Probity

Although I should be paying closer attention, I’ve sporadically followed the January 6^th House Select Committee hearings. Most of the live coverage and commentary I’ve listened to has been from NPR during my work commute. 

As viscerally horrified I was that day, time has blunted my emotions surrounding the incident.  I chalk this up to Trump fatigue.  I’m almost at the point where I say, “Fuck it.  Let ‘em all walk as long as I don’t have to hear about them anymore.”  

It’s not the conduct of the hearings.  Reps. Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney are making the best of an awful situation.  The revelations are nauseating but unsurprising.  The parade of in person witnesses and recorded depositions has become a rehashed drone of things we either already knew or suspected. 

Nevertheless, I was struck by Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony the week before last.  Hutchinson was White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ aide in the months and days leading up to January 6^th.  We learned of President Trump’s infantile reaction to Attorney General Barr’s denial of election fraud, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone’s warning of potential violence in the wake of the January 6^th rally, and Meadows’ strange inaction during the riot, as well as the requests for pardons afterwards.  

There was one thing in Hutchison’s testimony that cleared up a question I had had for the last year and a half concerning why Trump did not march on the Capitol after the rally as promised.  Apparently it wasn’t one of the innumerable cheap pledges he’s made over his career; Trump reportedly lunged at his Secret Service driver after the driver told him he had to go back to the White House.  That was the first actual surprise to come out of any the testimony.  Another was that Trump wanted the metal detectors removed from the rally site so that his supporters could bring firearms since he thought they posed no security threat to him.  It is unthinkable how much worse the ensuing riot would have been had Trump prevailed. 

Like many of the reporters and talking heads covering Hutchinson’s testimony, I was uncritical at first because I was genuinely impressed by her.  She projected a calm self-assurance, maturity, and wisdom beyond her twenty-five years.  I was also taken with her earnestness.  She was quoted in one source as wanting a career in public service, something that resonated with me.  I was a wide-eyed idealist as a young adult, though I soon learned to keep those sentiments to myself because they were often met with eyerolls.  At the time I worked in a position with a considerable amount of responsibility for a twentysomething, albeit far from the levers of power, but which nonetheless comported with my own aspirations. 

The passage of a couple of weeks has tempered my admiration.  I do not doubt Ms. Hutchinson’s idealism (or at least her own belief in it), and I will not criticize her conservative politics.  I can even forgive her cringy dance with Kayleigh McEnany to “Y.M.C.A.” during the 2020 campaign.  However, the White House-aide-as-Capra-heroine narrative does not completely hold up the closer one looks.  Certain questions arise. 

As an undergraduate Hutchinson interned with both Ted Cruz and Steve Scalise, two of the most disreputable people on Capitol Hill.  Surely, she was aware of their reputations before seeking work with them.  Then there is her accepting a position in the Trump White House.  Was it really idealism, or a self-serving determination to get ahead?  Only the most fanatical MAGA nutters, the people who believe Trump was chosen by God to save America from whatever imaginary threat, can truly believe Trump possesses even the slightest shard of integrity.  Then there is her apparent acceptance of an offer to work at Mar-a-Lago post-presidency which was later withdrawn (and has led to accusations from conservative media that her testimony was sour grapes for not getting the job).  

I am not second-guessing Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony.  I believe her to have been truthful with the committee.  However, I question the choices which put her in this position to begin with.  Although she did the committee a service, it does not mitigate her responsibility for being part of a criminal presidency.  Others may vouch for her character, but I am unconvinced. 

 

© 2022 The Unassuming Scholar

Enemies in a Lifeboat

 

“Alright then, we are two nations.”

John Dos Passos, The Big Money

 

Dos Passos was referring to the ideological divide surrounding the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti nearly a century ago.  The statement could just as easily apply today. 

As we approach a third year of pandemic, the divisions in our society have become a gaping wound for all the world to behold.  Its successive waves have limited physical mobility making escape from the social upheaval a distant vision.  I’ve long dreamed of becoming an expat in my retirement, but the desire to travel the world has morphed into an urge to flee and not look back.  Unfortunately, that is no longer feasible for most of us.  And as time goes on creeping political repression may make it even less so. 

In the aftermath of the “stolen” 2020 presidential election, we are entering what Jason Stanley terms the “legal phase” of fascism.  Much of this is happening at the state level given the narrow Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, though the 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court will almost certainly enable these enacted and pending measures.  Restricting voting rights, limiting the right to publicly protest, gerrymandering which further entrenches Republican legislators in red states, and the de facto purge of anti-Trump Republicans in Congress and statehouses are all calculated to pave the way for the Orange Führer’s triumphant return in 2024.  (To further raise alarm, it has come to light that Boeing and Pfizer were among the corporations and trade groups which donated $8 million to Republican lawmakers who voted to decertify the 2020 electoral results.)  

Nor has the past year mitigated the threat of right-wing extremists or self-appointed “good guys with guns” taking the law into their own hands.  While the verdict in the Ahmaud Arbery murder trial may signal a renewed intolerance of vigilantism, the not guilty verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case is disturbing.  (One reason I suppose the jury was inclined to acquit was that Wisconsin’s “stand your ground” law doesn’t apply to public spaces.  By initially attempting to flee a confrontation with an armed protestor, Rittenhouse was arguably fulfilling his duty to retreat.)  The brazen, high-profile antics of so-called militias give further cause for concern.  

Misinformation exacerbates the divide.  It helps further what Bill Maher has called the slow-moving coup.  Social media fueled hysteria over mostly nonexistent threats surrounding gun control, vaccines, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Critical Race Theory, and so forth.  It also promotes anti-science attitudes and misinformation about COVID, leading to lowered vax rates and increased spread each time a new variant emerges.  

It is no wonder that Donald Trump loves poorly-educated people.  They are the most susceptible to the message and the least likely to understand how our constitutional system actually works.  While affluent, educated suburban whites supported Trump as well, it is the unruly mass of working class whites who pose the more immediate threat.  Gullible and hostile and ready to accept any sort of bullshit shoveled at them as long as it caters to their anger and prejudices, they are the most liable to resort to mob activity. 

What we are seeing is a progressive normalization of ignorance and rage-fueled rhetorical and physical violence, fueled by social media.  At its worst, this violence has taken the form of looting in cities to violence against protestors.  Legal consequences fall differently depending on the person and the offense.  One year on, few of the participants in the January 6^th Redneck Riot have suffered any meaningful punishment for having attempted to overthrow the government.  Most of the convictions have been for trivial crimes such as trespassing, rather than for sedition.  Had it been, say, a Black Lives Matter protest, the penalties would surely have been swifter and more severe. 

To quote Dos Passos again, “They have taken the words of our fathers and made them slimy and foul.”  Watching the recent New York Times documentary on the riot, possibly the most complete dissection of the event so far, we behold scenes of self-proclaimed “patriots” confronting law enforcement officers demanding they uphold their oaths to the Constitution notwithstanding they were doing exactly that.  At the risk of repetition, it was these “patriots” who sought the disruption of the very government prescribed in the Constitution. 

The transposition of surreality over mundane normalcy characterizes the present moment.  Life goes on as usual, but with a pervasive sense of dread.  And I am beginning to think there is (admittedly anecdotal) cause for worry.  A couple of years ago, just before the pandemic, I took a trip to Europe.  Not only was the flight delayed without explanation for nearly two hours after boarding, but we had to submit to two separate document checks before boarding.  Perhaps it was only a routine security precaution.  Perhaps it was a harbinger of future restrictions on Americans traveling abroad.  

Which brings me back to my deep-seated wish to check out of the mess our country has become. I fear my contrarian opinions may make that more difficult if not impossible as time goes on with the prospect of even more repressive measures.  I’ve learned having money of your own confers freedom, freedom which includes leaving home.  Security legislation since 9/11 has given the federal government greater oversight of bank accounts.  All of mine are in the U.S., which means my assets can be frozen or seized by the authorities on the slenderest of pretexts.  Goodbye, freedom.  Our sweet land of liberty may well become a lawless place where mobs of heavy-gutted, bearded white men armed with guns and superstition are calling the shots and where decent people will have no means of escape.  

More than ever in our contemporary history it has become a matter of us and them.  We are seemingly locked in a death embrace with our enemies at home and escape may no longer be no longer an option.  There is scant cause for optimism.

 

 

 

© 2022 The Unassuming Scholar

Your Feelings and Mine

 

Fuck Your Feelings

 

That charming sentiment cropped up frequently in the runup to last year’s election and its immediate aftermath, culminating in the Beer Belly Putsch[1] on January 6^th.  It was meant to signal the defiance of real Americans in the face of political correctness run amok, to show one’s allegiance to the way it’s always been done, to trigger the libs. 

The conceit of this maladroit attempt at in-your-faceness is that liberals and progressives actually care about what the alt-right thinks.  They don’t.  

You see, most people left of center reject the legitimacy of the alt-right’s ideas.  It follows that any ad hominem attacks from them aren’t worth taking seriously.  To cite an admittedly puerile retort from my youth, it’s a case of mind over matter.  I don’t mind, because you don’t matter.  

Time to get serious. As a social scientist, I was taught to be a detached observer.  I trust neither emotions nor intuition.  But I’m fully aware that being human means we can never be fully separated from our sentiments, regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum. 

Let me offer an example.  Just before the Iraq War began, several colleagues in my graduate program and I organized a public forum on its implications.  While generally successful, we experienced a few hiccups.  Our intention was to offer an interdisciplinary discussion, pulling in professors and grad students from several departments.  We envisioned a calm, rational dialogue. 

It was wishful thinking.  Both ends of the political spectrum tightened the rhetorical rope around our necks to further their narrow agendas.  There was the activist group who wanted to not only set up a literature table inside the auditorium but a voice on the panel as well.  We grudgingly granted the first but not the second.  They sulkily accepted the arrangement.  Then there was the news crew from the local Fox affiliate who were there to capture the spectacle of a bunch of snotty, unpatriotic college students telling the world how much they hated America. 

That was galling enough, but there were two incidents at the panel which stand out in my mind nearly twenty years later and help illustrate the point I’m trying to make.  

They came when we opened the discussion to audience questions.  One question was more of a statement from an undergraduate who proclaimed the pending invasion would cause millions to die.  While we had already covered the considerable death toll the coalition had imposed on Iraq through its embargo since the 1991 ceasefire, apparently this wasn’t enough for our interlocutor.  When one of us asked just how she knew this was inevitable she keened, “Because I feel it!”  Much of the audience broke into applause. 

The second was an attempt at distraction from the opposite direction.  A middle-aged woman whom last summer's kids would have labelled a “Karen” stood up next to a young man clad in a collared shirt and khakis.  Karen introduced the young man as her son, a soldier recently returned from our adventure in Afghanistan.  How dare we question his sacrifice?  

Karen missed the point, as Karens often do.  She was trying to flip the script with a bald use of sentimentality to justify decisions at the top regardless of their outcome.  She was manipulating the attendees to shift the focus from a sober weighing of consequences to a visceral patriotism nationalism unfettered by facts. 

Our panel did not question the woman’s righteous indignation.  We most certainly did not say to her, “Fuck your feelings.”  We implicitly understood this was a display of sentimentality mistaken for moral certitude.  

And that is the heart of the issue of feelings with conservatives generally.  Most are so certain of their own inherent virtue that their gut reactions—their feelings—are not recognized as such.  To them, they are unerring truths.  

This certainty of infallibility, albeit arrived at emotionally, creates a condition in which conservatives cannot accommodate ideas at odds with their own.  Consider their reaction if you suggested that public policy should not be guided by their belief in a deity whose existence cannot be empirically proven.  Consider their reaction if you pointed out that gun violence is attributable in part to the widespread and poorly regulated availability of firearms.  You would be met with anger and resentment—an expression of feelings even though they would never think to label them as such. 

This is because feelings to those on the right are experienced only by the weak and inferior.  Their own emotions come from a place of certitude and thus are not “feelings.”  Requests to be mindful of the rights and sensibilities of those historically repressed by people like them fall counter to their truth and are thus to be ignored, and if that doesn’t work, to be mocked.  

The whole eff-your-feelings attitude, then, is merely an exercise in denial and projection on the part of a demographic whose social influence is on borrowed time.  Having invested their identities in a received wisdom, any counternarrative poses an existential threat.  Belittling those posing the counternarrative imparts a sense of security. 

So here we are.  I find myself forcing down my feelings in response to yours, forcing myself to be rational in the face of your irrationality, forcing myself into excessive self-restraint.  Perhaps this is what you mean by  “Fuck your feelings.”  

Returning to the third person, it appears conservatives in general and the alt-right in particular are indulging in a paroxysm of unrestraint as a means of bounding and containing threatening social forces.  Perhaps it is still another example of denying these social forces.  It probably doesn’t matter.  Denial postpones but will not avert the ultimate reckoning.

 

 

© 2021 The Unassuming Scholar

 

 

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[1] Credit to Thomas Knapp for the neologism.

Disgrace

Nearly a week later, I am still in disbelief.  The events of January 6^th at the U.S. Capitol shock the conscience.

That is, if you have a conscience.  The redneck mob that assaulted the Capitol after being whipped into a frenzy by their lame duck President lacked this essential element of character.  The resulting melee hasn’t deterred the base; this morning an FBI bulletin released to the media warned of more armed demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol and all fifty state capitols.

The optics of the forcible occupation elude its perpetrators.  The death of a Capitol police officer and the injury of several more doesn’t seem to faze them.  Neither does the threatened prosecution of its identifiable culprits nor their loss of employment in some cases.

No, instead we hear about the San Diego woman shot to death by the police as she forced her way through a broken window.  Her husband described her as a “patriot,” a term debased by conservatives over the years and trampled in filth over the past four.  Although her death was unfortunate and perhaps even tragic, she nonetheless met her end committing a violent criminal act.

And to what end?  The mob delayed certification of the Electoral College vote by six hours and caused considerable damage to a national monument which will fall upon the taxpayers to repair.  Attempting to subvert a constitutional process, to undermine the United States Constitution itself, is the polar opposite of patriotism.  All identifiable participants should be prosecuted for sedition.

It’s unlikely they will.  White privilege will out.  The small police presence on Capitol Hill last Wednesday was rooted in an assumption that a demonstration by white people was not a potential threat.  Contrast this to last summer’s George Floyd protests, which were not only met by local law enforcement in the larger cities but by a constellation of state and federal police agencies and the National Guard to boot.

Consider the intentions of some of the invaders when we raise the question of penalties.  One had threatened to shoot Nancy Pelosi in the head on social media.  Another was photographed in the Senate chamber carrying zip tie handcuffs as if they planned to take hostages.  Then there was the gallows erected at the Capitol steps.  One could go on with like examples.

There is little doubt concerning the crowd’s sentiments, as evinced by the Confederate flags and Nazi paraphernalia about.  If you needed further convincing, take the bitter remark one woman made to Andrew McCormick of The Nation concerning the police.  “They’re shooting us,” she said.  “They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.”

There you have it.  It’s law enforcement’s job to kill civil rights activists, not rioting white supremacists.  The destruction of a display honoring the late congressman John Lewis further underscores the racist nature of the insurrection.  In any case, the actions of law enforcement officers varied from actually doing their job defending the Capitol and its occupants, to making themselves scarce rather than confronting the assailants, to mingling with the rioters and posing for selfies with them. 

Meanwhile, buzz on the alt-right is framing the riot as a subversion.  It was the fault of the ever-elusive “outside agitators” and “antifa.”  The base continues to stick with is its narrative of deep-state conspiracies and pedophile elites.  No fable is too wild to be believed.

The Dems for their part, despite their victory at the polls, continue to flail impotently at the sociopath occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  The House is moving to impeach a President whose remaining time in office is down to mere days.  If they somehow succeed, and the Senate somehow convicts, the only effect will be to afford Mike Pence the distinction of serving the shortest presidential tenure in history.  Any attempt to invoke the 25^th Amendment is a nonstarter considering Pence’s refusal to even consider it combined with multiplying cabinet vacancies. 

January 20^th will be here soon enough.  Trump refuses to attend the inauguration, and it’s just as well.  But it’s foolish to assume the nightmare will end.  Talk of street protests in DC and elsewhere is rife, and will almost certainly take place.  Having had a taste of the potential havoc they can unleash militant rightists will feel empowered to repeat it.  Even as I write, Texas officials are concerned Trump’s visit to the border town of Alamo will lead to further violence.

For all their loud talk of freedom and love of country, the base poses an existential threat to our constitutional order and the liberties and rights it guarantees.  It’s doubtful many of them actually understand these.  Or care to.  I’m reminded of how common Russians welcomed the 1917 revolution believing that freedom meant absolutely no constraints on their behavior.  As we know, they were soon disabused of that notion, but I think a similar attitude animates the MAGA crowd.

It took almost four years, but I’m fully cognizant of how bad the situation truly is.  I never distrusted my own people until now.  The worst of it is there’s no escape.  We have so mismanaged the coronavirus pandemic that few countries will admit Americans.  I can’t even believe I’m entertaining thoughts of expatriating; I used to scoff at people who said they would leave if the candidate they opposed won.  Now I’m in the bizarre situation where I’m considering it myself, even after the guy I voted for won.  I want to live somewhere inhabited by sane people, if or when that becomes a possibility again.

In the meantime, it looks like the inmates will continue to run the asylum.  Don’t expect reason to prevail any time soon in the madhouse our country has become.

 

 © 2021 The Unassuming Scholar