First of all, if you are not up for political discussion, I totally understand. It won't hurt my feelings a bit if you just go check out these fabulous avian guitarists and skip the unpleasantness below. (H/T to my old friend ScentScelf for the video.)
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I thought about never coming back* to comment further on the insurrection. We’re all sick to death of thinking about it, aren't we? When someone like Anne Applebaum suggests that maybe the best course of action would be to change the subject, that's an option worth considering. (I don't share Applebaum's rightwing political bent, but her book Twilight of Democracy is an interesting and insightful — if depressing — read.)
Looking through some old posts on this blog, though, especially from 2008 and 2012, I was struck by the strong continuity between then and now. I was wrong about a lot of things back then. (Me on the Tea Party in 2009: "I think our side should calm down a little and stop worrying that they're going to stage a coup or something.”) But the elements that created January 6 were all in place years ago. And they were not hidden, though most of us couldn't see them with any clarity. This makes me think it’s worth setting down my thoughts now, however incoherent they may be, if only for the sake of revisiting them somewhere down the road, when who knows where we'll have wound up.
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In the weeks since the Capitol riot, it's become clear that there were several distinct factions involved: some who showed up with a plan, some who seemed to be there mostly to party, and a large segment of folks who, like Comet Ping Pong dude before them, apparently believed something heinous was going on and they better put a stop to it. And have fun breaking windows and knocking heads in the process, of course.
It's that third group that interests me because I can most clearly see my own folks in them. Not that I share their delusions or their ideology, but they're the ones who seem the most like the people I grew up around, the people I see around me today. All those aging white men with beards, wearing Walmart jeans and jackets from the army surplus store, with the Confederate flag, Old Glory, and MAGA/Trump gear easily blending as cultural identifiers. They are so familiar. That guy beating the cop with the flagpole — he looks exactly like one of the characters who used to hang out in my dad's favorite tavern. I feel like I know him. I feel like, had my life taken just a slightly different turn early on, I might have wound up married to him.
This feeling of embarrassed kinship with the rioters is something that anywhere-left-of-center white people, especially the ones with rural roots, do not seem to be talking about very much. (I'd like to digress briefly here to say that I will never get used to the way mainstream liberal Democrats are now routinely labeled "the left" by almost everyone, including themselves. Joe Biden, tool of the left. Good lord.) I know for sure I'm not the only one who feels the kinship, thanks to the popularity of the wild rant Corey Forrester tweeted on January 7. Granted, Forrester is a comedian and this kind of thing is his business, but he wouldn't have said it if he wasn't pretty sure there'd be an audience for it, and a lot of that audience is people like me, who watched the riot with a sense of cringing shame, as well as outrage: Oh my god — it's us. (For more from Forrester on the shame of our kind, watch this.)
I can't decide whether my inability — or unwillingness — to see myself as culturally Other to the insurrectionists is a good thing or a bad thing. It reminds me a lot of the way I felt about my paternal grandmother, who was a second mother to me and my brothers, a good and loving person in many ways, but who was also a confirmed segregationist. However outwardly friendly and kind she was willing to be toward Black people (and she was, in my memory, unfailingly so), she could not/would not let go of the deeply racist, white supremacist view of the world she was raised with.
I could never disown my grandmother. It would be dishonest. She helped make me who I am, without a doubt. I hate many of the things she believed, but I know there's not a bright line between the parts of our shared culture I love and the parts I hate. And I don't see any reason to believe that I'm a better human than she was. That's the sticky, troubling truth I have lived with forever, and the insanity at the Capitol is a powerful reminder. I honestly don't know what to do with it.
For another lens on this same territory, read Abby Lee Hood's recent piece in the NYT. And for a thought-provoking take on the enduring role of shame in white Southern culture and how it operates among the Trumpian evangelicals, read David French's thoughts at The Dispatch. (French sees the political landscape very differently than I do, and some of the positions he takes — like his signing of the Nashville Statement — are, in my view, deeply destructive, to put it mildly. But he understands the rising Christian nationalism as well as anyone out there, and he unfailingly writes from a thoughtful place, trying to grapple with the larger moral implications of the moment.)
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And speaking of nationalism, this weekend I watched Daniel Lombroso's White Noise, a documentary presented by The Atlantic, that follows Lauren Southern, Richard Spencer, and Mike Cernovich as they do their alt-right, white nationalist thing in the period leading up to and after Charlottesville. It's a compelling piece of filmmaking, well worth watching, but I'm still not sure what I think about it.
The film presents the three main subjects as narcissistic, damaged people, equal parts insufferable and pitiable — a take that is definitely not surprising to anyone who's ever known one of this tribe. But I came away feeling like the film did not go deep enough, that it spent too much time deconstructing the personalities, and none at all deconstructing the ideology. The evil of white nationalism is simply taken as a given, and at no point does anybody actually challenge the substance of what Southern, Spencer, and Cernovich are peddling. They are never asked to defend what they're doing in any meaningful way. I suspect that was a strategic choice on the part of the filmmakers, a way of earning trust by avoiding conflict. And it paid off in terms of letting us see the humans behind the rhetoric, but it fell short in furthering our understanding of the movement they speak to. You can see the trailer at the link above and on Youtube. You can read a profile Lombroso wrote about Southern here.
*Part 1 of this post is here.
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