The Inanity of The Defense of Looting

Vicky Osterweil isn't making a powerful argument. She just rediscovered tribal barbarism and put a fresh coat of paint on it. 

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Vicky Osterweil, the author of In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action, is getting her 15 minutes of fame thanks to a segment on NPR in which she said some really mind-bogglingly dumb, indefensibly evil, and fascinatingly reactionary things. 

We’ll come back to her in a moment.

One of my weird mental pastimes is to look at the world as if I were a visitor from the past. But rather than think of how a time traveler might marvel at the new technology and tall buildings, I like to wonder: What would someone from 500 or 1,000 years ago recognize as familiar? 

Some things are obvious: a mother breastfeeding a baby or an old man tending a garden. “We do that too!” a time traveler might say on first sight.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Mike B

    I can't help it. I crack up every time I read the word "cisheteropatriarchy".

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      DougCLE

      It is a little supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, isn’t it?

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    Cornelius O’Brien

    Abbie Hoffman did this much better and even encouraged people to
    Steal This Book

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    DougAz

    Inane is writing anything about such a trivial unaccomplished fringe nut case like Osterweil.

    What is to be chagrined, is ANY connection at all to any mainstream or movement.

    I just don't get why anyone cares a whit about this meaningless individual.

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  4. Avatar photo
    Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

    Osterweil's arguments are indeed old; we see them in Peter Pan, in virtually every story about childhood. Children wish to live a responsibility-free life. they don't ask for much, mostly just to have everything their own way. It is romanticism in many ways (Romanticists will of course, disagree).

    Our boring job as adults is to teach them, not about the trials and tribulations of cisheteropatriarchal orthodoxy, but that actions have consequences. Our job is not to stomp on their dreams, only to channel them in healthy directions.

    What will cause the protests and the looting to end is when the price becomes too high. The cisheteropatriarchal will demand to be paid, no matter how many times people click their heels and say "there's no place like home". I suspect Gaige Grosskreutz won't be lifting his right arm any time soon, mocking others with an insulting others with a nazi salute. When he is finally able to do so, the pain he feels in his arm will remind him that the cisheteropatriarchal defeated him fair and square in a battle of wits.

    But we do owe Osterweil our heartfelt thanks for coining a silly term that we can make fun of, which shows I suffer terribly from from cisheteropatriarchal orthodoxy. Now if you'll excuse me, I intend to engage in an exercise of cisheteropatriarchal dominance by feeding the puppies, and taking them for a ride in the car, so they can smile at the neighbors

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      CynthiaW

      Zowie!

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  5. Tim Johnson

    No quibbles with the article but wondering how it anchors the lede on the site for so long?

    Of all the things going on the world, this is a wingnut view that few even heard until others starting writing about it, and displaying it so prominently distorts what's going on the 'real world.' I see no left wing pols or pundits rallying to this woman's argument.

    It would be analogous to devoting the lede of the site to dissecting the views of a Qanon personality.

    All of this only serves to create the misperception that the extreme views of either wing are somehow becoming the mainstream.

    To its credit (although it will be used to discredit it - so much for doing the right thing), NPR did this:

    “This Q&A with a provocative author did not serve NPR’s audience,” the newsgroup’s public editor, Kelly McBride, said Thursday. “On top of being wrong about recent events, the author’s characterization of the Civil Rights Movement is a distortion and oversimplification.”

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      Antebellum Whig

      I think this conversation needs to be had because while we're all familiar with the "mostly peaceful protest," line, we also mostly know it's BS, so the people who want to wave away the violence and rioting have to sort out some sort of explanation for why it's ok. very few people have tried to make this argument.

      Vicki Osterweil is the new Franz Fanon - Trans Fanon, if you will...

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    Hrodland

    One of the great problems with "American Studies" is the tendency to ignore every other culture on the planet, and assume that we made it all up, starting with Jamestown. But it really starts with those crazy medieval guys who created evidence based analysis, you know, Ockham and Abelard.
    That gave western Europe an advantage right up to today--that is, until academe decided to can it all in favor of sub-Marxist drivel.

    Osterweil's discourses are little more that the equivalent of the Renaissance obsession with witches and demons. Given that that ended with the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War, we all might want to do a little more critical thinking on where America really came from.

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    Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

    Oh, she's mostly harmless, like the earth was in "Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy". I predict the book will be remaindeered in 6 months, as no one will care. It' s already deeply discounted from the list price. Bookbub will have it for $1.99 on kindle in 2 years.

    The issue for her is that her target audience (young looters) don't read, and won't want to pay for a book that tells them it's okay not to pay for a book. People who read will get eye strain from rolling their eyes so hard.

    But that's what is great about America. As HL Mencken once wrote "no one every went broke underestimating the taste of Americans"...

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  8. Martin Tatuch

    Vicky Osterweil = Titania McGrath.

    No, really. You have to be really, really good at being satirical to think some of this stuff up.

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      Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

      I could have sworn Titania created the word cisheteropatriarchal.....Sounds like zir....

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  9. Raincheck

    Can I just skip 2020 entirely and move on to a (hopefully better) future?

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      C C Writer

      I kinda feel like in a way 2020 isn't really a real year. What we're experiencing is not what should have happened this year. So we're just getting, I dunno what to call it, maybe 2020 lite?

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    Saied

    Someone needs to introduce Ms. Osterweil to Xenophon and the “Persian Expedition”. It is full of passages of this type and Xenophon is one of the few who took the time to record this stuff. We had presumed we were past this stuff (well, maybe not the Persians).
    “ Descending through this plain country, he advanced four stages—twenty-five parasangs—to Tarsus, a large and prosperous city of Cilicia. Here stood the palace of Syennesis, the king of the country; and through the middle of the city flows a river called the Cydnus, two hundred feet broad. They found that the city had been deserted by its inhabitants, who had betaken themselves, with Syennesis, to a strong place on the hills. All had gone, except the tavern-keepers. The sea-board inhabitants of Soli and Issi also remained. Now Epyaxa, Syennesis’s queen, had reached Tarsus five days in advance of Cyrus. During their passage over the mountains into the plain, two companies of Menon’s army were lost. Some said they had been cut down by the Cilicians, while engaged on some pillaging affair; another account was that they had been left behind, and being unable to overtake the main body, or discover the route, had gone astray and perished. However it was, they numbered one hundred hoplites; and when the rest arrived, being in a fury at the destruction of their fellow soldiers, they vented their spleen by pillaging the city of Tarsus and the palace to boot. Now when Cyrus had marched into the city, he sent for Syennesis to come to him; but the latter replied that he had never yet put himself into the hands of any one who was his superior, nor was he willing to accede to the proposal of Cyrus now; until, in the end, his wife persuaded him, and he accepted pledges of good faith. After this they met, and Syennesis gave Cyrus large sums in aid of his army; while Cyrus presented him with the customary royal gifts—to wit, a horse with a gold bit, a necklace of gold, a gold bracelet, and a gold scimitar, a Persian dress, and lastly, the exemption of his territory from further pillage, with the privilege of taking back the slaves that had been seized, wherever they might chance to come upon them.“

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