Human-Caused Climate Change

It's going to take time to sort out everything about today's shooting of several people at a Republican Congressional baseball practice by an apparent Bernie Sanders supporter and volunteer, and I could use that as an excuse not to write about it now.  But one thing seems clear to me.  For the past year and more I've been watching liberals, progressives, and leftists fantasize aloud about and even endorse violence against Republicans and other right-wingers, from the video clip of a football player tackling a Trump lookalike (shared on Facebook by my friend A, who unfriended me soon after I called her out on it) to the widespread kvelling over the punching of Richard Spencer.  Whatever the facts about James T. Hodgkinson turn out to be, I think it's indisputable that liberal Democrats have been energetically fostering what they call a "climate of hate" when it's fomented by the Right.

They'll do their best to evade responsibility for their words, of course, just as the Right did after the shooting of Gabrielle Gifford.  They'll try to claim that Hodgkinson was mentally ill, a lone nut, and that the vitriol liberals and some leftists have been spewing in public for the past year -- and especially since the election of Donald Trump -- had nothing to do with his crime.  Maybe so, maybe not: Hodgkinson died in the hospital after he was shot by police, so he can't speak for himself; but apparently he had a rather vivid social-media presence.

I believe that we are responsible for our actions and our words, and that words mostly are not actions.  We can't be held responsible for everything that happens after we've acted or spoken, because it's not always certain whether something like this crime was a consequence of public rhetoric.  But it's notable that liberals and progressives have insisted often that the Right's rhetoric made such crimes more likely -- that "climate of hate" -- while giving themselves a pass for their own intemperate and often hateful rhetoric.  The denial that is so by many liberals, like the person in the photo that heads this post, is not only illiberal but a declaration of war on the principle of free speech.  I've often told liberals who claimed that "hate speech" isn't constitutionally protected that they should be glad it is, because otherwise they themselves would be in deep shit.

But then the rest of us are in deep shit too, as both mainstream US political factions gleefully drag the country (and the rest of the world) down.  "The creatures outside looked from pig to man," at the ending of Orwell's Animal Farm, "and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

P.S. Yes You're Racist has been active in fostering a climate of hate on Twitter, joining hands with the white supremacists he purports to despise, so this morning's retweet was almost funny:

It is okay to spread toxicity if it gets retweets and favorites on Twitter apparently.  Some of us don't need to "rethink things," though.  A rich white lady got hurt a few years ago, after all -- has YYR already forgotten Gabrielle Giffords and the eighteen other people shot during a constituent meeting in Arizona six years ago?  Six of them died, including a rich white guy and a little girl.  YYR and his ilk are paradigm examples of what so many left writers call "tribalism," the belief that only our side's lives matter.  If it's not okay to spread toxicity, it doesn't matter who gets hurt.

And, of course, some in the liberal media are blaming Putin for Hodgkinson.  Why not?

Eighty Percent Of Americans Consider Themselves Above Average

I work as a dishwasher in a cafeteria, and we see a lot of wasted food on dirty dishes. One night my helper, a gay male student, was so outraged by the mess that he screamed, “This is retarded!” I thought that was pretty funny, given how much yammering I hear in the gay community about hate speech, so I assumed my Old Hoosier Voice and said, “Now, there ain’t nothin’ wrong with bein’ retarded, I’m gonna be retard myself in a couple years.” (For any reader unacquainted with US English dialects, “retard” is how an Old Hoosier pronounces the word “retired.”)

I don’t remember what, if anything, he said to that. What I do remember is that about a week later, I overheard the same boy pontificating to some straight friends that “Nobody says ‘That’s so gay’ around me! I don’t allow anybody to get away with that kind of talk.”

Now, that was funny. (And now that I think about it, it was what inspired the title of this blog.) I’d already noticed that epithets like “bible-thumper” and “redneck” were acceptable among nice liberal folks. In fact using such words was virtually a declaration of one’s liberal credentials. Later on, “wingnut” (short for “right-wing nut”) spread like a radioactive virus over the liberal blogosphere, where it enjoys wide use. Don't call them "pwogs," though -- they'll get pissy about your incivility. And “retard,” along with its many spinoffs (fucktard, diptard, and many more) turns up on liberal blogs and websites, usually in the comments sections, where liberal dittoheads signal their contempt for Rethugs and the Chimp while deploring Republican hate speech like “the Democrat Party.”

Not that I have any objection to polemic, invective, or contumely. As anyone who reads this blog should know, I love ‘em. I’m not even surprised when people commit the same language offenses they deplore in others. I’m just sayin’.

But then, this morning, I was on a GLB panel speaking to a high-school class. One of the other speakers is much younger than I am (isn’t everybody, these days?), and is getting ready to be a teacher. So she’s highly alert to “hate speech,” and insisted that any hateful epithets should be corrected immediately by teachers. The thing was, she kept referring to various people (some family members, some of her students) as “morons,” “idiots,” and other similar terms. After the fourth or fifth time, I began watching the faces of the kids we were speaking to. This was an alternative high school, where kids often go to escape from the wonderful American mainstream. I wondered how many times they’d been called “morons,” “idiots,” and worse, not only by other kids, but by teachers?

Many years ago (you don’t want to know how many), I dated a slightly older man, a person of great sweetness and vulnerability, and not at all stupid. But he wasn’t an intellectual – by which I mean a person who likes to work with ideas the way that a mechanic works with cars, taking them apart and putting them back together for the sheer pleasure of seeing how they work – and he hadn’t done very well in school. He was impressed by my big collection of books and records, and kept deploring his inadequacy where the life of the mind was concerned. I was young and had my own issues to deal with, so when mere reassurance failed, I began putting distance between us. I still feel bad about that, but I still don’t know how I could have handled his neediness better. Since then I’ve dated other non-intellectual men who didn’t constantly apologize for themselves, and got along all right. If they don’t mind my inability to rebuild a carburetor or recite the complete starting rosters of the NBA, I don’t mind their ignorance of philosophy or poetry.

But Jerry’s pain, combined with what I learned from reading educational critics like John Holt, reminded me that kids who don’t do well in school are not only penalized with bad grades, they may be shamed and humiliated in the classroom by their teachers. They’ll probably suffer less from their peers, who may not be academic stars themselves and will prefer to torment bookworms and teachers’ pets instead. While some such kids may not really care that much, if schoolwork really doesn’t interest them, it still does no one any good to be told that they’re stupid, inadequate, and will never amount to anything.

It took me many years to get over the intellectual snobbery I learned in school. I was very lucky that in my junior high and high school I didn’t get picked on for being a bookworm and a sissy. For whatever reason, other kids respected my intelligence, which freed me from the need to be defensive, and made it a lot easier to get over myself. (I had more trouble with a few of the teachers.)

One of the things I learned from Noam Chomsky was how to treat non-intellectuals with respect, even when I don’t agree with their opinions, while taking the gloves off for the elites. I’ve often noticed that the smartest people I’ve encountered, like Chomsky, don’t feel that smart themselves. They are all too aware of their ignorance and the times they missed solutions that were staring them in the face. It reminds me of the time a graduate student I knew told me, sweetly and almost shyly, “I don’t say this to many people, but I think of you as my intellectual equal.” I thanked him, embarrassed, because I realized that though I hadn’t thought about it before, and don’t go around making such comparisons in the first place, I didn’t consider him my intellectual equal.

Even if the young teacher-to-be this morning learns to contain the insults while she’s in front of a classroom, they'll leak out through facial expression, body language, and her total attitude toward her students. I’ve heard horror stories from gay kids who were mocked by teachers for being sissies, and have long told education classes that they need to think about how they treat gender-nonconformist kids whether they’re gay or not. If I don’t accept the excuse, made by many, that “That’s so gay” doesn’t really have anything to do with sexual orientation, I’m sure not going to believe that “moron” and “idiot” have nothing to do with scholastic ability. A teacher who uses such terms so casually should not be given power over children.