By Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday, September 24, 2024
Elvis was a hero to most
But he never meant sh** to me
Straight up racist that sucker
was
Simple and plain
— Chuck D., “Fight the Power”
Ta-Nehisi Coates never meant a thing to me, for the
simple reason that I missed his heyday. I was just an observer sitting in the
stands back during the Obama era, and thus was under zero professional
obligation to pretend he was “America’s most important essayist,” or anything
other than an obsequiously overpraised writer of middling observational talent
whose revealed politics ranged from obnoxious to poisonous. The poisonous
aspect of his political character, apparent long ago, has finally resurfaced
once again.
It is in fact presently something of a bitter,
retrospective joke across the journalistic industry that Coates — long before
George Floyd, mind you — was slavishly elevated to the dais as America’s most blazingly relevant political commentator, and not out of
merit so much as what hardheaded Marxist Freddie de Boer accurately labels the
Left’s fetish for “deference politics.” Coates was there at the right time
with the right profile employing the right buzzwords with the right amount of
craft; his literary deification was thus a symbolic act of token appreciation
to salve elite egos, and to his credit Coates himself seemed to grow
uncomfortably aware of it over time.
So he dropped out of it all, Chappelle-style, and became
a writer of comic books. You didn’t read them, I didn’t read them, a bunch of
people made fun of them on Twitter, and they didn’t sell. But I honestly
respected his decision to simply leave it all behind at a certain point and do
what amused him instead; one assumes he made enough money off of his Obama-era
memoirs to live comfortably doing what pleased him, and whether it’s writing
preachy woke comic books or (what I hope was) an attempt at young
adult fiction for that matter, then more power to Coates. It seemed like a
healthy and self-aware reaction to overpraise. (You made your money, might as
well enjoy it. I’d buy a bunch of out-of-print history books, myself.)
Alas, Coates is back and wants the world to know it, for
he is filled once again with a moral righteousness the likes of which he has
not felt since the days when speaking fees in the post–George Floyd era began
to crater. His urgent cause, according to New York magazine, which just profiled
him for the unveiling of his newest book? You guessed it: The elimination of
the Jewish state.
You see, Ta-Nehisi Coates spent a few weeks in Israel
last year before and during the October 7 massacres, and figured this entire
situation out. In particular, he concluded that Israel is the true enemy and
Palestinians the true collective victim in the only great moral battle of our
times. The first inklings of his views were evident on October 14, 2023, when —
mere days after the massacre by Hamas — Coates headed up the list of signatories on an open letter
condemning Israel for, in essence, bringing the slaughter upon
themselves, one which strongly implied that all of Israel was properly
Palestinian territory.
Now in his New York profile he is transparent:
“Does industrialized genocide entitle one to a state? No.” Israel is
illegitimate; the idea of a Jewish state is inimical to proper woke conceptions
of justice and must be ended to return it to the terrorists who wish to butcher
or enslave its current Jewish inhabitants to the last man. Not even the author
of the profile is entirely convinced, if this attempt at praising Coates’s
upcoming tract is anything to go on:
The book is strongest when its
aperture is narrow. There is no mention of the fact that Israel is bombarded by
terrorist groups set on the state’s annihilation. There is no discussion of the
intifadas and the failed negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders
going back decades. There is even no mention of Gaza because Coates was unable
to visit the region after the October 7 attack and he did not want to report on
a place he hadn’t seen for himself. (“People were like, ‘Gaza is so much
worse,’” he told me. “‘So much worse.’”) What there is, instead, is a picture
of the intolerable cruelty and utter desperation that could lead to an October
7.
Yes, it’s certainly interesting to muse idly upon what could
lead to an October 7, is it not? Meanwhile, here in the real world, what did
lead to October 7 was Hamas, under direct supervision of Iran, having directed
all aid money toward a devastating terrorist offensive rather than to bettering
the lives of its own citizens in Gaza. Morally, it’s certainly easier to write
about the victims you wish existed, rather than the aggressors that actually
do, but Coates’s journey to the dark is as contemptible as it is predictable.
It’s predictable because I remember what Coates wrote
(and was praised for writing) back in 2015, in his reputation-making memoir Between
the World and Me, about his reaction to 9/11.
I could see no difference between
the officer who killed Prince Jones [a friend in Prince George’s county shot by
a corrupt cop] and the police who died, or the firefighters who died. They were
not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature;
they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification —
shatter my body.
It’s been nearly a decade since that book was published,
and I well remember how almost every mainstream critic treated the 9/11
sections of Coates’s book, oohing and aahing over the bracing psychological
revelations of that paragraph without for even a second stepping back to assess
what exactly was revealed about Coates’s mindset. To him, one bad cop in Prince
George’s County morally canceled any humane response to police and firefighters
rushing to their deaths heroically in the Twin Towers. His explicit inclusion
of firefighters in his bleak moral equation is the true tell for how
monstrously unbalanced his core settings are: Guiltless as they are in the
“enslavement of black bodies,” they nevertheless represent Authority and thus
don’t even rate as body-count on his moral scales.
Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn’t need refuting in his newfound
fervent anti-Zionism. If anything, he perhaps needs explaining. I would advise
you not to ask why he has moved from race essentialism to anti-Zionist fervor.
Instead, ask yourself why it took you this long to understand that he starts
from the framework he applies, a simple victim–wrongdoer worldview learned from
childhood. That clumsy heuristic deranges his moral judgment. But then I find
it less interesting how a certain well-defined personality type ends up
an anti-Zionist than to ponder the empirical reality that so many find their
way there. To me, nothing about Coates’s moral journey from pre-Floyd
race-philosopher to anti-Israel eliminationist is surprising at all; rather,
the journey ended exactly where I would have expected. What stands between the
world and him is his own warped perception of it.
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