The Allure of Hatred

When James T. Hodgkinson shot Representative Steve Scalise and three others on an Alexandria, VA baseball practice field on June 14, his anti-Trump, anti-Republican Party views were widely noted. It wasn’t long before the Republicans started saying the left should “tone it down,” and pro-Trump supporters in Central Park interrupted a performance of Julius Caesar, protesting “the normalization of political violence against the right.”

Political violence on the diamond.
Political violence on the diamond. Photo: CNN.

No group has a monopoly on political hatred, but most would agree that hate groups and violent individual incidents occur more frequently on the right than the left. In fact there was surprise expressed at Hodgkinson’s political views, since anti-Republican violence is somewhat unusual. Not that Hodgkinson was any sort of political activist—he seems to have been a disturbed individual and a domestic abuser with little political involvement at all, apart from his comments on social media. But political hatred is alluring these days, whether one has a troubled background or not.

American politics has disintegrated to the point where each side views the other as the enemy. Enmity has reached the point where, for many people, members of the opposition party appear as enormously damaged human beings, if not actively evil. Eric Trump was recently quoted as saying, of Democrats, “to me, they’re not even people.”

This kind of hatred can be enticing. It’s like a drug that intensifies emotion and makes colors pop. For people leading uneventful, ordinary lives, it can add a jolt of excitement. For the increasingly large number of people whose lives are stressed daily, political hatred provides an outlet, a target, a scapegoat.

I can empathize and I suspect you can, too. We’re all flawed human beings, to be sure, but how can those people believe in such utterly destructive nonsense? How can they behave as they do? What hypocrites! What heartless, self-serving bastards! Look what they’ve done to America’s economy/education/healthcare/infrastructure/politics!

Can these divisions be bridged? I doubt it. It seems likelier that incidents like the one in Alexandria will only increase, with “partisans” from both sides doing the shooting. And each new outrage will only harden the hatred.

It would be helpful if the country could fully acknowledge this, if only to begin the process of constructing a solution. Increasingly, that solution seems to be that we will go our separate ways, either violently and chaotically, as at present, or formally and permanently with a political solution that codifies our divide in a way that makes sense.

Brilliant Fragments

Trump. Comey. Russia. All very important, yes, but also very exhausting to focus on exclusively. The mess in Washington is serious indeed but like all of our endeavors, it stems from the mysterious processes that govern human behavior. Granted, compulsive tweeting is a relatively new manifestation of troubled conduct. Still, it can sometimes help to examine behavioral patterns from another angle.

The Dinner Party by Joshua Ferris.
The Dinner Party by Joshua Ferris.

The writer Joshua Ferris is a case in point. He has an excellent grasp of the tragicomic nuances that underlie all our behavior, especially in intimate relationships, and The Dinner Party, his new book of short stories, may be a helpful distraction from the current news. Although there aren’t any direct political references to our present situation, the book may still help to put things in perspective.

Ferris is best known for his three novels (Then We Came to the End, The Unnamed, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour). Of these, the first and the third and most recent have been widely praised. Ferris’s second novel, The Unnamed, features a protagonist who is seized with an uncontrollable urge to walk and keep walking, no matter the consequences. It seems to have been widely disliked and/or misunderstood but I think it may be the best of the bunch, an existential journey that, as Tim Adams in the Guardian put it, shows us how “our biology will sooner or later remove us from the things we hold most dear.”

The Dinner Party is Ferris’s first short story collection and it continues the rather bleak existential outlook, leavened with flashes of humor, found in the novels. Some reviewers have savaged the book but the majority of reviews have been very positive. The stories vary somewhat in quality—stories in collections invariably do—but the best of them are very strong indeed. These include the title story, a devastating portrait of a disintegrating marriage and also the consequences of failing to know oneself, “A Night Out,” which deals with male infidelity, and “Fragments,” which counters with the female version.

The last story in the collection, “A Fair Price,” does have some direct relevance to America’s current social inequities. It concerns a clueless, self-involved privileged character and the day laborer he hires to help empty out a storage unit. The consequences of their interaction certainly gave me pause.

I think Joshua Ferris, only in his early forties, is one of the best writers currently working in America. If you’d like an extra helping of insight into the way a certain class of Americans (educated, liberal, urban) lives today, I wholeheartedly recommend The Dinner Party.

 

Denial and Destruction

I won’t spend much time on the twisted announcement reversing U. S. climate change policy that Trump made yesterday. There’s plenty of analysis regarding that already. Instead, I’d like to suggest you focus on something other than our buffoonish president for a moment. That something is the Republican Party itself, which MIT gadfly Noam Chomsky recently said is “racing as rapidly as possible to destruction of organized human life.”

Hurricane Sandy aftermath, 2012.
Hurricane Sandy aftermath, 2012. Photo: NY Daily News.

The GOP, and conservatives in general, have always been laggards when it comes to keeping pace with change—any sort of change. But today’s Republicans are another breed entirely. Motivated by a toxic combination of greed and hatred, and almost entirely devoid of empathy, the Republicans, as David Brooks puts it in today’s Times, “share [a] core worldview that life is nakedly a selfish struggle for money and dominance.”

Chomsky, in addressing the dangers this worldview and the Republicans pose, cites a 2013 Daedalus article by conservative political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein in arriving at his dire prognosis. They wrote that the Republican Party is now “ideologically extreme, scornful of facts and compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” Those words date from four years ago and their truth has only intensified in 2017. Moreover, Chomsky is not only considering climate change when he speaks of dangers to human survival but nuclear weapons as well.

Given what we saw yesterday in Washington, and given recent developments on the Korean Peninsula, we would do well to take Chomsky’s warning seriously.