It’s been a difficult refrain from writing anything overt regarding King Blear and his idiot knights who say MAGA! If only it were a shrubbery they wanted.
I’ve written little around politics lately for two reasons. The first is, I want to write about how events unfold as dispassionately as possible. Unfortunately, I’m finding calm equanimity and close observation of this confederacy of dunces to be mutually exclusive circles on the Venn diagram of possible emotions regarding he whose name must not be spoken yet cannot be ignored – like flatulence in an elevator. Incandescent fury, on the other hand, lies over close observation in an almost perfect circle. The passion of the pissed off is not an emotion I care to cultivate.
Yet there is so much to be angry about, in both quality and quantity. I know people who live with anger like an old roommate. I don’t know how they do it. Feeding anger is dangerous. If you try and use anger as a muse you risk being warped, like a flower bent over water so the only reflection it sees is it’s own. I’m sure on the spectrum of human experience there is a personality configuration that relies on anger as fuel without the corresponding corrupting spiral into, if not ethical or moral degradation, then social or personal. Say, Lewis Black versus Ann Coulter. You can tell Ann slid down the slope (hell, she got a sled and jumped headfirst) because her anger has cascaded downwards into a bedrock hatefulness.
I admit my revulsion towards the anger I notice in conservatives tends to sympathy when I see it in fellow liberals. How can it not? We tend to be furious about the same things. It’s important to recognize and account for one’s biases when you view what you regard as deliberate any effort to destroy much of what you care about. This sentiment highlights a difference between the average liberal and the average conservative – the former are more likely to place emphasis on the first part of that sentence whereas the latter appear to ignore the first part entirely and focus almost exclusively on the second.
Maddeningly, each side sees something different being destroyed.
Anger is useful. It tells you what it is you care about. It can help you get out of bed in the morning and it can turn you into a red toothed monster. In many ways, an inability to get angry or the willful suppression of appropriate anger, is as detrimental as an inability to feel, or the willful suppression of most emotions.
Anger is different because it makes every other emotion it’s mixed with worse. Perhaps worst of all is when it’s mixed with righteous certitude. You see it in the red faces of the fevered right and those who’ve watched friends and family suffer. In the latter you see examples of where angry righteous certitude ultimately serves the moral good e.g., pre civil war abolitionists, the civil rights movements of the 50’s and 60’s (actually, from every decade), all the way up to today with the black lives matter and the me too movement. A loathing of subjugation, murder, and sexual assault has a long history of validated righteous certitude.
I can’t negotiate with that particular demon.
Here’s what I know about anger. Anger is almost never an emotion that inspires good decisions. Anger rivals only fear with its power to cloud the mind. It lends a hideous strength to weak positions and nearly unstoppable force to those with heft. Let it slip the bit and anger is a wild horse that will take you for a ride. The longer you wait to jump off, the more difficult the walk back, if it doesn’t carry you over a cliff.
Unlike fear, anger constantly demands action. When you realize this, it’s not a far leap to understand the antidote to anger is delay. But even this doesn’t reliably pull anger’s fangs. Delay that doesn’t extinguish rage is the tempering force that causes the mighty to tremble. If conservatives have taught us anything, it is beware the fury of patient humans. It’s terrible fire to play with and only those with wills of steel and an unerring moral compass can hope to forge anything with it and not burn.
So that’s the first reason why I haven’t opined in writing lately. I couldn’t trust myself not to emulate Marcus Curtius, the original Leeroy Jenkins. For those a little shaky on their Roman mythology, instead of asking what his country could do for him, Marcus (and the horse he rode in on) leapt right into that chiasmus.
The second reason why I’ve made myself abstain from lap swim in the swamp is the rich variety of other people anxious to dive in. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I thought I’d sit down, shut up, and listen. The insistence, rightly so, of voices other than those that dominate our shared culture, in being not only listened to but deserving of respect, is best begun by sitting down, shutting up for a damn minute, and listening. It doesn’t mean you don’t get to talk anymore. It doesn’t mean what you value doesn’t have value. It doesn’t even presuppose you will come around to that point of view. It does signal that you are open to vistas that are beyond your perception. You might not like the view. But it shows the person who sees the landscape differently that you aren’t blind. This is a step not possible for far too many angry people. I’m trying to do this not just for those I am sympathetic towards but towards those that I am not. As a middle aged white guy, what I have to say can wait.
For example, I find it a herculean task listening to the current leaders of congress, professional defenders and deflectors for them, and nearly all of their knee jerk supporters. I force myself to listen to much as I am able of the first, as little as I can and remain informed (if none other than their current tactics) regarding the second, and close but nonzero amounts of the third. To be fair, there is a small percentage of people that identify as both republican and conservative who are nearly as horrified and angry as their democratic counterparts. I at least hear lip service in that regard. It is difficult not being angry with them as well. Too many are only just now wading toward the shores of sanity with far too little recognition of the part they played in the sinking ship. I’m looking at you George Will. Still, the reasonable and necessary thing is to let that go for now and enlist their help with pulling more towards the beach.
Because that’s what cool heads do.
They do not, for example, scream at the television whenever Sarah H. Sanders is in front of the camera and speaking. Cool heads are able to channel their ire into things that, if not serve the greater good, then at least do not detract from it.
Paint by numbers perhaps.
But that’s just sticking your head in the sand, I hear you say. And it’s true, that absent any other action, finding a hobby and hoping things turn out alright is, in my opinion, a morally reprehensible option. For the foreseeable future, the bare minimum of executing your civic duty is by voting every election for a Democrat.
We must. The simple logic is that we live in a two party system. Any significant third party presence that draws disproportionately from one side of the ideological spectrum predicts the opposite side’s victory. Republicans are supporting and enabling the erosion of our institutions and the relationship America has with it’s allies. They seem unwilling or unable at this time to defend our country from foreign attack, so long as they benefit. Worse, a significant faction would like nothing more than our country to be a Christian version of Iran. One wonders what flavor of Jesus would become the official religion. And what the Mormons or Catholics would think of that choice. If we don’t vote democrat, or something that completely subsumes the democratic party the way Trumpism did the republican party, then things will slide into dystopia all the faster. Republicans need to lose decisively and for as long as anything that resembles Trumpism is evident. We’ve seen what they’re willing to do and history shows us just how far they can go.
I leave it to wiser minds than I the task of indicating how much effort, and of what nature, qualifies someone exempt from the stink eye of history. The way things are going and depending on how bad things get, I suspect few of us will get a lake named after us.
There is a special category for those who do not vote. Barring being a victim of conservative voter repression, if you don’t vote, you’re the worst kind of fool. You’re standing slack jawed at the open gate as foam flecked barbarians invade the city. Only the perverse shields of idiocy and luck are keeping you from being gutted already. Their aim is to burn the fucking place down. Are you going to help them, or are you going to try helping us shut the damn gate?