“Leon Marlensky” is an alias that a fellow academic insists upon using in order to protect his identity. “Leon” insists that he is the last of the true leftists, that “the right,” as he calls it, has won.  The coverage of the Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal events proves this, Leon argues.  This makes for an interesting read, for Leon Marlensky is nothing if not consistent–at least most of the time.

To Those of You Who Claim to be Progressive:

There is much talk these days about the “leftward” drift of American society. To hear the right tell it, from academia to Hollywood, from the media to Washington, “the left” controls virtually every precinct of our culture.

If only it were true.

Tragically, there is no left. Not any longer. Even the rhetoric of self-styled “leftists” betrays the near total extent to which our society remains captive to a regressive political agenda.

The right-wing is winning.

No, it has won.

No event in the pop culture more attests to this than the celebration of Bruce Jenner’s “transition” to “Caitlyn.”

To hear Jenner—and his legions of admirers—tell it, there is no sex change here: “Bruce” was born Caitlyn. “Bruce” had always been a mask that Caitlyn, due to the tragedy of having been born into some male’s body, had been forced to wear. But now, at long last, she can shed this vessel and assume one that she finds more congenial to her gender.

What an awful story.

And it is awful precisely because it perpetuates precisely the same mind-body dualism that has been used from at least the time of Plato to justify all manner of oppression. Since, from the perspective of this invidious ontology, a person is “essentially” his or her mind, he or she just happens to have a body. What this in turn means is that one’s body is fundamentally no different than any other object that one happens to own. Thus, the body, having but a contingent relationship to the mind to which it belongs, is objectified, denigrated, another resource to be expropriated courtesy of the exploitative designs of the mind that rules over it.

In their more honest and sober moments, “feminists”—I hate this word—have realized that the gender oppression that has defined Western civilization for all of its history has depended upon casting thought in terms of the binary opposition of mind/body, for the latter has paralleled that of masculine/feminine inasmuch as the “feminine” has been depicted at the level of body while masculine has been associated with mind.

Yet now these same feminists, along with every other troglodyte, celebrate from the hilltops Bruce Jenner’s “transition” to Caitlyn Jenner.

Of course, this is scarcely the only time that “feminists” have doomed themselves.

For starters, the very name of “feminism,” far from so much as ameliorating, much less eliminating, gender oppression, only serves to strengthen it. Again, the masculine/feminine binary has just as long of a history in the West as does that of the mind/body. There’s a reason for this: In practice, the two are inseparable. “Feminists” legitimize these binaries. In doing so, they legitimate both the idea that there really is an “essential” difference between men and women and the idea that women, as the “natural” counterpart(s) to body, deserve to be ruled by men.

“Feminists” have also argued for abortion on grounds that reinforce mind/body dualism: When it is claimed that abortion is morally right because “women”—another word, implying as it does that women derive their being and worth from men, is radically self-defeating—“own” their bodies, it should be obvious that the body generally and women’s bodies in particular are objectified. However, objects are mere means toward the ends of those who, by nature, lord it over them.

Do you see where this thinking gets us? It isn’t just the prenatal entity growing in the mother’s womb that now becomes but another commodity in a merciless capitalist system. Since the environment generally, and animals and plants specifically, are manifestations of body or mindless matter, they too are now transformed into the properties of those who lay claim to them. If a woman owns her body and, thus, can and should be permitted to use it for whatever purposes she deems fit—including that of killing a fetus for occupying her body without her express “consent”—then to the extent that humans, being minds, can make property claims to all other mindless beings, humans can and should be permitted to use animals and plants in whatever ways that they wish to use them—even if this means destroying them for fun.

This mind/body dualism that has blighted the Western imagination since nearly its inception has and continues to account for all manner of degradation and brutality. Yet the Republican conservative Caitlyn Jenner—it is wholly unsurprising that she is a right-winger—and her “progressive” allies have just done more to market it than anyone of recent memory. Plato would be proud.

Though in the common parlance these evils are none other than “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “colonialism,” “imperialism,” and the like, common usage reflects and exacerbates the hegemonic rule of Eurocentric thought over the rest of the globe.

The notion that, for example, “racism” is an evil is a function of the notion that “the individual” assumes moral priority. In other words, if it is true that “racism” is a great evil, then “individualism” is normative. But “individualism” is a uniquely Eurocentric or Western moral doctrine. By promoting the idea that “racism” is an evil, people of European descent are guilty of doing what they’ve been doing for centuries.

They are guilty of coercing, whether overtly or subtly, by a thousand cuts, as it were, those outside of their group into accepting their own vision of morality.

What a vision this is.

This bourgeois doctrine of “individualism,” indispensable as it is to the rise and legitimation of the savage capitalism that has reduced everything that it touches to things to be bought and sold, is only kept alive by packaging evils in terms of “racism” and the like.

Discourse over issues of race and “racism” is another area that puts the lie to the fiction that the left has achieved some sort of cultural dominance.

Right now, a young estrogen-bearer by the name of Rachel Dolezal is at the heart of a media-contrived controversy. Even though Dolezal, the president of the Spokane (Washington) chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), is of European descent, she claims to be “black.”

This is the controversy.

A reporter asked Dolezal if she was “African-American.” To her credit, Dolezal responded with incredulity, insisting to the reporter that she didn’t understand his question.

If the left was a real influence in this country, the question itself would’ve been seen for the racially inflammatory—the “racist”—garbage that it is.

The term “African-American” is offensive. First, no inhabitant of the land mass referred to as “Africa” ever used this name until it was assigned by Europeans. “African” has etymological roots in Latin, the language used by the Romans. There was no “Africa” until the Romans declared it so.

As for “America,” this name too is of European lineage, for what we now know as America was named after the Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci. “African-American” is a Eurocentric fiction, a category straightjacket within which people of European descent seek to corral and trap those with salient Negroid features.

“Black” is just as racially offensive as the term “African-American.” White/black are among those binary oppositions that Westerners have relied upon to oppress those deemed more like body and, hence, inferior. Furthermore, “black” is another category that people of European descent invented to render invisible the diversities that exist among those taken from “Africa.” “Black” implies not white. With one simple word, the personhood of hundreds of millions of human beings around the globe is eliminated.

A true leftist, a consistent leftist, wouldn’t need for all of this to be spelled out.

Sincerely,

Leon Marlensky, Ph.D. Literary Studies and Studies in Global Justice (University undisclosed)