For the most part, I've tried to steer clear of politics in this blog, although my record has been less than perfect. Today's not really about politics; I've spent the weekend musing over a nasty Facebook thread that I inadvertently started during the last presidential debate, which still flares up even this morning like a campfire that never completely burned out.
The incumbent told a whopper on Thursday night, claiming that a health care plan was imminent although none had appeared in the 3 1/2 years he's been in office. I rather petulantly observed on my news feed that his support from roughly half the country demonstrates the truth of the statistical fact that half the human race has an IQ below 100. Immediately someone whose politics varies from mine jumped on the thread.
"Demoncrats?" he wrote.
"I think you just flunked the test," I replied.
What followed has been three days of relentless, nasty back-and-forth between friends on both sides of the political spectrum. I dropped out of the discussion that night, and just watched in horror at what was said. Before long we had unborn babies, taxes, the poor defenseless Kenosha shooter, etc., etc. It was simply awful. I started blocking people for the first time in years.
Then I started pondering whether my initial observation fundamentally missed what has gone wrong in our political discourse, while it was sitting there in plain view in the thread.
MAGA disciples aren't stupid, or at least not all of them. There were folks with degrees from MIT and Annapolis in that thread. These are not dumb people.
And yet, the grievances they rattled off are from a body of media that is as foreign to me as if it came from another society altogether. And, in a way, it did.
I recognized this as Peg and I sat down to breakfast in a little cafe in Alexandria Bay, New York, way up in the Thousand Islands region (and yes, to answer the question I know has now completely occupied your mind, the salad dressing was invented in that area). The proprietor was a nice, busy woman who made an amazing cup of coffee while her boyfriend/business partner/chef cooked a breakfast worth waking up for. She was also an avid Trumper, and described to another patron taking her grandchild to a MAGA rally.
On the TV above us blared Fox News. The topics of discussion there didn't sound like anything I read when I scroll through the morning papers on Drudge. What they sounded like, in fact, was the list of grievances that had just showed up in my Facebook thread. The idea of an aggrieved, persecuted "silent majority" was there in full display, with the lonely, embattled Donald J. Trump (the only candidate besides Lindsey Graham even mentioned on the show over the course of our breakfast) standing between us and Those People. If that is one's reality, it becomes understandable why one would decide that there is no revelation or act of incompetent governing too egregious to swing one over to the other side.
Which leads to my second observation. Anyone who is not on the train is a "Demoncrat," a "libtard," a baby killer who wants to abort babies as they're crowning (I actually saw a comment to that effect on another thread recently). MAGA's political opponents aren't real Americans; hell, they aren't even people. And they're doing such horrible things every day that whatever it takes to prevail is acceptable. It's for the unborn babies, after all.
Besides the potential for election-related mischief inherent in this dehumanizing of the other, it creates a real problem for us as a society when the election is over, which it soon will be one way or another. How, exactly, does one govern in a society where one side treats the other as traitors, or as murderers or worse? We already see it reflected in the legislative branch, where the collegiality that used to allow for the hard work of governing has gone, and the only time anything happens is when one political party achieves complete control. That may come again in a few days, and the party that has been vilified and ridiculed from the executive branch for four years may find itself in charge. It'll be interesting to see if they exercise a little restraint, or try to govern the whole nation instead of speaking only to people who look and think like themselves. Biden has already signaled that this will be his message. We'll see.
So, in sum I was wrong to equate blind acceptance of the stream of falsehood flowing from the White House with stupidity. In that group are a lot of very smart people who live in a very strange, alternative reality. It's a little frightening to consider what they'll be capable of doing if given four more years in charge of a society where over half their fellow citizens are considered a force of evil that must be stopped at any cost.
Tomorrow I'll probably talk about our weekend up on the St. Lawrence River. No more politics for a while.
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