Over the holidays, apparently not the most wonderful time of the year for some among us, the news seemed to turn even more grotesque than usual.
At a Christian Church in a suburb of Ft. Worth, a man decided shooting congregants would be a good way to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace. At a rabbi’s home in suburban New York, a man with a history of mental health problems seems to have believed stabbing a number of Jews on Hanukkah would qualify as performing a mitzvah — the thirteenth anti-semitic attack in the state in three weeks.
In Harris County,Texas, a black man who felt the barber had done a poor job on his 13-year-old son’s noggin didn’t just decline to give a tip, he took out his gun and shot the barber — three times.
In Clive, Iowa, a white woman hurled racial insults at a convenience store clerk, then intentionally hit a 12-year-old black boy with her car, followed shortly by the decision to drive up on a sidewalk in order to run over 14-year-old girl because she assumed the schoolgirl was a part of the Hispanic invasion, then swerved back onto the road and drove on as if she had done nothing more than swat a fly.
On the internet, cyber-sadists engineered a hack that was set off when any of the thousands of Twitter followers of the Epilepsy Foundation visited. This caused a strobe effect designed to trigger possibly fatal seizures. What fun! Click bait weaponized into death bait.
The surprise, if any, is that such inhumanity is unsurprising by now. This is a bitterly divided country, populated by the mad, aggrieved and amoral, and that isn’t exactly new. I’m old enough to remember an era when a large part of the country thought nothing of having separate water fountains for black and white citizens. And those that protested were attacked by firehouses, trained dogs, law enforcement thugs and members of a robed murder cult.
It’s a country that thought a four-year race war (that killed more Americans than the Revolution, War of 1812, Mexican and Spanish-American Wars, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combined) was a good idea. It’s also a country with a long history of permitting a persistent perpetuation of inequality — racial, economic, educational, social — rather than acting to ameliorate it.
It’s also a lonely country with huge empty spaces and bleak anonymous cities. Consider the striking difference between the literary depictions of English and American societies. The former centers on families, marriage, social structures embodied in towns, religious institutions, villages. It is populated by Tom Jones, Emma, the people of Middlemarch, Barchester and Wessex. Yes, there are high and low, horrific slums in Dickens, pampered elites in their country homes, Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist, but an understood ideal of membership in a community.
By contrast, American literature is filled with loners and outcasts, the estranged and dispossessed cut off from their communities — shamed Hester Prynne, mad Captain Ahab, homeless Huck Finn aiming to light out for the territories, the harsh prairies in Cather, the Joads on the road, Gatsby dead in his swimming pool, Frederick Henry walking back to the hotel in the rain alone, Holden Caulfield, innumerable invisible men and women.
In genre literature, the quintessential English detective regards crime as aberrant and solving the puzzle as a way to reestablish the conventional order. In America, the hard-boiled private eye is himself an outsider, navigating the mean streets, knowing the institutions, like the police and the politicians, are as much a source of disorder and corruption as the criminal underworld is. In this noir environment, it’s every man for himself.
My generation began, as perhaps all generations do, as idealists and got wised-up by Cold War, McCarthyism, hot wars, recessions, polluting industries, corruption, cynicism, and self-aggrandizement as economic policy, political platform and moral philosophy.
Unfortunately, this nihilism posing as pragmatism, is no solution and instead leads to the kind of news we now read daily, and the kind of politicians we now elect, including President Howard Beale — satire become reality.
The script of our leaders seems to have been cribbed directly from “Network.” They tell us “everything everywhere is going crazy…everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street…the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
Their solution is more of less the same as Beale’s. “I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’”
As we see, In Beale’s America, after the yelling, the next step is to run over a Latina, shoot a preacher or a barber, stab a rabbi, or trigger the seizures of unsuspecting epileptics while the rich get richer and the Russians steal our elections.