I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: LYDIA LOVELESS-Tiny Desk Concert #369 (July 1, 2014).

I want Lydia Loveless to be a punk singer–Her name is like a combination of Lydia Lunch and a last name that conjures up an asskicking punk.

But not the country singer that Loveless is (even if she is ass-kicking herself). Loveless is a new breed of alt-country which is pretty explicit with noticeably rocking guitar solos.  But her voice is so twangy it’s hard to not call it country (and in fact it’s a bit too much for me to take sometimes).

“Head” features this rather memorable chorus “Don’t stop getting undressed /Don’t stop giving me head.”  It seems especially surprising since Loveless looks like she’s about 12 (she was 23 at the time of this recording).  The buzzy solo is lengthy and more or less runs throughout the song.  Although at some point when Loveless takes her own solo the whole sound seems to fade out and get a little anemic.

Her band is fun with her bassist being very tall and having very long hair playing a very tall upright bass.  And then there’s another guy playing guitar and lap steel.

“Verlaine Shot Rimbaud” has a title that begs for an awesome song.  It’s not an epic masterpiece or anything.  In fact its closer to a pop song, The slide guitar and Loveless’ heavy accent on the chorus place it firmly in the country camp.

“Mile High” has a fun folk riff.  It sounds a lot like The Byrds and the chorus is super catchy.  If I could get her to sing less twangy I would love this song much like I love the punk country of X, or at least the Knitters.

[READ: December 29, 2010] “Who are All These Trump Supporters”

[This essay in the New Yorker also came under the heading “Trump Days.”]

So the title of the essay is a question I myself have been asking as I watch the hatred and vitriol bubble over during the convention.

If there was anyone I wanted to write this piece it would be George Saunders and he is actually the only reason I read it in the first place (I plan to read all of his contributions to the New Yorker eventually, but I’m glad to have read this one when it was timely–I hope it will be utterly irrelevant by the time I get to the rest of his works).  He self identifies as a liberal (although he was a conservative who loved Ayn Rand way back in the Reagan era).  He is a thoughtful and not prone to anger–a perfect foil for the crowd.  And he’s got a great way with words.

So great in fact that I’m just going to be quoting him a lot.  I could have pulled more excellent quotes from the essay, but really you should read the whole thing.

The essay, which is quite long, begins with a description of Trump in person which explain some of his appeal (as opposed to the soundbites of assholery that we get all the time):

In person, his autocratic streak is presentationally complicated by a Ralph Kramdenesque vulnerability. He’s a man who has just dropped a can opener into his wife’s freshly baked pie. He’s not about to start grovelling about it, and yet he’s sorry—but, come on, it was an accident. He’s sorry, he’s sorry, O.K., but do you expect him to say it? He’s a good guy. Anyway, he didn’t do it.

The thing that seems to attract everyone–not just his supporters is this idea:

It’s oddly riveting, watching someone take such pleasure in going so much farther out on thin ice than anyone else as famous would dare to go.

So that explains why people are drawn to him. But what about when he actually opens his mouth.  Do they not hear that this is what they are getting:

The speeches themselves are nearly all empty assertion. Assertion and bragging. Assertion, bragging, and defensiveness….  He lies, bullies, menaces, dishes it out but can’t seem to take it, exhibits such a muddy understanding of certain American principles (the press is free, torture illegal, criticism and libel two different things) that he might be a seventeenth-century Austrian prince time-transported here to mess with us.

I keep imagining, what would my parents think to see people acting this way?

In the first part, Saunders is in Fountain Hills, Arizona for a Trump rally.  People are nodding and cheering along with Trump’s speech.  Although there is one tiny voiced protester who is quickly escorted out in a rather rude way.

An ungentleness gets into the air when Trump speaks, prompting the abandonment of certain social norms (e.g., an old man should show forbearance and physical respect for a young woman, even—especially—an angry young woman, and might even think to wonder what is making her so angry), norms that, to fired-up Trump supporters, must feel antiquated in this brave new moment of ideological foment.

Of course all protest situations (not just Trump) erupt into angry shouting–that’s the point, right?  So it’s no surprise to hear people arguing and hurling insults, although it is surprising hear the Trump supporters telling the protesters that they are uneducated (given the typical Trump demographic).  But the anger seems to much greater here than at other political rallies.

Where is all this anger coming from? It’s viral, and Trump is Typhoid Mary. Intellectually and emotionally weakened by years of steadily degraded public discourse, we are now two separate ideological countries, LeftLand and RightLand, speaking different languages, the lines between us down. Not only do our two subcountries reason differently; they draw upon non-intersecting data sets and access entirely different mythological systems. You and I approach a castle. One of us has watched only “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” the other only “Game of Thrones.” What is the meaning, to the collective “we,” of yon castle? We have no common basis from which to discuss it.

This self-absorption in our own ideology is very different from how things used to be:

In the old days, a liberal and a conservative (a “dove” and a “hawk,” say) got their data from one of three nightly news programs, a local paper, and a handful of national magazines, and were thus starting with the same basic facts (even if those facts were questionable, limited, or erroneous).

Even though those of us in LeftLand believe that Trump is full of nothing but lies, it turns out that some of the facts that the Trump team spouts are true, they are just so angry about it that it sounds like it can’t be.

One person he talks to shouts at him and

then makes the (to me, irrational and irritating) claim that more people are on welfare under Obama than ever were under Bush.
“Almost fifty million people,” her husband says. “Up thirty per cent.”
I make a certain sound I make when I disagree with something but have no facts at my disposal.
Back at the hotel, I Google it.Damn it, they’re right. Rightish.
[Saunders explains the reams of information that one must understand to really address this complicated issue].
The couple’s assertion was true but not complexly true.

But what about the people themselves.  Just who is the Trump supporter?

The Trump supporter is your brother who has just brought home a wildly inappropriate fiancée. Well, inappropriate to you. Trump support, nationwide, stands at around forty per cent. If you had ten siblings and four of them brought home wildly inappropriate fiancées, you might feel inclined to ask yourself what was going on in your family to make your judgment and that of your siblings so divergent.

That’s a funny assessment.  But he also speaks seriously:

I didn’t meet many people who were unreservedly for Trump. There is, in the quiver containing his ideas, something for nearly everyone to dislike. But there is also something for nearly everyone to like. What allows a person not crazy about Trump to vote for him is a certain prioritization: a person might, for example, like Trump’s ideas about trade, or his immigration policies, or the fact that Trump is, as one supporter told me, “a successful businessman,”

And it was in the next few passages that I realized that the portrayal of Trump supporters as horribly racist, homophobic misogynists is not really fair. Sure there are some of those [anyone at the convention who chanted “lock her up” should be ashamed of himself] but Saunders lets us see that there are real people, not caricatures at the rallies too.

The Trump supporters I spoke with were friendly, generous with their time, flattered to be asked their opinion, willing to give it, even when they knew I was a liberal writer likely to throw them under the bus. They loved their country, seemed genuinely panicked at its perceived demise, felt urgently that we were, right now, in the process of losing something precious. They were, generally, in favor of order and had a propensity toward the broadly normative, a certain squareness.  They were anti-regulation, pro small business, pro Second Amendment, suspicious of people on welfare, sensitive (in a “Don’t tread on me” way) about any infringement whatsoever on their freedom.

And as we demonize them unfairly, they also generalize the other side:

They were adamantly for law enforcement and veterans’ rights, in a manner that presupposed that the rest of us were adamantly against these things.

And then there’s this awesome line:

It seemed self-evident to them that a businessman could and should lead the country. “You run your family like a business, don’t you?” I was asked more than once, although, of course, I don’t, and none of us do.

But what about the crassness, the mockery, the mean-spiritedness (which has only gotten worse since this piece was written):

The ability to shrug off the mean crack, the sexist joke, the gratuitous jab at the weak is, in some quarters, seen as a form of strength, of “being flexible,” of “not taking shit serious.” A woman who wilts at a sexist joke won’t last long in certain workplaces. A guy who prioritizes the sensitive side of his nature will, trust me, not thrive in the slaughterhouse. This willingness to gloss over crudeness becomes, then, an encoded sign of competence, strength, and reliability.

In sum:

Above all, Trump supporters are “not politically correct,” which, as far as I can tell, means that they have a particular aversion to that psychological moment when, having thought something, you decide that it is not a good thought, and might pointlessly hurt someone’s feelings, and therefore decline to say it.

[I am inserting a speculation here.  While people bemoan the recent outbreak of violence against the police and say that it is somehow Obama’s America, I posit that it is actually Trump’s America that is ‘responsible.’  Trump and his supporters do not censor themselves.  And once you let things out that you might normally hide, you are going to hurt feelings which just riled people up more.  Saunders will address this as well, but I believe it was written before the shootings]

Saunders tells a few anecdotes from the supporters and shows that they don’t always have all of their facts straight–they tend to assume all immigrants are illegal for instance, or they see things in very black and white terms.  I’m not going to give the examples, but

What unites these stories is what I came to think of as usurpation anxiety syndrome—the feeling that one is, or is about to be, scooped, overrun, or taken advantage of by some Other with questionable intentions.

Despite the blanket ideas, Saunders says that individually people ere willing to listen.   He presented this case about an immigrant to the Trump supporters, which I’ll quote in its entirety because it is nuanced.

I’d sometimes bring up Noemi Romero, a sweet, soft-spoken young woman I met in Phoenix. Noemi was brought to the U.S. when she was three, by undocumented parents. A few years ago, she had the idea of applying for legal status through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. But the application costs four hundred and sixty-five dollars, money her family didn’t have. Hearing that a local Vietnamese grocery was hiring, she borrowed her mother’s Social Security card and got the job. A few months later, the store was raided. Noemi was arrested, charged with aggravated identity theft and forgery, and taken to jail and held there, within the general prison population, for two months. She was given spoiled milk, and food that, she said, had tiny worms in it. Her lawyer arranged a plea bargain; the charges were reduced to criminal impersonation. This was a good deal, he told her, the best she could hope for. She accepted, not realizing that, as a convicted felon, she would be permanently ineligible for DACA. Puente, a local grassroots organization, intervened and saved her from deportation, but she is essentially doomed to a kind of frozen life: can’t work and can’t go to college, although she has lived virtually her whole life in the U.S. and has no reason to go back to Mexico and nowhere to live if she’s sent there.

He says that the people listened and gave him hope with the way they reacted to the story.

In the face of specificity, my interviewees began trying, really trying, to think of what would be fairest and most humane for this real person we had imaginatively conjured up. It wasn’t that we suddenly agreed, but the tone changed.

They would say:

Is she a good person? the Trump supporter might ask. I couldn’t feel more sorry for her, he might say. That kid is no better or worse than I am and deserves the best God can give her. Or he might say that deportation would have to be done on a case-by-case basis. Or propose some sort of registry—Noemi, having registered, would go back to Mexico and, if all checked out, come right back in. There had to be some kind of rule of law, didn’t there? Tellingly, the Trump supporter might confess that she didn’t think Trump really intended to do this mass-deportation thing anyway—it was all just campaign talk.

He can even see some commonality between himself and them:

Sometimes it seemed that they were, like me, just slightly spoiled Americans, imbued with unreasonable boomer expectations for autonomy, glory, and ascension, and that their grievances were more theoretical than actual, more media-induced than experience-related.

They’re not all sane, but there is some thinking there.

So, yes, there are bigots in the Trump movement, and wackos, and dummies, and sometimes I had to remind myself that the important constituency is the persuadable middle segment of his supporters, who are not finding in Trump a suitable vessel for their hate but are misunderstanding him or overestimating him, and moving in his direction out of a misplaced form of hope.

He acknowledges that people are hurt and have been wronged.  There is a general feeling of helplessness (even among the entitled) and they need someone to blame and someone to answer them.

Something is wrong, the common person feels, correctly: she works too hard and gets too little; a dulling disconnect exists between her actual day-to-day interests and (1) the way her leaders act and speak, and (2) the way our mass media mistell or fail entirely to tell her story. What does she want? Someone to notice her over here, having her troubles.

The problem is that this

bully shows up, is hateful, says things so crude we liberals are taken aback. We respond moderately. We keep waiting for his supporters, helped along by how compassionately and measuredly we are responding, to be persuaded. For the bully, this is perfect. Every fresh outrage pulls the camera back to him, and meanwhile those of us moderately decrying his immoderation are a little boring and tepid, and he keeps getting out ahead of us. He has Trumpmunity: his notions are so low and have been so many times decried, and yet they keep arriving, in new and escalating varieties, and the liberal imagination wilts.

There should be a real answer for these problems.  We need a leader who actually cares about people and wants to make things better.

The tragedy of the Trump movement is that one set of struggling people has been pitted against other groups of struggling people by someone who has known little struggle, at least in the material sense, and hence seems to have little empathy for anyone struggling, and even to consider struggling a symptom of weakness. “I will never let you down,” he has told his supporters, again and again, but he will, and in fact already has, by indulging the fearful, xenophobic, Other-averse parts of their psychology and reinforcing the notion that their sense of being left behind has no source in themselves.

He headed to another rally in San Jose.  Things had gotten uglier in the campaign.  Protesters were engaging in actual slapping and fighting with supporters.  Saunders watched as a woman slapped an older woman and then pulled her aside.

When I told the young … woman who’d given the first slap that this was exactly the kind of thing the Trump movement loved to see and would be happy to use, she seemed to suddenly come back to herself and nearly burst into tears.

Protesters are hearing really hateful things and its hard to hold back.

They were so young, mostly peaceful, but angered by the hateful rhetoric addressed at their communities, and their disdain for Trump morphed too easily into disrespect for the police, a group of whom, when all was over, huddled in a bank doorway, bathed in sweat, a couple of them taking a knee, football style, and when their helmets came off it was clear that they’d been scared, too.

No one is at fault.  Everyone is at fault.

The night was sad. The center failed to hold. Did I blame the rioting kids? I did. Did I blame Trump? I did. This, Mr. Trump, I thought, is why we practice civility. This is why, before we say exactly what is on our minds, we run it past ourselves, to see if it makes sense, is true, is fair, has a flavor of kindness, and won’t hurt someone or make someone’s difficult life more difficult. Because there are, among us, in every political camp, limited, angry, violent, and/or damaged people, waiting for any excuse to throw off the tethers of restraint and get after it. After which it falls to the rest of us, right and left, to clean up the mess.

And yet amid all the vitriol, Saunders still sees hope.

Who could fail to be cheered by the sight of a self-described “street preacher” named Dean, whose massive laminated sign read “Muhammad Is a Liar, False Prophet, Child Raping Pervert! (see history for details)” and, on the flip side, “Homo Sex Is Sin—Romans 1,” being verbally taken down by an inspiring consortium consisting of a gay white agnostic for Trump, a straight Christian girl for Trump, and a lesbian Latina agnostic for Bernie?

Or this group of peaceful protesters

A group of anti-Trump college students in Eau Claire concocted the perfect Zen protest: singing and dancing en masse to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” If there’s anything common across the left-right divide, it’s the desire not to come off as tight-assed or anti-rock and roll, and what could the passing Trump supporters do but dance and sing along, a few holdouts scowling at the unfairness of the method?

He even has this rather amusing sight

Outside a Clinton rally in Phoenix, a Native American-looking man in an Aztec-patterned shirt joined the line of Trump supporters, with his megaphone, through which he slowly said, one word at a time, “Make. America. White. Again.” Once the Trump supporters caught on to the joke, they moved away.

So yes, my neighbors who have had Trump signs on their lawns for months might be horrible racists (well, actually I know one is), or they could be scared.  Or any other thing.  really I should go next door and find out what the deal is.  I should also ask how they can have one sign on their lawn for Trump and another sign on their lawn for Amigo Builders, which seems like a dig at the racism of the Trump sign (and almost seems like having the heat and the A/C on at the same time).

The next few months will be torturous.  And things will certainly get uglier.  I can only hope that civility returns, but something has been let out of the bottle.  In fiction, after an eruption like this, someone comes along to get people to settle down again, to calm the mob.  I don’t think that Hillary Clinton is that person (she’ll make an excellent President, and I am very excited that my daughter will see the first woman President soon), but she is very divisive and will likely be hated more than Barack Obama.

I hope that people can see that it’s not “PC” to be civil.  And that the lesson I try to teach my children–don’t make yourself feel better by hurting other people–can be applied to the country again.