re: Juxtaposition and implication
[from notes ca. March, 2018]
The great wisdom of the twit-thread has something to do with the idea that people find merit in compressing complicated reality into mythopoeic baubles. Perhaps a lot gets lost or distorted in compression, but even people of literature and science, who know the problems of such compression, understand at least some of the merits. Or, you know, whatever. It's always strange to take our cues from
Tuxedo Mask↱, but such is the iteration of the obvious that crosses enough paths to eventually cross mine. For whatever reason, this particular iteration is, indeed, getting some attention:
It's wild that the Parkland shooter had a swastika carved into his gun, wore a MAGA hat, and explicitly expressed his hatred for Jews and black people but all these things were excluded from the subsequent conversation.
Since the Parkland shooting, we've talked about guns, we've talked about mental health, but the shooter's outspoken white supremacist values and where they came from are seen as non factors. Why?
We all know that if the shooter expressed support for ISIS online, it wouldn't just be taken into consideration, it would be seen as the direct cause of the terrorism. And yet people insist on acting as if violence isn't white supremacy's goal too.
Had the Parkland shooter even expressed sympathy for Black Lives Matter or wore an Obama hat instead of MAGA, the pitchforks would be sold out all over. People's selective outrage and lack of self-reflection is the fuel white supremacy depends on...And right now it's thriving.
Perhaps this is a particularly American context of the problem, but it's something we do a lot. It's why, for instance, Father Coughlin, the Canadian-born American xenophobe, is not more widely remembered; while Americans disdain recalling our infamy, his is a double-dose because it also means condemning our supremacist heritage, and we are still in a time when many Americans disdain and even fear acknowledging those aspects of our history.
Nonetheless, Aldous Huxley wrote, in 1925, that the British were very healthily unaware of history. Our American conscience, as a matter of heritage is riddled with this sort of ignorance. It has to do with the idea of ego defense in the process undertaken when "winners write history".
The American custom similar to and predating the Godwin corollary would say, "Are the KKK Nazis? Well, no, but ...." The answer, "Well, some of them," is, effectively, in that construction, a concession that no, the "KKK are not Nazis". Think about that for a moment: Are the alt-Right Nazis? Some of them. Are the alt-Right the KKK? Some of them. Does it really matter if the alt-Right "are Nazis" or "are KKK", if the principles are sufficient that Nazis and Klan members will take part in order to advance their agenda? Americans are, to the one, notoriously vague about such questions; to the other, it's not an easy answer; that latter is part of what is changing. Once upon a time, it was a very easy answer: The KKK were not Nazis and how dare anyone imply otherwise. Even that is simplification; the larger point is that, amid traditionally problematic juxtapositions, the very fact that someone—
e.g., the alt-right identity spectrum—should evoke the question for having such influence is not insignificant.
Meanwhile, a further point persists, because it must: If there is a rational, objective argument in support of given principles, it seems reasonable enough to presume that someone, somewhere should be capable of presenting it. That is to say, even in the context of alt-Right, it is about behavior, not specific political labels.
Some arguments just aren't rational. The only reason we might carve out exceptions is that we want to. Why would we want to? That is a much harder question. Still, it is true that certain supremacism still gets certain passes in certain circumstances.
Is the alt-Right Daa'ish? Probably not, but they really, really want to be. Or, more realistically, what does it matter if they're not Daa'ish?
The difference between what we will make excuses for, and what we will not, which in turn can also speak to the point of unfortunate justifications, basically comes down to splitting hairs 'twixt factions of suicide-pact politics. For our part, such comparisons haven't much use except for being part of the point. If there is a functional, rational argument for supremacism let someone make it. Meanwhile, if the political label happens to coincide with a behavioral problem, is the problem all there is to the label? That is, does addressing the behavior have the appearance of suppressing the political identity? If so, why?
†
[
23 September 2019] The later clarification runs: Shouldn't there be more to a political identity than fallacy and fantasy?
There are some who will find that simplistic, and, sure, it is. Plenty of those, however, will recognize the fact of market demand, a lot of which really does sound and read so poorly.
A few weeks before sketching the old notes, I actually had occasion to explain to someone, "your arguments only make sense if we cancel out the parts of reality you don't seem to know about". In a way, this can be a self-evident assertion about any argument achieving a range of rhetorical failures and catastrophes, but on the occasion it really was that obvious. I also recalled that once upon a time the grumpy old-men of moderately conservative society lamented the lack of civics education and knowledge among the kids of the day, and these decades later the irony is more unfortunate than hilarious insofar as conservative society now relies on civic ignorance in order to maintain its argument.
There might be some themes that stand out, such as behavior and political views; at the time, I was reflecting on a puzzle that gets strangely more complicated as it becomes more simply defined. We can also reasonably suggest that complexity comes from breaking the obvious or apparent down into fundamental components, and explaining them as simply as possible. Play a childish game of why, and try to justify the statement that "rain sometimes falls" by figuring out what parts of physics and chemistry to explain to someone who can't even tell you what confuses them about the idea that water sometimes falls out of the sky. Eventually, the sheer number of words, no matter how simple or simply arranged, gets too large for the demanding audience to countenance.
(Nor does this account for the variation by which we might suggest, "Water doesn't grow on trees, after all, except when it does," and suddenly the other can explain physics, chemistry, and biology well enough to demonstrate that, "Water doesn't grow".)
There is a question of function about marketplace equivocation. Watch who or what gains from any given disruptive behavior, and remember the metric of gain is not, on this occason, going to be our own.