no access lift; not that Kylie needed one, but I had asked when I’d made the booking just in case she was having a shitty day. We climbed up the stairs to the yoga room and I wondered briefly how the miraculous wheelchair recovery person had managed.

  ‘This is a safe space.’

  ‘This is a place where you’ll be understood.’

  Like understanding ever changed the fucking world or produced a good idea. The proletariat doesn’t start a revolution by asking the bourgeoisie to understand it. Understanding is a placebo. Unless, of course, it is undertaken rigorously. Say, at university. Which is very difficult if you are worried about being ‘triggered’.

  We went to the class.

  Kylie had been a jogger for years and was strong. She did downward dog perfectly; she did a very creditable warrior. I didn’t as I am shit at yoga and was really in it for the heat-induced inch-loss. But the teacher didn’t correct my crap asanas despite the fact they were the most ungainly in the room.

  Instead, she picked out Kylie.

  ‘Kylie, Kylie,’ she said to Kylie. ‘Feel your Hindi-Word-I-Didn’t-Recognise-And-Am-Therefore-Unable-To-Reproduce-In-Text so you can achieve your Something-I-Am-Pretty-Sure-That-Nasty-Orange-Bitch-Made-Up.

  ‘Do your Mystical Whatsit so you can get in touch with your Chumbawamba and release your Spicy Fruit Roll.’

  And then it was time for the tree pose, which might very well Enhance the Root Chakra as claimed but, given that it demands that all one’s weight be carried by a single foot, is pretty much impossible if that foot has sustained significant nerve injury.

  ‘You need to believe, Kylie.’

  We need to get the fuck out of here, Kylie.

  The safe space has become a fixture of some contemporary social justice movements. In the safe space, all participants agree not to critique a certain set of principles. It’s a bit like bringing peanut butter to kindergarten. It will result in your expulsion.

  A few years ago, I was asked to do a funny piece at a feminist fundraiser. I wrote a short comic poem on the topic of penis and my new enthusiasm for it entitled ‘She’s Back on Solids’. But it turned out to be a fundraiser and a safe space.

  I picked up a copy of the rules and they requested that anything likely to ‘trigger’ negative responses be signalled with a ‘trigger warning’; that is, if one was planning to mention the topic of sexual abuse in particular, one should give ample time for those Viewers Who Might Find This Disturbing to leave the room. It also requested no ‘Feminism 101’ speak, which meant that all participants agreed that the basic principles of feminism be understood.

  Now, I can see how it might be profitable to discussion to observe both of these rules. Essentially, one is creating the means for a more advanced exploration of a topic without menace or inconvenience. But I also saw, in what turned out to be an okay evening, how these rules begin to take on the appearance of natural justice and how one very quickly can become enamoured of their enforcement. At university, I adapted quickly to seeing a reflection of my own views; any crack in the looking glass was a transgression. It hardly needs saying that the experience of exchange without opposition is seductive. And habit-forming.

  Creating a temporary zone for particular thought has its intellectual uses, but our tendency to take the temporary and make it permanent is one of our species’ least laudable and most dependable traits. God, we are good at explaining our worst and most Stupid habits away as ‘natural’. The formalised safe space sees any resistance as the work of a ‘troll’ and action outside narrow margins as ‘hostility’ and, as it has made its rules explicit, I guess it is entitled to do so. But it troubles me that these ground rules, intended to privilege the normally marginalised, reproduce the framework they seek to defy.

  This is what happens in the naturopath’s office. It happens in an increasingly niche electronic world where birds of a feather tend to tweet, ‘like’ and ‘share’ together. Once, I suppose, it happened in church, but there was not then the pretence of empowerment by participants; just the promise of heaven. In church, one consented to rules set by a Higher Authority or one was excommunicated. The authority of Understanding Each Other is far more duplicitous because it claims to be consensual. And one never knows when one has broken the rules until the naturopath has told you that your irises are blotchy or your book club strikes you off because you called literary fiction ‘just another genre’ or you are un-friended. You don’t know when you’ve broken rules often unwritten and always devised with ‘safety’ in mind.

  ‘Kylie. KYLIE,’ said the ginger tan to the falling tree. It was quite clear that the orange lady was concerned far less for Kylie’s safety than she was for the safety of The Space.

  Kylie broke the rules by toppling over; the failure of her body was an affront to Bikram.

  That Kylie was unafraid to topple is to her credit. The composed, yogic look on her face as she went down conveyed the stupidity of the safe space so invested in the protection of itself and not those within it. Being unafraid to make a misstep in one of these unsafe safe spaces takes a courage I couldn’t muster for years. Perhaps now, having abandoned the need for intellectual safety, I can get off my arse
and build some genuinely safe space for people persecuted by a force more awful even than ‘triggering’ poetry.

  HR

  6

  National stupidity: How the War on Terror is killing and impoverishing us

  They hate our freedoms.

  —George W. Bush, 2001

  Much, indeed most, of the Stupid we’ve encountered so far has been traceable through a long lineage in Western thought. The Stupid we’re about to examine reflects many of the urges and causes of historical Stupid, but is of a considerably more recent development: primarily since 9/11, but with its roots in the national security state that has developed since the Second World War.

  When it comes to modern examples of extreme Stupid, it doesn’t get bigger, vaster, more historic, more epochal, than the Iraq War.

  First, there was the cost.

  The United States is estimated to have spent $1.7 trillion on the Iraq War so far, with much more expenditure to come in the decades ahead via healthcare and veterans’ costs. The final total could be in the order of $4 trillion. The cost to the UK of its participation was a fractional, but still substantial, US$14 billion in 2010; the cost to Australian taxpayers of Australia’s trivial support role in the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ had, by 2011, reached $2.4 billion. Nearly 4500 US troops died, along with 179 UK servicemen and women, with many thousands more injured and crippled. US Iraq veterans continue to have a frightening rate of suicide.

  Then there were the results.

  The most significant direct achievement of the war was the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis—estimates vary between 100,000 and 600,000. Whatever the number, so many Iraqis died during the ensuing allied occupation and civil war that, according to the World Bank, life expectancy in Iraq fell by two years between 2002 and 2007; in 2010 it had still not recovered to pre-war levels. Iraq itself has now fallen apart in another sectarian civil war, with the country now divided into a relatively effective Kurdish state, a nightmarishly brutal and aggressive Sunni terrorist state, and what’s left of southern Iraq, likely to become a client state of Iran. Meantime, the West is once again ramping up its rhetoric and deploying its military to address what is deemed to be the ‘apocalyptic’ threat of the Islamic State.