Earlier this evening, I was reminded once again of Chinua Achebe’s 1959 novel Things Fall Apart. Though it probably sounds counterintuitive, Senator Tim Scott’s response to President Joe Biden, or rather people’s reactions to it, evoked Ekwefi’s story about the tortoise and the birds, a seemingly innocent story she relates to her daughter Ezinma. But the folktale is really a story about the power of language. In the story, the tortoise tricks the birds into assenting to a technicality that enables him to eat nearly all their food at a great feast in the sky. They eventually exact a level of retribution, but the statement that echoes inside my mind is Ekwefi’s line: “Tortoise had a sweet tongue.” That he did; and so, too, does Senator Scott. I’ve only seen a few critical statements here and there. But every comment I’ve seen or heard—on cable news, Twitter posts, and other social media sites—has pointed to various contradictions or explained in detail why Scott’s statement was immoral or misleading. But such criticisms are quite beside the point, and they betray political ineptitude.
Like other members of the GOP, Senator Scott operates in the subcutaneous realm of human emotions. He’s not concerned with truth; he wants to shape people’s perceptions of truth—what Marxist theorists once called ideology and older Black folk called tricknology. But regardless of the terminology, facts fall short in conflicts like this. The most effective response is to clap back and tap back into people’s gut-level feelings because emotions are often averse to contrary views and information. In a political situation like this, reciting catalogs of factual data is counterproductive. It’s like putting money in a pocket with a hole in it. The real challenge is to lampoon and thus illuminate Scott’s contradictions w/ such razor-sharp satire and irony, so that they appear to be as ludicrous as they really are—even to some of his supporters potentially. Progressives are quite adept at academic politics: most are very good at battling so-called moderates and various rival figures on the left against whom peer-reviewed articles and books are much more effective. But in the bare-knuckle world of right-wing politics, progressives’ dependence on conventional academic strategies is analogous to bringing boxing gloves to a bar fight. By and large, the critical reactions to Scott demonstrate how thoroughly many of us have internalized bourgeois paradigms as constitutive of knowledge itself.
Achebe’s elaborations on traditional Ibo narrative forms and the philosophical constructs therein exemplify the wisdom engraved in the grooves of African Diasporic cultures, and our great wordsmiths are prime examples. The hilarious Black queer woman comedian Moms Mabley came of age during Jim Crow when Black artists suffered legal and extralegal consequences for criticizing public officials. But she would’ve had a field day responding to Scott. She may have even elicited a chuckle from Scott himself or perhaps some of his supporters. After all, the greatest Black wordsmiths could always provoke laughter and thus minimal concessions from people who fundamentally disagreed w/ them. Hence Richard Pryor’s early 1970s recordings. Or even Gil Scott-Heron’s classic song-poems (incidentally, this is one of the reasons why “the godfather of rap” is too narrow to accommodate his legacy). They were all experts at using wit, satire, parody, and so forth. Academics often talk about the lack of a mind-body split, but this whole situation typifies how deftly GOP politicians exploit that aspect of human phenomena.
Which brings me to my final point. Another omission in current discussions is Scott’s main objective. Considering the premium on “theory” in academic circles, such an omissions seems rather ironic, especially since so many thinkers describe themselves as “radicals.” The inordinate talk about the senator’s “carrying water for the GOP” is misguided. This is a symptom of the problem, and talking about it incessantly ignores the fundamental fact that Scott’s strategy worked. He effectively deflected and sidetracked discussions about the most terrifying experiences in recent history: the living nightmare of state violence. Police officers are shooting and killing us with virtually no legal consequences, and it’s happening in our homes, in our streets, and increasingly in live and living color on tape. These are modern-day lynchings; and if we borrow a basketball-analogy for our discussion, Scott’s response was a prototypical pump-fake of GOP obfuscation. His speech was as predictable as voter suppression in red states, which is calculated, in all honesty, to transform the nation into an official state of white supremacy. In a word, a uniquely American form of fascism. This is what’s at stake.
Yet progressive pundits, professors, and corporate broadcast journalists fell for Scott’s trick. GOP tricknology is gangster to the max: Three-card Monte—find the red card. As with the birds in Things Fall Apart, progressives’ gullibility can be remarkable at times. It’s easy to disprove a boldface lie or to correct statements that are more subtle and misleading. But this is isn’t a classroom or a debate. Republicans’ refusal to accept Donald Trump’s defeat in the presidential election has precipitated violence and vitriol fueled by racist propaganda. This is the subtext of Scott’s rebuttal to Biden. The challenge for leftists, then, is to create discursive aversions to misinformation. That is to say, make it less rewarding. Obviously, accomplishing anything along these lines would be exceedingly more difficult, but the political payoff would be commensurate, especially in terms of mobilizing our people, not to mention providing a critical context for local discussions of politics wherever people gather. Indeed, mobilization will play a decisive role in our efforts to stave off full-blown American fascism, regardless of its terminology (e.g., autocracy, white nationalism, etc.). Indeed, the rancid seeds are being sown at this moment. It is therefore vital to engage people’s emotions and to counterpunch rhetorically via signification or other cultural devices. Given the circumstances, this is the least we can do.
Such are the political insights implicit in Ekwefi’s folktale. When Tortoise instructs Parrot “to bring out all the soft things in [his] house and cover the compound with them so that [he could] jump down from the sky without very great danger,” Parrot altered the message and told Tortoise’s wife to bring out “the hard things” instead. Hopefully, we can come up with more resourceful ways to respond. As Achebe understood all too well, racial capitalism presumes that we are little more than parrots who are doomed to repeat their narratives. In the context of modern U.S. politics, concentrating solely on disputing Republicans’ bogus claims ad infinitum is tantamout to the stereotype. Such reactions are futile and self-defeating. Counterpunch—this is the legacy we must learn from Achebe and other resistance writers throughout the African diaspora.
