Of Mobs and Government

It's been hard to focus on much but the news to-day. Especially since, as usual, it's difficult to find articles and reports unfiltered by significant bias. So often a story convinces me something happened but leaves me asking, "What really happened?" prompting me to seek out more and more sources. By a rudimentary net of cross-referencing I gain something like a clear picture of circumstances. Of course, when both The Guardian and Breitbart say Trump Supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol building, it's a good bet that's exactly what happened, though Breitbart has since removed the term "Trump Supporters" from their headline.

It's this widespread obfuscation that has led to frustration on both sides and fomented rage on both sides. Though to those Trump supporters who would argue that it's evidence of election fraud I would ask them to compare the 2016 and 2020 elections. When Hillary Clinton lost the electoral college and won the popular vote, she didn't incite invasion and vandalism of a federal building, she didn't stubbornly refuse to concede for months. And Biden won both the popular vote and the electoral college.

The invasion of protesters has rightly been called a terrorist act because it was intended to and succeeded in inspiring terror. And like most terrorist acts, the terror it inspired had the exact opposite effect of what the terrorists hoped to achieve. Republican lawmakers who previously supported Trump's dispute of the election results, like Senator Loeffler, changed their minds as a direct result of being frightened out of their minds by a mob intruding on and vandalising their workplace. Again, I'm reminded of 2016 when I said I thought the best movie to watch to understand the Trump presidency was Luis Bunuel's Viridiana. It was hard not to think of the dirty beggars rifling through the household finery, a move that shook the titular character's desire to champion their liberty, when I saw pictures of a Trump supporter kicking back in Nancy Pilosi's office, or that guy in the buffalo hood romping around on that familiar blue carpeting, amid the marble columns. Only now Trump isn't the figure of tighter security, of the iron fist who promises to keep the rabble in line. Now he's truly the figurehead of the rabble. There are few things he could have done that would more decisively turn Republicans against him.

For years, I've watched the rhetoric on both sides of the political spectrum ramp up and I see it in full, grotesque extravagance to-day. Both sides call for violence, both sides point to the irony of the other side's attitude about their own violent protests. And then both sides are seemingly shocked that the other side would dare use violent rhetoric.

I looked through the Twitter account of Ashli Babbit to-day, a Trump supporter shot and killed by police in the Capitol. She was unarmed but she was trying to break into the Speaker's office. The comparisons between her and George Floyd are already flooding social media. She's an obvious flashpoint for the two sides to condemn each other as monsters. As it happens, she's from San Diego, my hometown. Her Twitter is filled with pictures of familiar seasides. Mostly she retweeted other people but she also has videos in which she rants about border security, liberal media, and the California Governor, whom she blamed for many people losing their homes. She doesn't come off as a smart person, she may even have been a hateful person, but she seems like she genuinely cared about people. That's the kind of thing the Democrats are going to have to recognise if there's any hope in truly avoiding a civil war--the two sides have to recognise each other's humanity. That's looking increasingly unlikely.

Last week I listened to the infamous hour long recording of Trump in a phone conference all but begging for votes, his argument pathetically dissolving into flat assertions that he'd won the election. As though, like a spoiled child, he could make something happen just by saying he wanted it. And I thought again, how could anyone take this guy seriously? How could anyone think he belongs in a place of authority? But maybe it's not surprising when so many have praised selfishness for years while the quality of education has decreased.

I hope for the best but I think we're in for the worst.

The Wrong Way

Lately I've found myself watching interviews and lectures by the late Roger Scruton available on YouTube. As I've started seeing reports of the widespread riots in the U.S., I've been constantly reminded of a story Scruton told multiple times about the moment he became a conservative, when witnessing the riots in Paris, instigated by Communists and Socialists, in 1968.

"The thing that most struck me about those students in the street was the sentimentality of their anger. It was all about themselves. It wasn't about anything objective. Here they were the spoiled middle class baby boomers who never had any real difficulty to cope with, shouting their heads off in the streets, burning the cars belonging to ordinary proletarians whom those [students] pretended to be defending against some imaginary repressive structures erected by the bourgeoisie--the whole thing was a complete fiction based on the antiquated ideas of Karl Marx, ideas which were already redundant in the mid-19th century. They were acting out a self scripted drama in which the central character was themselves."

I've had a similar growing feeling since the election of Donald Trump. I didn't vote for Trump, I thought he was incompetent, and I plan on voting for Joe Biden. But almost immediately after Trump's election, reactions against him have felt oddly disconnected. As though Trump was the figurehead of an enemy in a war that had absolutely no substance for me. Which would be bad enough if I liked Trump but seems even worse because I don't like him. The oddly mechanical feeling of new young voices suddenly injected in news media, the stark bifurcation of reality between news media of different political stripes, the persistent recasting of heterosexual male libido as perverse. When I became concerned about lockdowns harming the economy, I immediately felt concern for my former coworkers at JCPenney who found themselves furloughed, sent home without pay. I can understand the belief that quarantining is more important than the economy but rhetoric from the left typically hadn't even a shred of sympathy for that proletariat the left is classically supposed to advocate.

And now, somehow, we're to believe that the horrific, the absolutely despicable murder of George Floyd calls for businesses across the country to be destroyed and looted, for Nashville's City Hall to be burned.

Again and again, I'm glad to be in Japan partly because there are so many things here I used to love about the U.S. Early on, I walked down a street with a coworker and I pointed out to her all the small business along the street we were walking down. There are so many little restaurants here, each distinctive with its own personality. I remember when San Diego was like that, before one by one nearly every place with any shred of individual personality was strangled to death by oppressive rents. And now this. I don't know what else to say because I know the kind of Fred Madison madness I'm talking to can't see or hear the other side. There are no eyes to see or ears to hear any appeal I can make. All I can do is hope.