So I figure that when we end the last term of Donald we will enter the seventh inning stretch of the Culture Wars. The game is not nearly over, shit hasn't gotten real enough yet. It will only come when there are enough burned buildings and dead bodies to stop the blathering in its tracks.
I've been thinking about the hug. Men in Los Angeles, particularly straight black men (since such things have to be said) essentially starting grasping each other after the Riots. It was an evolution in dap that was created by the fact of the Riots over the beating of Rodney King, and the failure of a jury to crucify the four officers complicit in that beating. It was only after the buildings were burned to the ground, after Korean storekeepers hardened up their defenses to the level of lethality, after 64 people were dead, after similar riots in cities all over the country were over and people were picking up fragments of their lives from the ashes. It was only after all that when people responded with tenderness and a new kind of civility arose. It was only after the election of Riordan as mayor of Los Angeles that calmer heads prevailed. It was only after people lost fingers that they stopped pointing fingers and demanded healing. It was only then that these black men in Los Angeles started acknowledging their own humanity in a new and purposeful way. It was the peace that war demanded. And now American men hug that way on the regular.
Our identity politics have been ratcheting up the stakes of the continuing Culture Wars but they haven't reached a crescendo. The failures of the multiple intersectional third wave theoretical tentacles on the appropriate pronouns for pet groups, while crumbling to its foundations, have not yet lost their grip on the popular imaginations of the Chatting Class. So 'racism', 'sexism', 'homophobia' and various other accusations have not lost their cachet despite actual progress against these very real sins. That a lone wackjob like Dylan Roof can kill nine in Charleston and not set off so much acrimony as the gang of neo-confederates in Charlottesville tells us something very important. We have political groups of Americans who wish to see the destruction of other politcal groups of Americans. As I say, there hasn't been enough violence to satiate that bloodlust.
In a way, we are fortunate to have Antifa and Alt-Right to enact these fantasies. Call it the boneheads vs the skinheads. So far we, we meaning Left and Right, remain willing to send them into ritual combat as non-official proxies for the never ending stream of invective that is our contemporary political dialog. We are in that same perverse way, fortunate to have a President whose oratorial vacuity allows all sides to interpret whatever they wish to project as emanating from his bully pulpit. Americans are not actually having to deal with leadership in anyway resembling a responsible republic. So the wars between ourselves against ourselves continues. And it shall continue as the Congress, the Executive and the Press continue to fail to lead and America stumbles into a triple witching hour when all three fail simultaneously. Charlottesville is just a test. Our good fortune will soon run out and real riots will begin, but we now benefit by watching all the ingredients. Time will provide us another OJ Simpson or another Timothy McVeigh or another James Damore or another Matthew Shepard. Somebody whose fate will align the political opposition like Alt-Right and Antifa into a perfect storm. America will rage. Then America will hug. But first we must suffer the fire next time.
What strikes me as particularly notable about this latest non-event in Charlottesville all due respect to mere three deaths in Virginia, a number that MS-13 would consider a weak showing, is the actual symbol at the heart of the matter; the fate of a statue. You see there's still a lawsuit. And while lawsuits are generally the respectable and civilized way to resolve disputes, nobody is really talking about that lawsuit. The focus of our finger-pointing is the animus of the non-official proxies and what pronouncements we in the Chatting Class are demanding of their putative leaders. The legal process and the legal solutions for violence and rioting and municipal statuary are not what we really care about. We demand that the right people make the right sounds. We demand rhetorical satisfaction, ultimately a pledge of fealty. We are demanding satisfaction for something with great historical import and mythological power to validate our claims of sovereignty.
The King used to be called democracy, due process and rule of law. But we don't really want that right now. We want the so-called King to bend the knee.
For myself, I didn't pay attention to the Taliban in Afghanistan until they started blowing up statues. When you decide to blow up statues, when you are offended by symbols, when you burn flags, books and buildings, you are expressing a desire to exterminate. That's what's going on here. A desire to rewrite history and to undo any claims that Others might make that stand in the way of your full dignity. It used to be that Americans, all of us, aspired to one national identity. But we've gone radically and multiculturally autonomous and self-serving. We've abused pluralism into a perversion of itself. The warm fires of the melting pot have gone damp and we have been served cold kale salad and told that's as integrated as we're going to get. Pick out the fruits and nuts you don't like. It's your salad, we are told. Common purpose is epistemologically impossible. Or at least faith in it has declined abysmally. That's what it means when you are compelled to rename, reclaim, resist, reinterpret. It's only one step from remove.
What I hear in the back and forth is a call for others to imagine their ox being butchered. The interwebz are full of madlib scenarios of offense. "What if it were a statue of (insert inviolable icon here)?" We only offer sympathetic imagination of the Others when they are incited to rage beyond reason. Isn't what the screening of movies like 'Detroit' are all about? Of course it is. All of our dramas are about pushing people to the limits of tolerance. We are encouraged to all be inglourious bastards. Today is national punch a Nazi day. One step closer to the edge and we're about to break.
American institutions of the humanities and mainstream mass communications are broken, but we people are not. The longer we pay attention to those broken institutions, the more we fail to see our own humanity both in ourselves and in the so-called 'Others'. I have lost my faith in the ability of these old mainstays of society to be repaired or reformed, although I am confident about our basic humanity and the evolution and growth of new institutions. A new kind of hug is coming, but it will take a while. It will come after the fire. We have already created our Alts and armed these outcasts with the imprimatur to fight for 'our' version of America. I'm telling you now that they have been dignified by our callous disregard for our common purpose and they will clash and that clash will not be contained.
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