The claim of the World-Spirit rises above all special claims.
—Hegel

I don’t know what it is that so disturbs me about the screaming crowds, the interminable TV coverage, the invocations of Lincoln and King, the full conscription of humane culture from pop star to poet. Lewis Lapham wrote a book called The Wish for Kings, and that—not hope, not change, not a new dawn or a dream come true—is what I sense here. A population so demoralized, so brutally cut off from the social, so immersed in totalizingly mediating technologies, yearns for a kind of Hegelian union in the state of subjective consciousness with world-spirit. When white conservatives do it, we know what to call it. But we knowers feel odd calling this by its right name due to its canny conflation with a certain teleogical version of the African-American experience.

Obama understands the white liberal American distaste for power as a symptom of white privilege, and he is certainly right.
—David Samuels

And this has been my qualm about “multiculturalism” in academe and popular culture, which would have been a good idea, but which has become a mere rainbow-hued reinscription of American nationalism. In university survey courses, for instance, multiculturalism means that you will read books by WASP Americans, Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Jewish-Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latino/a Americans, Arab-Americans and Native Americans, and what this boils down to is that you will have spent your undergraduate career reading books by Americans; diversity never looked so uniform. The conservative will complain that there’s no room for Shakespeare; my complaint is that there is no room for any language other than English, no matter how inflected with immigrant languages, and if you don’t make it far enough across the ocean to reach the literature of England, you can be damn sure that Russia and China and India and Nigeria and everywhere else remain a blank. American ideology, ever resourceful, has taught us to laugh at the Puritans, but, hey, when it comes to diversity we sure are a city on a hill. Even Toni Morrison, perhaps our greatest novelist, and one who seemed to know better, has caught the bug. Meanwhile the president-elect mulls intervention in Darfur and journalists wonder what our president of African descent will “do for” Africa, as if the concept of diaspora has convinced American ethnic bourgeoisies and their white missionary/NGO counterparts that they own the places they came from. The world can look forward to the “multicultural person’s burden.”

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind.
—Toni Morrison

But, much as the pleasant-faced, feel-good, humanitarian imperialism that the coming years promise disgust me, I cannot pose as a Leftist purist, though I am that to a certain extent. Personally I am also disgusted by this desire of my generational cohort, black and white, to melt into the television and fuse with the state. I have an anarch taste for fragmentation and drift, mess and chaos, bohemia and poetry, and our new body politic, shorn of its mangy Bush, is altogether too clean for me. Now you will be given hard stares if you mutter darkly about the state of the world, now you will be suspect if you reject the new normal—Bono and Sanjay Gupta, Save Darfur and escalate Afghanistan. America’s back and better than ever, and they’re partying in the city on the hill, and naysayers can go to the devil. Well, I suppose my party is the devil’s after all.