Hatred Abounds

  Man is conceived in sin
and born in corruption
and he passeth from the stink of the didie
to the stench of the shroud 
--All the King's Men, 
 Robert Penn Warren

I'd rather you were dead
than be a fuckin' faggot
--American Beauty (1999)

 Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky 
---Imagine, John Lennon
__________________________

Scenarios are created by words in context. We are not a very serious people today, and require inflammatory rhetoric to keep us online and connected in even the fragile and tenuous way that we are when we subsume the "news feed", such as it is.

Of course, we are not connected with the truth, but only the facts with which we are presented, so we can only know those things which are fed to us.

A number of incidents over the past few weeks have struck me as either so unworthy of the coverage or of the sort it received. These stories are so tortuously constructed that they become, well, torturous. The stores are difficult because they are being used to front an agenda, instead of to understand who we are. I will write about several over the next few days.

Violence is the common thread, so the relevance to our project at RangerAgainstWar is solid.

Today, I will mention the shooting at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, in which 49 people were killed and slightly more than that number were wounded. The shooter, Omar Mateen, had been a regular at the club and used a gay chat app over the course of a year with one of the customers.

Yes, Mateen claimed the kills for ISIS, but no one has asked the serious questions that must be asked if this sort of thing is to be extinguished.

First, his father said (after the requisite "I love America" spiel) that his son did not like gays. Mateen's ex-wife confirmed this, and it seems the father did not much like gays, either. This is a virulent hatred with which his parents did not seek help, and which most likely was learned and encouraged.

If the parents did not establish the hatred in the cauldron of the home, a hatred which would be in keeping with devout Muslim precepts, then at least it was never addressed as a pathology.

Mateen's behaviors sync with those of a self-loathing homosexual: he was abusive to his first wife (who escaped with the help of her family), and he was a regular at the gay nightclub. His sexual orientation was at odds with those sanctioned by his religion. He was closeted, like the Marine father in the film, American Beauty. Repression will out, often in explosive ways.

Another recent shooter who went into his comfortable fishbowl to shoot -- Dylann Root, in Charleston -- had also cased the joint well, and the regulars at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church also welcomed him inside the perimeter.

Press photos of Mr. Root show him in various poses with the Confederate flag and other classic white power paraphernalia. His hatred and fear of blacks overtaking the country was ab origine. He did not have original or strange ideations; he simply parroted what he heard. He took it a step further than most of his ilk who mutter their disdain sotto voce. Dylann Root wanted to be a hero.

So that is how you stop these spectacularly violent events: you rout out hatred and violence. You start at the cradle and you master your own ego before having children, or before joining a church.

Just that. But that is not how Homo sapien is wired, so we go on killing and hating better, enlisting our boundless and unremitting ego and opposable thumbs in the service of our hatred and violence.

At least we could be honest about it, and stop saying, "Gol-ly!" every time  something like this happens. Condoleezza Rice's disingenuous, "No one could have imagined them taking a plane" stance has worn quite thin.

The precedents abound. Imagine it.

Charleston

This is politics at its finest
--Wag the Dog (1997)

And that's what it is,
the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement,
and all you got to do to join is sing it
the next time it come's around
--Alice's Restaurant Massacree,
Arlo Guthrie

 Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive 
of all unifying agents 
--The True Believer, Eric Hoffer
_______________________

In another Wag the Dog moment not to be unexploited, President Obama plied his pipes last Friday at the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, SC, the site of the killings of nine black parishioners.

While the killing was surely a hate crime, against which we have legislation, it was not a massacre as the hyperbolic press is wont to label it. Massacres involve groups acting in symbolic ways. Instead, this was the deranged act of a pathetic, rootless individual.

The President performed a call and response near the end of his oratory: “Clementa Pinckney found that grace,” repeating the phrase after each victim's name. No, they did not find grace but were rather murdered in a deluded individual's vulgar and tawdry attempt at self-glorification. In a self-contradiction, Obama later said, "In the Christian tradition, grace is not earned."

Perhaps more horrifying than the actual killing is the fact that twelve years into the war on terror, none of our military or intelligence was able to predict or deter this event. This was neither an act of terrorism nor of home-grown or sleeper cells of terrorists. This was simply an act of good old-fashioned American hatred. It is a hate crime -- nothing but.

Mr. Obama may fly down in Air Force 1 and interpose himself in a show of force, but he was and is powerless to predict or stop such acts. He may order drone strikes world wide, but they do not make us any safer from terrorists, criminals, or crazy, crusading idiots.

People like the shooter give off little of a predictive nature. When they do, it is often within the confines of their little crazy worlds, often lived in the bubble of innumerable virtual chat rooms, and thought crime is not yet prosecutable. 

Hatred is the glue that holds the world together. Even for those who claim fealty to a religion, it is a hard row to hoe to "love thy neighbor" (= The Other) when your religion -- any religion -- gains its legitimacy by virtue of cleaving from every other. This is by definition, and a built-in failure of most dogma.

You are you, by virtue of not being THEM, and the "them" is an excoriated unknown, condemned by your creator to a life of everlasting torment in the hereafter, at best.

Meanwhile, when the Charleston story was claiming the spotlight, heinous and murderous violence continued apace throughout the world. Hatred and opposable thumbs (to create and carry weapons) may be the defining feature of the hominids -- not a great legacy.

To refashion the lyrics of songwriter George Gershwin, "In time the Rockies may crumble / Gibralter may tumble / There're only made of clay / But ..." hatred is here to stay. Our biracial President trying to get his groove on singing a negro spiritual will not alter the fact. 

We are a nation of hatred and violence protected by a government that holds hatred and violence near and dear. Oh, if you kill the right ones, that is. Someone else's mammas and pappas.

Then the leaders of that same government cry crocodile tears when the violence is visited on the home team. 

It is a predictable and sad story, and the "sad" is a double entendre.

Shocked!

--Mr. Sterling and his "tranny",
according to a comment thread at the SI site 

The left wing is broken,
the right insane 
--Pretty Pink Rose,
David Bowie
 _________________

That's "tranny", not "nanny".

I'm shocked, aren't you? Mr. Sterling, the white basketball dude, said some negative things about black men and how this has a negative impact on how whites view the franchise, and now he's banned from going near a b-ball court again.

Well, at least that. Feeling better now -- how 'bout you? Or at least, I think I'm supposed to feel better. Naw, on second thought, I feel worse. We have freedom of speech in the United States, and what is protected is not just what you like. Incitement to violence is not protected, but expressing bigotry is not the former.

Among the roundup of talking heads on NPR's Diane Rehm show this morning was Michael Eric Dyson doing his predictable patter, about how the black man owns his negritude and transvalues the odious N-word into a symbol of his empowerment and re-habitation of his black body from the colonizing white man, who is not allowed to use the word.

Dyson is beside himself regarding the "entrenched racial biases that persist," but his outrage only extends to the bias that inhabits the headspace (or perhaps, the viscera) of the white man, which I suppose co-opts the person of the white female, too. {Forgive me, but I've had a particularly noxious exposure to Post-Structuralism which leaves me unable to brook too much of Professor Dyson's cant without feeling vaguely ill.}

Dyson will not allow himself to consider the prospect that blacks using the N-word is a self-loathing behavior. Can you imagine President Obama calling himself "one crazy nigga"? Me, either. By professor Dyson's metric, blacks may use the N-word, but if a black man like Bill Cosby (that old fuddy duddy) speaks of a problem in the black community, he is banished from the universe of cool.

And somehow, we are all o.k. with this, 'cos Jay Z. makes a lot of money throwing down his rap. And money makes you a Big Man in America.

Ms. Rehm then asked the panel if we might not draw some connection to the "Crazy Rancher Dude" (NYT's Gail Collin's term; and she has the temerity to talk about "freedom"?) who recently spoke in the NYT about black malaise in America. Not comme il faut, but he IS a rancher in Nevada, after all. Permit me to draw my own connections.

I've seen those people/families to which the rancher refers, sitting on the tattered sofas on their sagging front porch at 1100, perhaps someone drinking out of a paper bag. Lives without hope in my quaint, magnolia tree-lined city (on the off-streets, of course), in Cleveland, in D.C., in wherever. Do you think this is a problem? Me, too.

But laughing at "Crazy Rancher Dude" who's worked most of his 68 years is not an answer. It doesn't make me feel good. It makes me wonder how crazy are my fellows to even waste a moment missing the actual problem, which is the dismal lives of the people whom the rancher spoke of.

Ah, but fixing a problem takes effort and innovation. A Tweet is a mere 140 characters.

An older student, Joyce, once ask me a big question. (Joyce was really "Annie" on the student log, but she explained that "Annie" was a "black person's name", much I suppose as "Sarah" was the name appended to Jewish women in pre-war Nazi Germany.) Joyce asked after the murder of James Byrd, Jr., the black man who was dragged behind a truck in Texas, "Why do white people hate us, Miss Lisa?"

"Why do black people hate us, Joyce?", I asked. Hatred and exclusivity seems hardwired into our genome.

It will be a choice to stop, if we ever can.

Two Minutes Hate

--Suicide Bombers, Emad Hajjaj (Lebanon) 

I'd like to teach the world to sing
in perfect harmony
I'd like to buy the world a Coke
And keep it company 
--Coke Commercial jingle (1972)

 We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus!
That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. 
We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities,
we are eaten up by nothing
--Charles Bukowski

He had raised hatred into an art.
He hated better than anyone had loved 
--Do you know the source of this quotation?
_________________

After recently reading the excellent Stories From Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch covering the Rwandan Genocide, and seeing pictures of the fighting still going on in the same region by the same players in the next day's paper, Ranger was reminded of one of his pet theories: The world is held together by hate, and not love. 

Whether we are talking of the Balkans, Asia, Central Asia or wherever the world is not a Coca Cola commercial, and hatred is the prevailing glue that binds us together -- not politics, religion or any other enlightened philosophy.

Further, the United States both participates in the divisiveness and deviates incrementally from this fact as we are bound and riven by more seemingly benign tribal affiliations like sports teams and "reality" t.v.; a subset of reality t.v. would be the 24-hour news cycle programing. What this implies for America's future is unclear. Additionally, the maintenance of the tribes albeit once- and second-removed (via Tweets, feeds and other remote reportage) poses the question of whether the affiliations will be diluted via distancing, or strengthened via need for some defining connection, regardless of how ersatz  or remote it is.

We claim to be civilized, and have our differences mitigated and attenuated by various attempts at fellowship, but at bottom, love does not triumph. As U2 sang in "Pride", "What more in the name of love?"

Hatred runs and rules the affairs of our daily lives.

Who Woulda Thunk It?

From today's Slate: Supreme Court Conservatives say the South is no longer racist. You learn something everyday, no?

Lemme tell ya, if there's one thing I know for sure about the South, it is that bigotry still reigns five ways from Sunday.  Do not fool yourself into thinking it is mostly racial; oh no -- far from it.  As long as "they" know their place (=untermentsch), there is a role for blacks.  Not uppity ones, mind, who have pretensions upon your dog or woman or property. Step -and-fetch-it is just fine, thanks.

The highest vitriol may be save for those of differing religions, and I don't mean the crazy Baptists at the Bethel AME down the road. No, their deepest vituperative is save for those not Christian, which includes Catholics, or, "Idolaters".  The reasons for this reserve pool of disdain is deep. But never fear that the United States lacks a sense of coherence or homogeneity; it is just done at the expense of everyone else.

(Ranger essay coming later today.)

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Is the South Still Racist? SCOTUS Conservatives Don’t Seem To Think So