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July 7, 2001,11:34 a.m.

Lauren Berlant calls it "national sentimentality:" "a liberal rhetoric of promise...which avows that a nation can best be built across fields of social difference through channels of affective identification and empathy." What defines a citizen (in this rhetoric) is not her civic duties or her participation in the public culture, but rather the appearance of "right feeling," a sentimental attachment to the symbolic nation that has transformed the "proper" meaning of politics from a space of conflict to a space of "feeling good."

In this sentimental moment, politicians must be seen to "care," even if their policies are failures and social equity a distant, buried hope. A citizen must feel a part of something larger --the nation, "we the people"-- even if her actual ability or mobility within the sociopolitical sphere or the mythological space of imagined community is limited by the state or the national imaginary. In a state of national sentimentality, the experience of injury becomes the index for political claims, and the elimination of pain the limit of political responsibility.

Because I find it fascinating and useful, I've been trying to think through this notion of "national sentimentality" in a number of contexts, from video clips of immigrants being sworn in at naturalization ceremonies, to the popular outcry over a young, white beauty pageant child-contestant's murder (while others languish for lack of lip- glossed photographs and sequined head shots), to the recent "debates" around the World War II as "The Good War" (nevermind those h-bombs, internment camps, or the U.S. rejection of thousands of fleeing European Jews). About how national spectacles, like the Fourth of July, Ellis Island or the Korean War memorial, become the sites for national sentimentality,obscuring social or economic inquities or historical contradiction. Or even in the Vietnamese instance, how the refugee flight of 1975 becomes that defining moment of pain that supposedly binds the diaspora, even though it was a small percentage of Vietnamese (mostly elite) who actually left from those U.S. airfields in Saigon.

And not to be repetitive (well, too late), but the McVeigh execution seemed to be a symptom of this phenomenon -- his state-sanctioned murder was carried out to "punish" him, but also to (supposedly) relieve the pain of the victims' families. When the story about the trial files withheld by the FBI broke the news, the delay in his execution inspired rage -- hadn't the families suffered enough? wasn't he guilty enough? The elimination of pain (which is always ideological in its articulation) became the limit of political responsibility (though a number of the victims' families and other commentators seemed to believe that their more national pain could best be soothed by the vision of McVeigh's individual pain). And thus the U.S. government was able to wash its hands of the dirty dealings (suppressing evidence, sanctioning executions) because these things, these violations and troubling probes into the unjust power of the state, were overwhelmed by the demands of national sentimentality and the needs of the state to cover its tracks. The state must seem to care, even when the injustices on all sides can be attributed to its daily operation.

I thought of this also --of "proper" citizenship expressed as sentimentality-- when I read the following:

What if? What if, it were known across America that there were more flags on display in Koreatown/Chinatown/Little Saigon/Japantown [than anywhere else] on Independence, Memorial, and Veteran Days? What if, ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC picked up on it and routinely used those "seas of flags" as photo opportunities or special write-ups during our national holidays? Will most of our compatriots still think of us as foreigners? No way! Can we turn this vision into reality? Yes, if we each do our share! 80-20's Steering Committee has appropriated $50,000 to propagate this symbolic message to America. As a start, APAs in CA and NY will soon hear a 30-sec [sic] radio ad in English, Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese [to urge Asian Americans to display the American flag].

80-20 is a national nonpartisan Political Action Committee dedicated to winning equality and justice for all Asian Pacific Americans through a swing bloc-vote. For more details, visit http://www.80-20initiative.net.

-- excerpts and link courtesy of the Enemy Alien, a.k.a. Paperson

Ah. If Asian Americans would simply express the "right feeling" -a feeling which might be compressed into the simple yet prominent display of the Stars 'n' Stripes-- we might become "less foreign" in the eyes of others. This assimilating/naturalizing act of expressing the "right feeling," a national sentimentality, is the marker of an apparently worthy citizen -- and obscures the nonconsensual and oppressive origins and present-day practices of U.S. democracy. (And here the historical and social function of communities like Japantown or Little Saigon is ignored.) And the question of social equality or justice is not anymore about power, but of sincerity - if we only were seen as sincere, everything would be okay.

10:34 a.m.

And I remember when riot grrrl went the way of competing claims to pain -- white girls and boys decided they too had been injured, whether by racism ("It keeps us from having true human relationships") or by its victims/critics ("I felt silenced by all the girls of color!"). They misunderstood the basis of our politics - when we argued that our mobility in the "real world" and/or the punk rock hierarchy was limited because of our gender/race/sexuality/class, it wasn't to reify that violation (or its individual effects) but to throw into relief its productive conditions.

"Validation" and "healing" were never the horizon of our politics, and none of us, I don't think, ever argued that "feeling good" was our goal. But we watched in horror as white girls and boys began to express themselves in the language of pain and argue that freedom or "revolution" was in the elimination of conflict. On some level this was a sometimes overt accusation that we (girls of color, most of us) brought this conflict into the "safe space" of grrrl love and were responsible for their subsequent grrrl pain. What were left unaddressed were our critiques of empathy's limits, of token gestures and other moves to sidestep the question of social or cultural inequities. 

Queer political theorist Lauren Berlant asks, "What happens to questions of managing alterity or difference or resources in collective life when feeling bad becomes evidence for a structural condition of injustice?" I learned the answer to this question from my encounters with riot grrrl -- difference is then "contained" by a liberal rhetoric of tolerance and the sentimental desire to forego the conflict that dealing with difference neccessitates. "Feeling bad" is understood as (vague) injustice (with no real structural meaning) and "feeling good" becomes the limit of political transformation.

I think some part of our anger still stems from this mistranslation.