"Well, it's their idiot president, isn't it?"
He's a huge, rancid problem, to be sure. But he's not the problem.
"White supremacism."
Yep, that problem, it turns out, never really went away, and racism is a long way off being called a historical phenomenon. But that's not the whole of the problem.
"Is it the wildly corrupt political system where he who spends the most wins and the NRA literally has a fucking ratings system for the most useful politicians doing the rounds? Or the fact that the great American news media, despite the best efforts of those still working in longform, is basically composed of motormouth rent-a-rants whose nightly job is to turn every development into an elaborately constructed strawman and ramp up the rage bubbling away in their respective political tribes, rather than trying to convey anything like a nuanced overview of the day's events, let alone a cogent and considered analysis of the world as it stands today?"
Well, okay, yes, you make an excellent point, and these are of course all big parts of the story but it's not really where I was going with this. Are you going to keep interrupting or can I talk now?
"Go for it."
Thanks.
Nostalgia. The problem I have in mind is nostalgia. That cosy, cuddly, wistful feeling that tells us we can always go home again. Sepia skies and songs about the open road and the simplicity of childhood. The notion that it was all better and simpler Back Then. The idea that once upon a time, people knew right from wrong, kids respected their elders, there was none of this PC crap, and men were men. Because under this bullshit idea that the world was a better place back in the day is the rather nastier idea that those who held all the power then should still be in charge of it all now, and any upstart attempts to redress the balance and make things fairer for everyone represent a dangerous attempt to corrupt society and freedom as we think we know it.
Worse still is the idea that moving forwards is inherently a bad thing, and that because people have the legal right to stay stuck in the past, that's the moral thing to do. That attitude is a large part of why America is still - still - in the grip of a epidemic of mass shootings that has been going on for years and is getting worse, and why one of the loudest voices in the conversation about this is still the National Rifle Association, whose bullish advocacy for gun ownership (read: gun sales) is a major factor in this obscene and tragic state of affairs. On average there is more than one mass shooting every day, and yet the most powerful people in the country refuse to have a serious conversation about how to stop it, because to do so would be to admit that the version of America they promote and coddle is stuck in the past and dependent on a faux-nostalgic set of fallacies, outdated stories and deeply damaging ideas about what their nation is meant to represent.
I'm thinking about the obstinate determination that you've got to be a devout Christian to run the 50 states, and not just that, but the right kind of Christian (loudly pious, paternalistic, makes everything about God when a lot of it is really about us). Indelibly linked to that are the creepy ideals of completely separate gender roles, and the re-disenfranchisement of women. Whether that's Alabama and Ohio and Georgia lawmakers removing women's rights to make their own decisions about their bodies, or the shuddersome, inside-out rhetoric of incels who believe they're owed sex and devoted girlfriends through none of their own efforts - at their most extreme, going on killing sprees to make their point.
Nearly 1/3 of the world's public mass shootings have taken place in the United States of America.
I'm thinking about, yes, white supremacism, and the racism that never went away, despite large strides in heavy, painful boots by men and women who endangered themselves to make the land of the free better for their sisters and brothers. The seething butthurtness of a hate-filled, sulking group of people who still deeply, deeply resent making room for the people of colour in their society, even though the ancestors of one group forced the ancestors of one of the other groups to be a part of that society in the first place, to put it baldly. The police officers who kill black men in the streets for selling cigarettes, and shoot black men in the back of the head for trying to save fellow citizens from mall shooters.
I'm thinking about gun culture. I'm thinking about this pathological and fundamentalist obsession with The Constitution, as if it was, from its beginning, a static, untouchable document. It's full of fucking amendments, my dudes. (I say "my dudes", and for sure, toxic masculinity is a big part of the gun fixation and the bloody harvest it reaps, but let's be real, this mindset is not only a male one.) The last ratified amendment was completed in 1992. Every amendment is an example of someone putting their thinking cap on after the ink was dry on the page, and suggesting, "Hey, had anyone thought about this?"
The idea persists, grossly swollen in its arcane stupidity, that the 2nd Amendment matters above all other modern considerations, because Americans might one day need to use their rifles to fight against the tyranny of their government. Cool, bro. That was ratified in 1791. You're going to take on the 21st century military-industrial complex with an AR-15 and a few rifles are you? Good one, let me know how that goes. Your president sent tanks and fighter jets whizzing around Washington last month to flex his military muscle, while alluding to violence from supporters if he's challenged, continuing to foment racial hatred on national TV against his own political rivals as well as your neighbours, and keeping children locked up without their parents in cages down there on the border, and you're waiting for the day when you might encounter governmental tyranny? It's here, and you're cheering wildly for it as an example of making American great "again".
In 1996, after a gun massacre in Port Arthur, Australia enacted an amnesty, registering all guns and collecting 650,000 newly banned guns over the course of a year. In the next seven years, gun suicides dropped by an average of 57%. Gun homicides went down 42%. They held another amnesty in 2017.
"Again." There's that nostalgic word. Yesteryear America isn't a place of soft-focus nostalgia for anyone who was left at the bottom of the pile by its laws or developing society. And for many ordinary people, the America of old probably would have been no picnic for them either. Dodging gang and mob violence in Chicago in the 20th century or New York in the 19th century. Living in slums, dying of dysentery in a civil war, or living without the vote or the right not to be raped by your own husband (it took til 1993 for that one to be a crime across all 50 states, fact fans). Working against your will on a cotton or tobacco farm, fleeing lynch mobs, or watching the land you'd lived on for generations fenced off from you as your family were slaughtered or shoved into reservations. The young America was not an especially pleasant or comfortable place for most people to make a life, and it took a long fucking time to get anything close to great.
Societal progress has lurched or crawled forward, interrupted and even set back by rule-bending, corruption and political obsessions like McCarthyism. Ugly ideologies like white supremacism and religious bigotry have ebbed and flowed, but are not yet universally unacceptable enough to neutralise the threat they pose, and former nationalists like Christian Picciolini make a compelling case that they are getting more dangerous; that the sitting president refuses to condemn them in clear terms is damning in itself. There was no golden age of America, and it's not there yet either. It's in a constant state of push-and-pull between the great and the grotesque, but still striving messily to be better tomorrow than it was yesterday. What a grotesque lie is sold to its people when its gangster-like Childcatcher-in-Chief blandly promises them a return to greatness if they'll surrender their collective sense of decency.
Maybe the attraction of gun culture, for some of those who defend it so fiercely, isn't really the idea of taking up arms against a government that they can't possibly hope to steer by waving a rifle in the air. Maybe the right and ability to fire a gun is much more about personal power. Feeling a little bigger than you are in a world that makes you small. Maybe it has to do with feeling powerless in the face of your town's dying industry or what it costs to go to the doctor. Maybe it has to do with feeling bigger and badder than the neighbour who might piss you off, or the brown guy you've decided is trying to steal your job, or the politician you disagree with, and what clearer demonstration of that than a weapon that makes a big bad noise and lets you feel, when you pose with it, like John Wayne or John McClane? Maybe the nostalgic, toxic machismo has to do with feeling like a rootin, tootin' movie character untainted by the depressing realities of your life, a frontiersman defending his territory valiantly.
The problem with those scratched, rose-tinted lenses is that they obscure anything beyond the foreground; its wearers are so busy squinting at the immigrants in their immediate field of vision, that they can't see the investors, lobbyists and politicians fifty yards down the road, making the decisions that will shape their lives. The othering takes place, the scapegoats are identified and lit up like Christmas, and in the sights of men like Patrick Crusius, who drove 1000 kilometres down one of those fabled American highways to murder the citizens of El Paso, they become literal targets.
Gun advocates argue that what we need isn't fewer guns - it's more guns! Arm teachers. Arm everyone. The implication is that people should live like characters in a shoot-em-up, constantly primed for the enemy around the corner.
In 1994 Bill Clinton signed a ten year ban on assault weapons and certain large capacity ammunition magazines. The ban expired in 2004, and was not reinstated despite repeated efforts from various senators and representatives and Barack Obama's administration.
All of this entitlement, this searing sense of injustice, seems to come from the idea that Things Were Better Then. Not because the world was genuinely a better place, or because the right decisions were always made before America became a modern-day Sodom, but perhaps because false nostalgia always makes things seem simpler, assigns the the responsibility and hard work of self-improvement to some other entity offstage. It's the comforting idea that the Constitution laid everything out clearly and completely, and everyone knew their place and behaved better. It's similar to the desperate need to believe literally in every word of the Bible, which might go some way to explaining why a nation founded on the idea of separation of church and state holds up Christianity and its practice as a such a vital aspect of public American life, and mistrusts those who eschew it.
Fundamentally, the people who believe that Old America was better have nothing more to go on than blind, dogmatic belief, and the letter of the law taken out of time and context; woe betide anyone that should intrude upon their idea of what America is or was supposed to be. This self-sustaining rage seems to express a fury that, in the land where you're told you can be anything you want to be, for many it hasn't worked out that way, and someone must be to blame, and if the president tells you it's the women and the Muslims and the Mexicans, then that's probably who it is.
In 2019 alone, there were 248 mass shootings in the USA. That was accurate to July 31st, but then El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio happened.
The president of the United States of America feeds nostalgia into the vending machine that is his core base, and what comes out of the bottom is domestic terrorism. He lets people believe that he thinks they're smart, the masters of their own destiny, and that America is a state of mind, not a federal country that needs fair and careful governance according to the principles of law and real democracy. The obsession with (as opposed to the respectful and thoughtful observance of) the signifiers of America - the flag, the anthem, the Constitution, the uniformed flower of youth fighting overseas - all have to do with the mythology of America, the simplistic story of a bright, beautiful, unbeatable society built from the dust of an empty, fertile land waiting to be brought alive by joyful nation-builders. We know that story's a white supremacist dream that ignores all the blood in the soil of America, but it's an intoxicating one to people feeling hard-done-by and deprived of what they regard as a birthright.
The problem with nostalgia - and I speak from experience, because to my own detriment I'm a deeply nostalgic person, a daydreamer - is that all that time spent thinking about Then is time missed Now, and it leaves you with little to show for it. It leads you hopefully by the nose into thinking that your ship's going to come in, because that's how all good stories end, and it's a rude and devastating bump to find out that the world isn't here to provide you with your own rags-to-riches story unless you have the luck, ingenuity, connections, resources and will to write it yourself and live it. And some of these folks don't take rejection very well.
And so the guns come out. Jewish and African-American and gay and female and Latino and Muslim and student communities are targeted, set aflame, shot at and blown apart, because disappointed, predominantly white men are furious that special provision has not been made for them - that they are not, in fact, the chosen ones. They act out their lone gunman fantasies of taking revenge on the world, of finally making a name for themselves, of taking what they're owed, and all they achieve is another scar across the face of the country they feel they are uniquely entitled to represent and benefit from.
And yet, because the power of nostalgia is so great, because the pull of the past, the glories of the frontier and the days when men were men and defended their turf has become such an ingrained part of this psychology, nothing must be allowed to change. The right to bear arms is considered holier than the right to live without fear of indiscriminate murder, or the unspeakable and statistically very real possibility that in a moment of depression or despair, your child might put a gun to his own head, with nothing in place to stop him. The NRA continue to hold the whip to the backs of their preferred politicians, concerned only with their own cold dead hands, and people in Kansas, Arizona, Florida and Wyoming clutch their guns tighter and tell themselves that these machines are their protection from the soiled world out there, that a yellowed document, written when cannon blast was the most frightening government weapon one might expect to face, holds the answers to the problem of smeared, wonky 21st century nostalgia and deeply individualistic, neurotic, thwarted entitlement.
On the 5th August 2019, two days after two cities were bloodied in the massacres in El Paso and Dayton, the President of the United States offered prayers for Toledo, OH and announced that video games were to blame.
No comments:
Post a Comment