If You Try Sometimes, You Might Find You Get What You Need

What bothered me most about the reaction to Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act was not so much the misinformation, but the emotional temperature of the reaction by liberals.  The mantra of "it's a license to discriminate against LGBT people" was bad enough, but it was only part of it.

Here I must backtrack for a while for context.  The quality of political discourse on the near right (liberals, progressives, Obama Democrats, et al.) had, it seemed to me, been degenerating for some time before Mike Pence signed the RFRA into law.  Instead of trying to take the high road by being smarter, more rational, more scrupulous about fact than the far right, liberals were taking their opponents as role models. This was nothing new, of course. American politics, like politics everywhere, has always been more about emotion than about fact, personalities instead of issues.  Liberals have always countered the far right's Hillary is a lesbian who murdered her lover Vince Foster with Oh yeah? Well, Rush is a fat pedophile drug addict! And Michael Moore is fat too, just to be balanced about it!  For that matter, I'm old enough to remember when, influenced by Black nationalists' fondness for calling their opponents faggots, the New Left in the late 60s borrowed the trope.  It might be that the Internet helped make things worse.  Are you pissed off by the idiotic memes and slogans your Republican neighbors are flooding Facebook with?  Why not just make some idiotic memes of your own?  (Not that I'm in a strong position to complain about that one, of course.)

In mid-March, forty-seven Republican Senators sent a letter to Iran, notifying its government that they would overturn any deal Iran makes with the Obama administration as soon as Obama is out of office.  It was a stupid gesture, and it set off a wave of controversy.  What I saw on Facebook from the liberals I knew, linking to posts from Daily Kos, the HuffPost, and other liberal sites, was sheer howling hysteria, echoed in comments.  Words like "treason" and "mutiny" were thrown around.  "Treason" was ridiculous, since however obnoxious the Cotton letter was, it didn't fit the definition given in Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution as far as I can see: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."  Who was the Enemy to whom Cotton was allegedly giving aid and comfort, or even adhering to?  "Mutiny" was no less absurd, since opposing or being insubordinate to the President isn't mutiny. The President isn't the Commander-in-Chief of the Senate, or of Congress, or of you or me.  I suspect that what the Democrats were grasping for was something like lese-majeste, for though Obama isn't a monarch his fans like to think of him as one.

Glenn Greenwald pointed out that in the recent past, Democrats have made independent diplomatic initiatives against the will of Republican Executives, which infuriated the Republicans and inspired vitriolic abuse very much like that being spewed by liberal Democrats against Cotton and his buddies.  As usual, the players switch sides when the person in the Oval Office changes to one of a different party.  Democrats who'd attacked certain of George W. Bush's policies started defending them when Obama did the same things, and Republicans attacked Obama for doing things they'd approved and defended when Bush did them.  Republicans accused Democratic critics of Bush's wars of disloyalty, of wanting Al Qaeda to win, and so on -- until Obama continued and escalated Bush's wars, whereupon Democrats suddenly realized  how vital to America's security those wars were, and anyone who criticized them was disloyal and wished Osama bin Laden was still alive.  As Nietzsche said, of necessity the party man becomes a liar.

While I was procrastinating writing this post, I looked over older posts I'd written here and was reminded just how bad liberals have been before; it's nothing new.  I suppose I'm just getting older and tireder.  But it does seem to me that liberals are abandoning even the "reality-based", "evidence-based" pretense they've claimed in the past.  They're embracing the stupidity, dishonesty, irrationality and sheer viciousness of their opponents.

So I'm still inclined to think that liberals have gotten worse.  The comments under posts I saw on Facebook and elsewhere about the Cotton letter, and then about Indiana's RFRA, were disturbingly vitriolic, resembling the comments one sees by right-wingers on local news sites, and as free of substance or rational thought.

And then there came the Memories Pizza flap.  Remember that?  A young woman who worked in her family's pizza shop (in the town where I went to high school) told her area ABC TV affiliate:

If a gay couple came in and wanted us to provide pizzas for their wedding, we would have to say no...I do not think it's targeting gays. I don't think it's discrimination...We're not discriminating against anyone, that's just our belief, and anyone has the right to believe in anything...Why should I be beat over the head to go along with something [homosexuals] choose?"

-- Crystal O'Connor, whose family-owned pizza shop supports Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act. After receiving threats, the family closed the shop. A GoFundMe page in support of their stance has raised over $50,000.

Again, there was so much here that could have been addressed rationally, starting with her claim that singling out gays was not "targeting gays" or "discrimination."  But liberals aren't much better informed on civil rights law or discrimination, so why should I expect a small-town teenager from darkest Indiana to know any better?  And leave us not forget that antigay discrimination was already legal in Indiana, as in most states, which both Ms. O'Connor and her critics forgot -- or, more likely, never knew.

So there was a lot of jocularity about how no self-respecting Homo-American would serve pizza at their gay wedding anyway.  (Unless it was penis-shaped or vulva-shaped, maybe.)  C'mon, gay men are famous for their good taste and class, their "This Face Seats Five" t-shirts!  And then Memories Pizza started getting threats, on Twitter and elsewhere.  When the threateners got caught, some at least tried to lie their way out of the situation -- just like their antigay, racist, and misogynist counterparts do.  And why not?  Gay and Lesbian and Bisexual and Trans Americans and our allies are just regular people: the people of the land, the common clay of the Midwest.  You know -- morons.  I don't jeer at the person who responded to the lesbian coach's arson threat as follows: “When you threaten to burn down #Memories Pizza that is not a mean tweet. ITS TERRORISM!”  It's exactly how a liberal would respond to the same threat coming from the other side, just as playing down the significance of the threat is how conservatives try to kick sand over their own intemperate rhetoric.  Nor can the threats be excused as a natural human response to outrageous provocation, since that excuse can be and has been used to excuse threats and violence by the Right.  Memories Pizza closed for a few days, and then reopened, fortified by a gift of more than $800,000 that had been raised on their behalf by a right-wing group.

A liberal friend of mine suggested that some of the reaction to Indiana's RFRA had been organized previously to oppose an RFRA being considered in Oklahoma. Opponents were able to block that one, so the hysteria simply was transferred to Indiana.  This is plausible, since what stopped the Oklahoma bill was an amendment that would have required businesses seeking to refuse service to gay people to post a publicly visible notice to that effect.  I noticed that even before the Indiana version passed, some of those sounding the alarm claimed that it had such a requirement.  I think this happened more because the alarmists were the people of the land, the common clay of the Midwest, etc., than because they were following a PR script. But to the extent that it was true, it undermines any attempt to excuse the ragegasms as spontaneous reactions to provocation.  People had plenty of time to inform themselves and ponder their responses; I think they were working themselves into a snit quite deliberately.

I think that a lot of what is going on here is a desire to vent against people one dislikes, or thinks one dislikes -- but from a safe distance.  It's easy to rant about the Homosexuals or the Bible Thumpers in the privacy of one's home or neighborhood tavern, where everyone present can be assumed to be like-minded, or at least to keep quiet if they aren't.  I think I first noticed this during the national controversy over Anita Bryant in the late 70s.  Most gay people who knew that their families and straight friends and coworkers were bigots weren't about to confront them directly -- but they could call Bryant a "bitch" where neither she nor their straight acquaintances would hear them.  Likewise, Bryant and her admirers could prattle about Militant Flaunting Recruiting Homosexuals without reflecting that they knew homosexuals personally, or having to look their gay relatives in the eye while they spewed out their propaganda.  Bryant claimed, and on this I see no reason to doubt her, that she received death threats.  If you lack the guts to tell your family you're queer, how satisfying, and how cowardly, to pick up the telephone and hiss threats against someone you don't have to see face-to-face. (One of the ironies was that most people on both sides who behaved like this were Christians, and saw no conflict between their behavior and their Christian beliefs.) This is why we gay radicals urged everyone who could to come out publicly, and it's why so many gay people did so: we could say to those around us, "Do you realize that you're talking about me?"

Facebook, even more than the rest of the Internet, has collapsed the distances between people at what used to be safe distances, and so undermined this desire.  But people still act as though no one could hear or see what they post.  (Not all that many bother to learn to use the privacy settings.)  I use the Internet to vent too, but first I address people I know on Facebook.  And also people I don't know: a lot of deranged garbage from all over the political spectrum turns up in my news feed, so I reply when it suits me.  Sometimes I get indignant demands that I mind my own business, but this sort of thing is my business.  It affects the quality of life everywhere, not just on Facebook, that people are so ignorant and/or misinformed (the two aren't mutually exclusive) and feel free to project their anxieties aggressively onto people they know nothing about.  By contrast, I do know quite a lot about the ideas I criticize and the people who express them.  Learning that is not often comfortable, but nowhere is it written that I must be comfortable.

Somewhere in there the playwright and actor Harvey Fierstein posted a meme which attributed to Senator Ted Cruz an endorsement of businesses being allowed to discriminate as they pleased.  It turned out to be a fake, the product of one of the proliferating satire sites.  Fierstein conceded with bad grace, complaining that it wasn't funny: "Maybe I'm just tired, but I don't find that crap at all amusing. These are people's lives and reputations." Since when does he care about Ted Cruz' reputation?  In other words, he said just what many right-wing bigots say when they fall for a similar hoax.  (His other remarks on the RFRA were equally clueless.)  One can debate the validity of at least some of those satire sites, but they do have a useful function, to remind everybody that you can't believe everything you see on the Internet.  The worst falsehoods aren't helpfully labeled as such by their creators anyway.

Fake Barry Quotes

Well, this is ... interesting.  One of my right-wing acquaintances from high school posted it to his wall last night, and I was immediately suspicious, but I don't own a copy of The Audacity of Hope, and it wasn't available as an e-book from the library, so I just made a note to check in the morning.

I wouldn't have been surprised if it had been totally fabricated, but it wasn't, not quite.  But it's still a lie.  Here's the actual passage from The Audacity of Hope, page 261, with the key passage emboldened.

Of course, not all my conversations in immigrant communities follow this easy pattern.  In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arabs and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging.  They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific assurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.

That's Senator Obama, before he became President, talking about interacting with some of his constituents, Arab-Americans and Pakistani-Americans but evidently citizens, who were understandably nervous that their government might stick them in a concentration camp and confiscate their property as it did American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II; or disappear them and send them to be tortured in other countries, as it did do with some Americans during the War on Terror; or just stand by while they were lynched by their Christian fellow citizens.  Obama wanted them to know that he would stand by them if "the political winds" blew in that direction, though I don't know how much his word on that was worth.

Whoever produced this meme wanted people to believe that Obama had pledged to side with Muslims elsewhere in the world, and to think of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS as the Muslims he'd side with.  I've noticed a number of my right-wing acquaintances having ragegasms (a word I swiped from Joan Walsh, writing on another topic) over what they view as Obama's refusal to do anything about ISIS.  It takes a very well-disciplined memory to believe such a thing, given the thousands of foreign Muslims whose blood is on Obama's hands, given his characterization of ISIS as a "vicious death cult," given his bombing of the areas that ISIS now controls, and given his request for a new resolution from Congress authorizing him (and his successor, whoever it turns out to be) to wage war against certain Muslims in perpetuity.  They wouldn't be satisfied, I suppose, even if he personally disemboweled every single Muslim in the world, because really their rage has nothing to do with what he actually says or does -- it's about the Barack Hussein Obama they've invented and nurtured in their minds.  Sure, racism has a lot to do with it, and it feeds their derangement, but they'd hate him almost as much if he were white.  His real crime is being Not-a-Republican, but even there I'm baffled by the intensity of their anger.

Such people are not, I think, anywhere close to being a majority of Americans, or even of American voters.  But there are a lot of them, and it's scary being in the same country, the same world with them.  They love fantasizing about certain people being slaughtered as messily as possible -- preferably brown- or olive-skinned people, preferably non-English-speaking, preferably dressed differently than Real Americans dress, but again this is not mandatory, just more fun.  You can see them frothing at the keyboard in the comments sections of many local newspaper websites, because they think someone got away with something, and they want that person torn to shreds on live TV.  I remember a couple of years ago, for example, some kid ran out onto a professional sports field during a game; he was grabbed, restrained, removed, and probably arrested.  The newspaper site where I saw this story exploded with enraged comments from people who wanted that kid dead. Even a fairly liberal man I know personally huffed to me about the danger the kid allegedly posed to somebody by doing what he did; he didn't want the kid publicly burned alive, but he still was more upset by the event than I thought strictly reasonable.

As I say, being non-white isn't required to be a the target of this free-floating frenzy of hatred.  Nor is this phenomenon restricted to elderly Republicans.  All you have to do is "misuse" the word "hopefully," or misspell a word, or say "nukular" instead of "nuclear," or commit any number of other linguistic crimes against humanity, and liberal / progressive / left people will go completely bonkers.  The flip side of the GOP ragegasms is the ragegasms of liberals, who are flooding Facebook with memes and articles about the stupidity and subhumanity of people who watch Fox News, or commit other atrocities, like having "too many" children.  Or showing insufficient adoration of POTUS, Blessed Be He.  Jeb Bush made a poor showing in his recent national security speech, stumbling on pronunciation and getting facts wrong.  To those on the same team, this shows what an unaffected, regular guy he is -- as when Obama starts dropping g's and pronouncing oil as ole; to those on the other team, it shows he's an idiot.  Daily Kos sends out daily e-mails of their own "recommended" stories that I rarely click through, especially as they consist mostly of clickbait that fits the pattern I'm describing: titles like "Hilarious full page ad in NYT skewers Boehner" and "Hilariously stupid Fox response to Bill Reilly's lies."  As I've said before, just because Republicans are stupid doesn't mean Democrats are therefore smart.  If anything, it looks to me like Democrats are getting dumber as they obsess over the dumbness of the Rethuglicans.  And not only does this not make Republicans (or Democrats) any smarter, it seems to make things worse as more and more political "discourse" is adapted to this mode.

(One milder version of the syndrome, but I think it's part of it nonetheless, are the people who comment simply "ugh" or "Disgusting" on what they disapprove.  They're just getting warmed up.)  I remember well from the 1960s the fury inspired in many Americans by the hippies, which I think was plausibly explained as their resentment that other people were getting away with refusing to join the rat race as they had done, to live an unhappily constrained, boring, frustrating life as they'd consented to do; of course they wanted to see the slackers and rebels punished.  Why this carries over to Obama, as it carried over to Bill Clinton, I don't know, but it seems to be the same pattern: the Two Minutes' Hate.  The important thing is that the target is on the Other Team, and so those on Our Team are free to do and say whatever they like.  Especially if you know in advance they won't (or can't) fight back.

In the greater scheme of things, though, hate and love, extremism and moderation are beside the point. The satirist Andy Borowitz wrote ironically today:

Critics Rip Obama's Refusal to Fight Hate with Hate

WASHINGTON - A rising chorus of Congressional critics are blasting President Obama for what one of them called "his stubborn refusal to fight a war on hatred by using additional hatred." According to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), "Islamic terrorists are fueled by hatred, and the only way to end that cycle of hatred is by adding more hatred." Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) agreed with Cruz, adding, "The United States of America is blessed with enormous reserves of hate, and President Obama is willfully refusing to tap them." Graham also ripped Obama for "pointlessly seeking the root causes of hate," adding, "No problem was ever solved by finding out what was causing it."

I think Borowitz missed the deeper irony here; like his right-wing opposite numbers, he thinks Obama is, if not a pacifist, then at least really nice.  In the real world, Obama intends to fight hate with Christian love, as the Bushes, Clinton, and Reagan did: he will bomb you, incinerate you, kill and torture you and your children, starve you, drive you into exile -- all in a spirit of Christian love! Praise Jesus!  Christianity is a religion of peace!  I'm sure the dead, charred, maimed, orphaned and widowed will feel so much better to know that they were done in, not by a hateful Republican Bible-thumper, but by a loving Democratic Bible-thumper.  Love makes all the difference.

There are those who, like Obama, want to distinguish between some supposedly pure, pristine ur-Christianity or Islam and the bad impure "extremists" who are trying to steal these religions from their true, moderate owners.  Even if you set aside Jesus' parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, in which Lazarus watches the torment of the damned in Hades from Abraham's, um, side, the teachings of Jesus are full of what should by now be a very familiar wish to see certain people get what's coming to them, namely the worm that is not sated and the fire that is not quenched.  For all the talk of love in the gospels, it's exactly balanced by the fantasies about punishment, punishment without limit, punishment that makes eye-for-an-eye look absurdly benign by comparison.

I'm sure I needn't point out that this is neither new or an American (or for that matter Christian) invention.  Think of Christians killed in the Roman arenas.  Think of the American Indian torture of captives for "spiritual" reasons, in public, for the edification of the audience.  Not everyone went to public torture or executions, but many did, and they were the spiritual ancestors of those who publicly call for the blood of those they consider it safe to hate.  And you don't really need to go see the actual executions: you can sit at home, yelling at the TV, posting vindictive garbage on your Facebook account. To quote again Walter Kaufmann's paraphrase of Freud, "Not only is the criminal a human being like you, but you, alas, are like the criminal."  I'm not excluding myself here.  I suppose one reason I'm so disturbed by the murderous fury of these people is that I recognize myself in it too.  But it can be, must be, resisted.