If They Come For Me, It's Bomaye

I like to think of myself as capable of complex thought, muddling around in the grayest areas, avoiding the extremes that take so much energy to maintain and make people like Alex Jones so sweaty all the time. And not a good sweaty, like the luminous sheen over taut, muscled arms of a professional tennis player in the late stages of a hard-fought match against a wily and disciplined opponent, no. More air-conditioner-repairman-in-middle-August sweaty.

I'm sort of suggesting that I'm either a moral relativist or a political pragmatist (depending on your starting point of view) out of pure laziness. This might not be too far off the mark. I went to a march one time. Nobody told me there'd be so much walking.

I have my share of strong opinions, sure, but by and large, I am almost pathologically disinterested in arguing, or even defending, the merits of what I believe. The point of argumentation is rhetorical persuasion, to change a mind in some small way, but we're at the low ebb of a trough in the political wave cycle where persuasion across party lines is vanishingly unlikely. A lot of us, especially people my age and younger who came of political age in the Clinton era or after, would have trouble remembering a time when anything like consensus even seemed possible. Sure, Obama won solid majorities of both the popular and electoral votes in 2008 and 2012, but the Congressional votes often swayed against him and the language of opposition (political, racial, etc.) left little room for anything like compromise.

But really it wasn't that long ago that it at last felt like we could agree on a thing. Remember in 1984 when Reagan more or less ran the table, winning 49 of 50 states? In hindsight of course we can see the seeds of the current polarization in that moment of national synchronized head-nodding: the introduction of Christianist political thought into the national discourse, the attacks on trade unions leading to the eventual dismantling of the post-war middle class status quo keeping a lid on income disparity, the explosion of AIDS and crack resulting in government indifference or outright hostility that would eventually develop into deep left-wing roots in activism for social justice in its current form, the vilification of the poor, mentally ill and other liminal citizenries blooming into a full social Calvinism... The Reagan administration has a lot to retroactively answer for, but there has to be a reason why that high point of national political unity was dragged down into the sticky morass we're trying to trudge through now. We opted, more or less, to pull it all down ourselves.

I turned 10 in 1984. I grew up desperately poor throughout a lot of the Reagan era, including receiving public assistance. One of my first political memories is the president and his factors in the press talking about food stamp abuse and "welfare queens." This was before I knew how to decipher coded racist language, so I assumed they meant us too, which was an obvious incongruity. Or, as I would later come to understand it as an adult: the president could be a liar. And a fucking vicious one at that. Jellybeans on his desk and shoe-polish hair-black and the whole aw-shucks whisper-voiced eye-twinkling demeanor, but that asshole was coming at me. Right through the same TV I got my Thundercats and Robotech through, the things that actually taught me right from wrong and to distrust mummies, a damned sight more than I ever learned listening to a president say anything.

So yeah, I have developed some strong opinions, sure, but those came with a healthy skepticism for the absolutes. The Reagan people after 1988 and especially after 1992 started to get actually scarily insistent not just on reverence for their fucked-up icon on passive-aggression and privileged obliviousness but also on the idea that, given the results of 1984, that power was theirs by default, by right. That's when they gave up on the idea of governance at all and turned to the politics of the temper tantrum. Right now we're living in the era of the politics of the Unshakeable Belief. Mitt Romney is an inarticulate bag of bundled stolen money with beady black eyes drawn on, but he was (accidentally) on to something with his "forty-seven percent" comment: we are dealing with some irreducible subsets that are unwilling to ever even consider voting for the Other Side. Because the Other Side are the enemy. And they deserve to get stabbed in the neck on a train or shot in the hip at baseball practice.

Again, I have some really strong feelings on certain subjects, but those don't really matter. The only absolute ones have to do with free speech and violence, and they're pretty tied together. I'm pretty OK with people being able to say whatever they want, however vile and in whatever forum is afforded to them, except to the extent they might incite violence. And even that is a nuanced position compared to when I think political violence is justified, which is to say, never ever. Like not even against the motherfucking cynical assholes trying to score political points off the shooting of Rep. Scalise and others. I believe they should be allowed to try to score political points, without threat of government sanction or any kind of violence against their persons. It's just that I enjoy the same political right to point out that them choosing to exercise their free speech franchise makes them motherfucking cynical assholes.

The only other thing I think I believe without any nuance or subtlety is that the Eagles as a band are fucking terrible, with no redeeming qualities. Yeah, sometimes I get "Take It To The Limit" stuck in my head, but that's not proof that I enjoy it. All that really proves is the uncharted limits of my restraint from perpetrating acts of violence.