The Fateful Lightning

I'm trying not to be an old person. I don't have a lot of space in my head or on this platform that I'd like to devote to reminiscing about the "old civility" and the way people within the scope of political discourse, in politics and among the lay polity, used to be so much nicer to one another because like most nostalgic appeals to the past, it's not supportable by the facts. Maybe you could point out that it used to be possible for Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan to work together on some stuff or at least have a jovial exchange the way old white guys assured of their own personal power can and what a shame it is that that kind of collegiality no longer exists, blah blah. But like with most history, the story you think you know is a lie you've decided to accept probably because, if you're anything like me, it's a subject you're super tired of trying to think about at all. Glomming on to someone else's feels-based narrative of comfortable historical symmetry is far simpler and more emotionally comfortable, soft and warm like a bed made from a thick fleece blanket laid over a layer of fresh bullshit.

Also these things are both cyclical and arbitrary. Sure, there are periods when people are more subjectively civil to one another, but if appealing to the past lends legitimacy to an argument, appealing farther back should lend even more legitimacy, right? Whatever argument anyone wants to make about the Old Days being more consensus-y and respectful, I can always point back to the mid-late 19th century when some Congressional debates resulted in the deaths of 600,000 Americans (including one president) over a period of roughly five years.*

Call me a shameful optimist I guess, then, but I don't really feel like our current political epoch, depressing and cacophonous as it is, really represents any kind of mortal wounding of the American political process as a whole. It's more resilient than we think. We've been trying to kill it with the dumb Electoral College for 225 years, for example, but it just keeps on ticking.

When something like the fucking horrendous Oregon college campus shooting happens, though, it's interesting to read the chatter and figure out where people actually are. There is no perceived space between accepting the language and emotional surrender to the complete fetishization of something (an issue, a cause, a person or even an object) and active, violent, visceral hatred of a thing bent on its active destruction. The flag, police, guns, service members, Jesus... these are thing you not only have to love, but if you don't, your denial of their emotional primacy in your life is proof of you actively hating one or (as is usually assumed since they come in a Beliefs Packet you get when you register as a Republican) all of these things to the point of being an agent of their erasure from American life. And an agent of Satan.

I'm sorry, but I'm just not as simple as I seem. My views on Christianity, for example, are complicated. And they are complicated by the fact that they are informed by my own, personal questions and musings about theoretical and practical theology, the differences between the two things and their expression in liturgy, ritual, catechesis, social outreach, ecumenicalism, the overlap into or with political expression, just lots and lots of stuff, without relation to anyone else's personal cosmology. But if I start with the premise that the mythology should be treated like a mythology on par with Zeus and Mithra and hell, even Mothra (but obviously less cool), then anything I have to say about it is another shot fired in the War on Christmas or a War on Christianity or a War on Cops. I don't think it's a coincidence that since we started winding down our actual wars, these new Wars have proliferated like rabbits. In Australia. With roughly the same effect.

The simplified categorization between People I Tolerate and Mortal Enemy is a bit manichean, sure. And so there are some disagreements and some intemperate language gets used, even among old buddies when something important like 8th place in the GOP presidential primary field is at stake. But look, there were like over 20,000 casualties just at Antietam in 1862 and we're certainly not facing anything as extreme as all that. Sure, we lose 10 or 20 here or there as a direct result of the discourse sometimes, but there are some people for whom those kinds of regular losses are acceptable in defense of the principle of something like, for example, lax-as-possible gun control laws. And I'm free to disagree, with or without suggesting such a person lies somewhere on a scale bound on either end by categories of "sociopath" and "asshole," but it wouldn't be right to characterize that disagreement as threatening to the social order because, between us, we know that no matter what anyone says or how often this happens, nothing ever, ever, ever, ever, ever changes.

---

*Pointing out that it was called a Civil War is not going to win you any points here, Mr/Ms Clever Boots.