A Dyke A Broad #60
On Covid, Merkel's departure, and what Rosa Luxemburg can teach us about social change.
Hello from Paris!
Today I got jabbed for the third time with a booster that will probably help somewhat against the latest strain of Covid, but definitely works against the still dominant Delta. Yay science! Still, hospitals are starting to fill up again, and exhausted medical professionals are protesting against working conditions, and for higher wages and more help. The government can do something about the first two. But recruiting health care workers is an uphill battle worldwide.
There are other solutions, of course, if you change the channel. This time of year French TV is packed with formulaic American holiday specials in which an independent, but frazzled, woman with a city slicker job like book editor has to return to her hometown to take care of an orphaned child, or wrap up an estate, or save the family bakery, and just happens to meet a confirmed bachelor, and after a little rivalrous head-butting, ends up under the mistletoe with him where she looks less happy than relieved to have a strong arm to lean on, a fairy tale man who not only knows how to fix the electricity, but change diapers, nurse elderly relatives, cook dinner, and even clean up afterwards. In short, who needs day care, home help, health insurance, and a paid vacation, when you can have a man?
In the meantime, one woman who’ll soon be taking a very long vacation, also known as retirement, is German chancellor Angela Merkel. On Thursday, she was honored for her sixteen years of service with a torchlit military farewell in the courtyard outside the defense ministry in Berlin. (It’s worth watching. )
Angela Merkel put a decidedly nonmilitary stamp on the occasion by using her brief remarks to encourage Germans to defend democracy, stick to the world of science and fact rather than indulge in conspiracy theories—especially when it comes to Covid. And above all, to try to see things from multiple points of view.
Then, of course, there were her genius musical choices. Every honoree gets to pick three songs that the military band will play. Hers drew worldwide analysis. The first was a Christian hymn—no surprise given her party (Christian Democratic Union) and religious upbringing (her father was a Protestant pastor). The second, Hildegard Knef’s Für mich soll’s rote Rosen regnen (It should rain red roses for me), says, “I was supposed to conform, make do…Oh, I can’t conform, I can’t make do, I always want to win too.”
The real shocker, though, was East German punk rocker Nina Hagen’s Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen (You forgot the colour film). As the Guardian wrote:
First recorded in 1974 in a conventional schlager style, the song was a hit in the East German pop charts before Hagen emigrated to the other side of the iron curtain, where she immersed herself in London subcultures and became West Germany’s pre-eminent punk figure of the 1980s.
The song, whose lyrics were written by Kurt Demmler, is an angry lament that admonishes Hagen’s boyfriend Michael for having only taken a black and white film on their holiday to Hiddensee island. As a result, she wails, “no one will believe how beautiful it was here”.
The song is incredibly ambiguous. The Guardian suggested that it was “understood by its admirers at the time as a covert criticism of the socialist republic and its grey and drab everyday, where colour films were a rare commodity.” And went on to speculate that Merkel was making a swipe at men not doing their jobs properly.
Another writer suggested that the song choice was a way of saying that even under the Soviets, life was not uniformly grey.
I have another theory, prompted by the very tiny smile that seemed to appear on Merkel’s face as the military band played, that the song could also be a comment on her years as chancellor, even on how she herself is perceived. After all, she’s the politician applauded for her boring stability, her pantsuits and practical shoes. She’s the one who kept Germans from panicking during the 2008 worldwide financial crisis, and didn’t rock any boats until she decided to keep German borders open in 2015-16 despite the colossal influx of migrants mostly fleeing civil war in Syria. And later managed to fend off the anti-immigrant backlash from the initially welcoming Germans.
Seriously, who could be more boring than Merkel?— A scientist with an earnest belief in science telling people to get vaxxed, a stodgy former East German with an equally earnest belief in democracy, freedom, cooperation and incremental change. There’s nothing more unexciting, grayer, less cutting edge than governing, trying to put those beliefs in action. I can imagine her singing… “…No one will believe how beautiful it was here.”
It takes a certain kind of person to do what she has—persist. One conundrum of social change is that it takes very little to demobilize people once the shiny new revolutionary rhetoric has ceased, and some gains, even small, have been won. Which is where I return to Rosa Luxemburg whose thoughts in Accumulation of Capital could just as well apply to other things, like Accumulation of Male Power aka The Patriarchy.
As Hannah Arendt explains it in her essay on Luxemburg,
Marx’s “original accumulation of capital” was not, like original sin, a single event, a unique deed of expropriation by the nascent bourgeoisie, setting off a process of accumulation that would then follow “with iron necessity” its own inherent law up to the final collapse. On the contrary, expropriation had to be repeated time and again to keep the system in motion. Hence capitalism was not a closed system that generated its own contradictions and was “pregnant with revolution”, it fed on outside factors, and it’s automatic collapse could occur, if at all, only when the whole surface of the earth was conquered and had been devoured.
The lesson I take? That the Patriarchy, like Capital, is not a fixed thing. It’s not pegged to one event, or place or thing. When one sector is played out, it leaps to another, and maybe returns when there’s an opening. It is hungry and insatiable. And if you want to make a dent in it, you cannot strategize as if you’re up against a single animal that can be brought to the ground with one shot. You have to treat it like a virus that hides and shifts.
A case study? The increasingly obvious failure of the single-issue American “women’s” movement which, ever since I can remember, has focused almost only on abortion, and not just abortion, but a single law protecting abortion. As a result, they (we) have failed to protect even that. Lost by the wayside—the broader fight for female equality and liberation. If we are going to get anywhere, including in that battle, we have to engage in nearly constant vigilance, rethink everything, and above all acknowledge that agents of male power, to put it politely, are constantly working to obscure our basic interests, often by co-opting our own language. Which we gobble up like poison.
Other Brain Hash
Check out this young artist’s Twitterfeed. She’s on fire.
Meanwhile, historian Heather Cox Richardson calls for a radical return to centering, “the public good.” A week ago, she urged readers to, “… focus on the mechanics of government and constantly to call out official actions that you would find unacceptable if they happened to "your" side, especially if it's "your" side doing them."
She’s a woman after my own heart.
That’s it for this time.
Disgruntledly yours,
Speaking of torches, if you’re looking for a dykely Christmas present, think about ordering a copy of The Lesbian Avenger Handbook: A Handy Guide to Homemade Revolution.
Or why not, Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger.