STRAIGHT OUTA COMPSON

STRAIGHT OUTA COMPSON

On page A2 of a recent Washington Post, the headline reads: "Brawl between moose ends bitterly. After locking antlers, pair became united in death and preserved in ice." Apparently, "moose" is the plural of "moose," but don't be distracted by that. I'm bringing this up because of the obvious metaphor.
  Recently, I've been preaching civility while my friends have been telling me about hideous things Republicans are doing. What some of them are assuming is that I'm saying "Don't speak up about racial hatred, bullying, or hate crimes." And what I'm assuming, unfairly in many cases, is that they aren't perceptive enough to understand what I'm saying.
  In the past, I've tried to use wit and clever writing to make large points. Toward this end, I've resisted spelling everything out, avoided taking expository detours and launching into rhetorical tangents that might clarify my thinking and cut off anticipated dissent. Even though I've mostly left this sort of thing on the cutting room floor, my prolixity has remained intact (thank god!), but I find that I'm spending entirely too much time every day responding to comments from people who seem to think I'm naive, or crazy, or something.
  A few times I've lost my temper, because it was late, and I was tired. At least once, I lost it with a friend who didn't deserve it at all. I think I patched it up okay (fortunately, my friend is pretty gullible), but I can't afford to make this mistake again. Obviously it's mighty hypocritical of me to be condescending toward people I am lecturing about how condescending they are. Moreover, I'm in the early stages of building a media empire, and I can't afford to lose anybody.
  So today I'm mostly eschewing cleverness in favor of clarity.
  The mission statement for my upcoming HOT PLATE! radio show, helpfully crystallized by my plucky colleague Eli Staples, is this--


HOT PLATE! is here to help Americans overcome their unhealthy dependency on the concept of  "The Other."

  We will do this with conversation, civility, and music. Also humor, though the humor will be pretty rare, due to us blowing our pre-production budget by hiring a staff of approximately 147. (My intern karlstraub'sintern RhondaMarvell will be in charge of them, since we seem to be in a season of promoting unqualified loyalists to positions both delicate and important.)
  Since I'm committed to 100% comprehension in my audience today, allow me to explain this at uncharacteristic length.
  The Other is a human construct. Scientists tell us (those of us who listen to scientists, anyway) that "race" has little meaning at the DNA or molecular level. The notion that a person's bloodline predetermines their ability to appreciate irony, or ace the SAT, or steal hubcaps, is popular but fatuous. (Like Mumford and Sons.)
   There's a propensity (or, if you prefer, a proclivity-- I could go either way) for Americans to prejudge a person based on their "race." Sometimes this prejudging is positive (cf. Asians and algebra), but, sadly, often it is not (cf. the same Asians and vehicular locomotion). This kind of presumption, regardless of anecdotal or other evidence "supporting" it, is what we call prejudice. I believe most or all of us have a little, or a lot, of this. It's normal to have it. I have it. I try to fight it in myself, and I'm entirely skeptical about it even when I can't banish it from my mind.
  Now, a few words about racism, a topic that rarely gets discussed with just a few words. Racism has a dictionary definition, which may be helpful to my readers as I find there is a range of opinion about what racism is.

Oxford English Dictionary says this:

"1. Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.

(And also) 1.1 The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races."

I often hear a different definition of it, which may be more accurately characterized as "institutional racism." This is when a government or power structure overtly or covertly makes and/or enforces public policy based on racism.

Let's address a few prevalent views of these things. Some people say that it's only racism if it's used institutionally by the powerful against a racial minority  (or, as in the case of South Africa's apartheid, a powerless majority). I've been sympathetic to this view for years, possibly because I learned it at Howard University. The Oxford English Dictionary chaps would appear to disagree with that, although a careful parsing of the above definition offers some support for the idea that white-on-black racism and black-on-white racism are not literally the same thing. At least not every time. I don't think that when black people dislike or prejudge whites, this is always evidence that they consider their own "race" superior. I'm not sure why so many white Americans think it's outrageous when black Americans aren't inclined to think of the modern era as a kind of "do-over," where white people's past monkey business mustn't be allowed to influence anyone's current thinking. The prevalent grievance and martyrdom of many whites here baffles me, especially when I hear statements to the effect that "liberals are the real racists." It's impossible for me to take this seriously, as it seems more a creation of publicists for the right wing bubble machine than reasonable discourse, but that doesn't mean I don't take it seriously as an example of how a large group of Americans feel. And on the radio show I'll be attempting to draw people out if they feel this way. Perhaps they can amplify it in a way that will forestall my inclination to mockery. I sincerely hope they can rise to the occasion.
  On to the notion of "The Other." I think I first started hearing this phrase in the context of the Jan Brewer/Arkansas immigration dustup a few years back, although it may have been the curious case of the homophobic bakers wrapping themselves in the Constitution like phyllo dough. I'm fascinated by the concept, because I interpret it as a pretty broad spectrum of things people will aggressively blame for a host of ills. Race is only one example. However, it must be said, The Other is often about race; I believe this is because racial intolerance in particular is above all fueled by laziness. (Judging a person by skin color can be done from 300 yards away in a high wind. You have to quickly move in closer to the object if homophobia is the objective, which can sometimes be a hassle if you are wearing heels.) This, in fact, is the core of my opposition to it. Others prefer to criticize intolerance from the warm dry safety of moral high ground. I'm more inclined to see it as a failure of curiosity, and evidence of the intellectual laziness that comes with that territory.
  Which leads me to my next point, which many of you will not dig.
  Most people reading all this palaver are familiar with the right, or the alt-right, and their hatred for the Other. I see it as quite loathsome, of course; nevertheless, this particular judgmental view is something I generally prefer  to keep mum about. In fact, I've been at some pains to avoid saying this out loud; this is partly because I don't wish to tweak conservatives, and partly because I don't care for self-congratulation and I refuse to indulge it in others. Don't like Nazis or the Klan? I concur, but to me that is no more an achievement than arriving at a bar with proper ID. Calling out racists is, of course, the right thing to do when they are terrorizing the Other of their choice. But I don't see the need to be against them for their thoughts in addition to their deeds. The problem with that is its opposite number; if you condemn a man for his thoughts, you may also be inclined to congratulate yourself for yours. I don't like to do that, because for a person who's intolerant of intolerance, judging others can be a low-risk, high-yield activity. The stock market doesn't operate that way (unless you are Martha Stewart), and this is one of the few things I like about finance. So, just as religious belief can be a seductive choice for those inclined to self-congratulation, so can liberalism.
  It's thoughts like these that make it harder for me to believe, as many conservatives and many liberals do, that the bulk of the hypocrisy and self-indulgence is concentrated on one side. I doubt there's an American alive who doesn't believe that. Even if they say both sides are corrupt and despicable (a seemingly enlightened view that often shuts down thought even quicker than partisanship), scratch most "Independents" and you will find extreme credulousness for the vaguest of criticisms leveled at one side, while the objection to the other side often stems from a truly troubling current candidate or a long-nursed grudge against some previous administration that the emotionally preferred party foisted on its faithful in a bygone era.
  Now, don't get me wrong. Emotionally, I'm just as partisan as anybody. More, even. As a political consultant friend of mine explained it to me, people "self-identify" as one thing or another, while being sometimes quite at odds with the ideas and policies that nominally accompany the acknowledged position. My personal version of this dance, I've come to learn, is to loudly proclaim that I'm a leftist, while finding the people on the left largely insufferable. Not all of them of course; I refer primarily to the leftists who aren't me.
  Does this mean I'm in sympathy with those on the right? Decidedly not! That is, not with their policies. Or with their thinking. Far from it. The main area where we overlap is how annoyed we get at the left. In this, we differ in degree, of course. Where I find liberals wearying and shrill, the right sees their very existence as a crime against nature, and would like to burn San Francisco to a cinder and sow the ground with salt from the Holy Land, with a pike that beareth Hillary Clinton's Gorgon head as the lone reminder of the place where the supergay municipality once ignominiously stood, as a warning to future godless traitors, and a popular destination place for the traveler eager to snap a patriotic selfie.
  Years ago, I went to a showing in DC of the "controversial" Godard film "Hail Mary." The Catholic Church had condemned this film, and a few old ladies were picketing the theater. My friends and I were all junior-liberals-in-training at the time, which means that we all yelled at the protestors with a mocking tone, because nothing says "liberal" quite like yelling at rubes. When I say "we," I really mean everybody except me, because it didn't feel right to me to be making fun of these ladies. I went over and talked to some of them after I saw the film, which probably would have been around for about a day had the Pope not talked about it. I don't know if you've ever seen a Godard film, but if this work du cinema was some sort of snarky propaganda against Christians, you would have needed a pot of strong coffee to stay awake long enough to figure that out. It wasn't like a Michael Moore movie where you feel he's tattooing his point on the inside of your eyelids.
  In fact, the film, which was a kind of modern retelling
of the immaculate conception story, was considered outrageous because Godard's Mary played basketball, smoked a cigarette, and in one shocking scene, applied lipstick to her lips. Perhaps it was the lack of coffee (Starbucks didn't exist back then), but I found it to be surprisingly sweet and actually moving. I told the protestors that they were wrong about this film, as I had actually found it quite touching and even spiritual. Those ladies couldn't have been nicer. They hadn't seen one frame of the movie, because they'd been told not to, and they kindly encouraged me to write a letter to some Catholic publication whose name I've forgotten. I didn't do this, to my eventual regret.
  I'm not trying to pretend that those little old ladies are the same as a bunch of thugs screaming at black girls to go back to Blacklandia, or that chatting up young neo-Nazis will cause them to cut back on their anti-Semitism. "Could you just-- for me-- paint one less swastika on a jungle gym today? Come on, Reggie! Let me buy you a smoothie and we'll hang. No, Jeremy, not that kind of hanging. Come on, guys, you know what I meant."
  And I'm well aware of the many famous quotes about how good people looking the other way is what caused the holocaust. There's some truth in that. And I know a lot of you are feeling angry, scared, powerless, and it helps you to vent. Some of you seem to suggest that if we just vent enough, the alt-right will back down.
  The similar analogy-- the McCarthy era-- is complex and not entirely applicable to the Trump era. I've watched the Army-McCarthy hearings many many times, and it's not entirely correct to remember all of it as a story of good people stepping up and hounding the villains til they left town twirling their mustaches. Mostly the good people kept their mouths shut and played golf, while Joe McCarthy had a daily forum on TV so housewives could see him rant drunkenly about how many communists were poisoning our government. After a while, McCarthy's frothing overreach caught up with him, and when public opinion shifted a bit (mainly because of people listening to McCarthy talk), the good guys rode in and stacked up all the chairs. It's more complicated than that, of course-- Joseph Welch, a guy I generally love watching in those kinescopes, stooped to a pretty nasty tactic that might not fly with the left today. He made a veiled reference to Roy Cohn's being gay, which got a big laugh from the gallery. According to what I've read, people understood the dog whistle and Cohn's stock fell a little.
  Do I know what's the best tactic to use to make this all go away? I do not. But I don't think smashing stuff is going to help. I don't think yelling at rubes is going to help. As I've said, the right now has the government and the guns. Karl Straub yelling at conservatives is not going to scare Trump, or Bannon, or Pence. (He's the one I'm really frightened of, by the way. I think Trump's attention will wander, and I think it's quite possible that the GOP will use Trump's many conflicts of interest to impeach him, after which things could easily get worse. But that's just one paranoid scenario.)
  I take the long view here. I'm under no illusions that my civility idea will magically fix things. But I see the biggest problem as ignorance. A huge number of Americans don't trust "the media," which means fact-checking is something they don't even know about. I know my dad is entirely unfamiliar with Trump's curriculum vitae, and is under the impression that Trump is basically an honest guy. I've seen Post columns where the online rebuttals amount to "this is all lies, because it's in the media." That kind of idiocy, to a great extent, got Trump elected. But it's reasonable to ask the question, why do all those Americans tell themselves this soothing fairy tale? There are a lot of reasons, but The Other is a big part of it. And while the Alt-Right has a long list of bogeymen (and bogeywomen, too, let's not forget!), the left plays this dangerous game too.
  For the left, the Other is rednecks. The people in the flyover states. You know, the stupid morons we've been making fun of in movies, TV, books, truck stop tchotchkes, comic strips, jokes, etc., probably since the Civil War at least. (I suspect a ton of rednecks died in the Revolutionary War protecting the founding fathers' property, by the way.) Check out some 1950s trade paper ads for Hank Williams records, with the Hatfield/McCoy bearded cartoon hillbilly carrying around the jug with the XXX logo. While public racist imagery was busy disappearing from pancake syrup bottles, the left continued to not be bothered by all the hilarious jokes equating banjos with anal rape, and fiddles with barefoot idiocy. I have a whole book here chronicling the long history of making fun of the south in mainstream American culture. But what's that you say? They bring it on themselves, with their music, and the clowns acting out on reality shows and all the rest? Ok, but doesn't that defense sound a lot like the aggrieved sniffing of conservatives who cite rap music as evidence that black people are terrible and deserve their shitty lives?
  I know this is complicated. And I can already guess what many of you will say. What about lynching? And the Klan? Enough with the false equivalency, people will yell.
  Please let me state this with clarity, and boy, do I hate that you're pushing me to cheapen my writing by stating something that ought to be obvious.
  I don't actually believe that southerners aren't guilty at all. I don't actually believe that neo-Nazis are no worse than liberals. I don't believe that racists shouldn't be called out. I don't believe that friendliness will bring back the Bob Dole GOP. I don't believe we should roll over when hate crimes show up in our neighborhood. I don't believe that Trump might be really great as president if we just give him a chance.
  I do believe that a lot of bad hombres have come to town. And some of them will be hired by Trump. Others will be emboldened by his rise and rhetoric. But I also believe that a lot of GOP strategists and insiders will be taking advantage of this one-party state to ram through a bunch of stuff that's been on their wish list forever. And voter suppression (in all its many forms, some denounced by conservative judges, and some not) will likely become much more effective in the next few cycles at least. So we are probably looking at decades before we can clean up this mess. I'm frightened, and angry, just like you are. But if a bunch of hayseeds in overalls and straw hats vote for Trump again in 2020, they will have done it almost entirely out of spite, which will be possible for two reasons.

1. They will continue to ignore reality and fact checking, while continuing to believe crazy fake news bullshit. (A Facebook friend of mine a couple years ago was circulating the truly insane conspiracy theory that Obama faked the Newtown massacre. Think about how profoundly dumb you have to be to believe something like that. Or, more accurately, think about how much you'd have to hate The Other to buy it.)
2. They will continue hating liberals and continue living by the credo that everything liberals say is a lie. It's not all that different from a teen saying she hates her mom because her bitch of a mom won't let her go to the concert with her friends. Her mom is a total bitch! But although her mom actually isn't a bitch, that teen stomping around in her bedroom really fucking believes it with all her heart, at least for a little while. And lecturing her is not going to make her see the light.

  We on the left are not their moms. They are adults. You can't just keep telling them how bad their boyfriend is. It's way too late for that. A little empathy for them can't possibly hurt. You don't have to ignore all the really heinous stuff out there, and by all means, stand with your friends and neighbors who are the Other for all these assholes. But can we try to talk to Trump voters as if they're human, at least once in a while? Maybe in a couple generations, conservatives won't be as likely to do something that is so obviously stupid (to us). Maybe, like the Indiana teen who joins the army and learns that a gay guy can have his back in a firefight, some folks might grow up a little bit.
  There are a lot of reasons to imagine this kind of growth can happen. Any of you who have been following political and sociological and demographic trends may be familiar with the notion, which I first heard laid out by the late great Peter Bergman, that all of this could just be the last gasp of a desperate party that has benefited from nativism and racism and homophobia for decades. In spite of the warnings from the saner guys on the right after Romney lost, the party doubled and tripled and quadrupled down on this morally repugnant strategy. And it worked again this year (even though it didn't in 2012, and this shift occurred for various reasons that are certainly not all the fault of liberals). But it isn't sustainable. Despite the short term horror, it is not sustainable. The white hot anger of all those flyover guys won't just escape like steam from a big city espresso machine, and it's going to sound more and more lame to keep blaming Hillary and Obama for their lost jobs that still haven't come back, while Trump gets richer. And the younger evangelicals can't relate to the homophobia of their parents, so that particular dog won't hunt for much longer.
  And when all of these chickens come home to roost, I want some of those Flyover-Americans to associate a tiny slice of the left-- the Straubinical left-- with civility, and with at least 33% less sanctimoniousness. If any Republicans or rednecks are still reading after all these paragraphs, let me say this to them. In the words of Quentin Compson, "I don't hate the south! I don't hate the south!" I'm not letting y'all off the hook, but I consider you to be Americans just like my left wing friends, and check out my phone-- I own way more country albums than you. I'm grateful for redneck culture, and I don't ever want to live without it. Let's all have a drink, and if I promise to crank up the George Jones loud enough for those fuckers in the next county to hear the Possum sing his heart out, could y'all just put the swastikas and Klan robes in the attic and chill out on that stuff?

(also--  Philip Proctor--- I apologize for presumptuously tagging you on this. I thought you might like the brief mention of Peter  Bergman found about 10,000 words in)