1/1/22: Happy New Year.
There’s a lot of hand-wringing these days but few answers from the media about how rude we’ve all become, how angry, how divided, and how all this tension is leading inevitably to civil war.
Oh, no, I gasp; not that.
I’m being facetious because this sensibility—and the lack of ability to come up with answers as to why we’re like that—shows IMHO a simple lack of historical memory.
Let’s examine our country’s history: As we all now (finally) know, slaves were brought to the US before the land was the US. Before the arrival of the Puritans, for god’s sake. Profitably keeping slaves implies capitalism, or at least a proto version of it.
Add to that the Puritans’ self-importance and their delusion to think the world would care that they were setting up a City on a Hill. When the world yawned and went about its business, so the argument goes, this caused anxiety on the part of the Puritans, who were certain they were doing God’s bidding.
So they continued to take it out on the Native Americans, exterminating them (after first teaching them how to scalp, how to kill, and so on) as devils in the Christian mythos. This was considered a reasonable way to prove their project was divinely sanctioned.
There never really was a unified American project, and by definition any melting pot or agglomeration of many different peoples will result in lots of tension. I suppose the best we could say about the US project is that it’s been (sort of) a sustained form of that tension.
I still think Lincoln’s strong advocacy for a unified nation misjudged how to proceed. But the actual Civil War didn’t teach us the lesson—that we have to get together on some basic things, or else continue to fall apart. Read up on Reconstruction if you’ve forgotten how retrograde was the country’s “healing” after the Civil War.
So now we live in a world of accelerating income disparity; a government that can’t muster enough care for its people to make much of any difference; an ethos that continues to preach rugged individualism while proceeding by the rankest means of nepotism; government officials controlled by corporations; global warming that we don’t seem to be able to do much about, or certainly not enough. Those of us thinking about it and admitting it know that we are, every day, betraying our children. We have a choice: feel the consequences of that guilt, every day—or slap a flight attendant.
White people see their lives as disappearing, which is accurate; minorities appropriately cry more loudly for justice and the culture ends up imposing 1984-style opposition between those who are doctrinaire and those—like me—who are never able to figure out the proper way to talk in polite company. So cancel culture thrives.
This is our country and our reality, so why should we be surprised at rudeness, anger, and incivility? This is our heritage, for god’s sake! It’s the chickens coming home to roost.
So let’s admit it: we love rudeness because it’s “speaking our minds”; we love enacting narcissistic children having a temper tantrum about masks because, well, there’s something in life we don’t like. Our Amazon package doesn’t arrive, and we react indignantly and out of frustration. We think standing our ground or voicing a strong opinion is a virtue, as opposed to conveying, say, flexibility, open-mindedness, or simply experiencing not knowing what one thinks.
I’m suggesting here that, instead of being shocked by the notion of civil war, we rather stand in awe of what we have created, the paths we have all been complicit in marking out. Doing that will take a lot of the puzzlement out of our predicament.
But I don’t really think we will have another actual civil war. Too many of us are fat, lazy, addicted to TV or consumerism—too many like only to watch. Or we’re too busy trying to earn enough to keep up. Who’s going to fight? Some minority that is angry?
Jan. 6 was, so it has been characterized, an “assault on democracy”? So—unaddressed extreme income disparity; the trashing of our environment; exploitation of the world like there’s no tomorrow—none of these is an assault? Or are they just harder to see?
Slapping a flight attendant for making you wear a mask is not a good way to start a war. That’s just another temper tantrum from Baby. So is the capitol/capital riot, IMO.
As Lawrence Durrell wrote about the Western artist, we have moved from “case history to problem child, from problem child to cry baby. Crybabies of the world, unite!”
So whom are the Jan. 6 aimless rioters going to fight? You have to have another side for two sides to go to war. The only two sides of significance to me are the owners and the workers. That civil war has really yet to be declared. Call me when it is.