Joepistole said:
Interestingly, there has been very little media coverage of this issue.
There has been some, but in the expected places. I wonder how much noise people will make now that the Secret Service said no; it is sometimes disappointing if these things don't make the nightly news and then the morning infotainment the next day.
This is, after all, kind of important. We've already seen some violence; we've witnessed threats of mortal violence. I think we're probably reasonably aware of my general sketch of a thesis that these people
want some manner of violence and revolt; they didn't get their chance with Jade Helm, but they have been agitating for a "necessary", "we had no choice", "y'all forced us to do this by making us defend ourselves" revolt pretty much from the outset. This is the crowd where there is room to argue about the merits of why being a white Christian male complaining about taxes makes you a patriot instead of a terrorist when you ram a plane into a building.
And to what degree does the
proverbial everybody get what's going on? We might not like to talk about it in the "serious" discourse, but everyone seems to be in on the tacit agreement that the protofascist echoes of Mussolini-style Coughlinism are on the table; even the candidate, as the Drumpfjungend bits and pieces we've seen are deliberate trolling.
So it seems like some degree of the proverbial everybody knows what's going on with the idea of guns at the convention; people are preparing to defensively enforce their will, because they have been left no choice but violence. In and of itself, the fact that this is taking place in open daylight, and we are so comfortable with it as to develop post-Edwardian disclaimers of our discomfort, seems newsworthy.
Everybody sees this coming, and we seem caught between, "No way, it's not going down that way", "Well, yeah, but just let them, except that could still get really, really bad", and, "You realize there's nothing we can do because we're all just bricks in the wall?" It's almost like we're going to sit back and let this happen, perhaps justifying ourselves by means of a widespread tacit presumption that it's going to happen, at some point, anyway, so ... right,
this time we're going to just let it play out.
Except we'll tamper with it.
Right after the election, we'll start tampering with it. Even right after the Republican convention.
But we always tamper with it.
And in this case, the possibility that we're just going to sit back in order to let certain people harm themselves and potentially others is a bit discomfiting.
But neither does anybody have any good idea for what to do. These people really seem determined to find their necessary, "how dare you force us to revolt!" insurrection.
Still, the requisite cynicism to countenance what they get from all this is simply unbelievable. And maybe that's the problem with appropriate mainstream media coverage of the issue; they haven't really figured out how to make it make sense. Still, this can eventually find its way over every coffee table in the coming week or two. More likely, we are to watch it happen and pretend we are surprised.
But that's the problem with trying to psychoanalyze a culture; where the reward scheme makes sense in a context of a given individual psyche, inflating that result so exponentially as to accommodate prevailing American culture must necessarily distory the result, because if it really comes down to something so stupid as creating significant enough disruption to blame the first black president for bringing the country to revolt and ruin―I mean, how is that
not ridiculous hyperbole?
To the other, if we account for all the available routes―the Snack Club Uprising, for instance, simply suffered the usual revolutionary delusions of grandeur, but is stil symptomatic of
something―it almost seems like the proposition of violence becomes the common cause.
And, yes, I perceive this weird spectator aspect, as if we're going to watch this happen because we believe we cannot persuade it not to. Depending on how things actually go, this question could rise to such import that we promptly and formally ignore it in the aftermath.
Or maybe we're just banking on the hope that this is all bluster and the Convention merely provides some raucous entertainment. Something about cultural psychoanalysis would, then, go here.
