Let's Be Honest With Ourselves

...if to no one else.

“The Battle of Trenton,” depicting terrorist George Washington (center right- tee hee entendre). I wonder if searches or word/image use of “George Washington” by itself is a red flag these days.

DISCLAIMER: This post is not intended to encourage, suggest, or incite political violence or criminal activity of any kind. Readers are admonished to obey all laws at all times without question or exception. All unlawful acts are immoral and are universally condemned.

Aimed mainly at the Americans in the crowd or anyone with a more than passing interest in America, but there’s hopefully at least a little food for thought for everyone.

This hatched in my brain last night while lying awake contemplating that I would probably be at home sick today, and when it comes to prognostications about our own weaknesses, we humans are rarely wrong.

I woke up still thinking about it, which is a good but not excellent indication that I should probably write it. As I did, I realized that it kept reminding me so thoroughly of my semi-recent (and for some reason relatively more popular) posts What The Fuck Do We Do Now? and Are We There Yet? that I just now sat down and re-read both to make sure I wasn’t just repeating essentially the same ideas in an only slightly-reorganized manner, which is how I got through at least a few classes at college.

When I wrote What The Fuck… I was prompted by the then-happening raid on Trump’s Mar-A-Lago home ostensibly to search for classified documents that Trump had ostensibly kept there in violation of a regulation by the National Archives (which Trump argued he had declassified in keeping with his broad powers as then-President). This morning, I was greeted by the revelation that while I was sending a steer and a hog to slaughter yesterday, President Brandon was found to have been keeping, wait for it, classified documents from his time as the male lead on the reboot of Veep in the offices of his think tank, the Penn Biden Center, which is enormously funded by the People’s Republic of China. If true, this is not something that would have been within his powers as then-VP. His home was not raided. A big, scary case is not currently being prepared against him. He is widely praised by federal law enforcement for being a very good boy and cooperating with what is in all likelihood a big misunderstanding.

Which, of course, reminds me of my recent The Rules of War, but I wasn’t thinking about that yesterday because I was nowhere near the news. And I swear with the honesty of one-handed Tyr that this post isn’t supposed to be a lame-ass roundup of recent posts to farm clicks. (It just turned out that way.)

No, what I wanted to write about today mainly has to do with the recent eye-rolling anniversary celebration (because it fucking IS a celebration) of Jan 6 that we will apparently have to all deal with every single year from now on for as long as there is a Democrat party.

Mainly, the idea of “insurrection”- ACTUAL insurrection- but also the words “terrorism,” “revolution,” “riots,” and the immediate emotional response we have to those concepts when we see and hear the words.

Collectively, “political violence.”

I’m going to say some things that are probably going to sound tedious to some of you now. Some might not. I expect everyone reading this will have a slightly different, interesting ratio of their own.

• America- like many other nations throughout history and in the modern era- was founded by political violence.

• The American revolutionaries were considered terrorists by the British Crown (and by many of their fellow Americans), as is every revolution by the state against which it revolts.

• An attempt to overthrow a government and permanently remove it from power is an insurrection. It typically stops being called an insurrection and starts being called a revolution if it lasts long enough to not-obviously be doomed to failure or if it succeeds in its goals, but these are nuances of meaning and I have found ample examples of “revolution” and “insurrection” being used more or less interchangeably, with the only obvious distinction being that “insurrection” is typically used to frame such activity as illegitimate or wrong and “revolution” to frame it as legitimate or just.

• Terrorism is a form of political violence, generally considered the domain of non-state actors, in which people or infrastructure are targeted by actions designed to hurt, destroy, or demoralize- “terrorize”- the civilian populace to manipulate public opinion regarding their own government, rather than to substantially damage the warfighting ability of the state itself.

• The overwhelming majority of people alive today in the United States lack (for better or worse) the capacity to engage in violence in any circumstance other than when they suffer an impulsive, temporary loss of self-control or otherwise responding to immediate emotions of anger or fear. Many are incapable of engaging in violence even under those circumstances.

• This is generally seen as a positive indication of a civilized and peaceful society.

• Despite most being incapable of engaging in political violence, Americans as a majority are okay with the concept of political violence provided it is in service of ideologies they approve of and that it won’t affect them unless they choose to be involved in it.

These points apply to everyone on the political spectrum. With the possible exception of a very small minority of people who are truly ideologically pacifists, it is in the DNA of American culture that force is a justifiable route to combating injustice. Aligned with this is the enduring hypocrisy that when our tribe is politically ascendant, we are fine with the state being the instrument of that application of violence against injustice. Democrat jeers that “we thought you Repubs were the party of law and order” will become “no not like that” the moment (if ever again) there is a shift in political power, and vice versa, though each tribe will use different language. In my heart I suspect this is because- in keeping with my sweeping sense of what is “American DNA”- we, because of the unique character of our founding, regard our state as being (or should be) an extension of the people- of “us”- and not the completely unmoored, detached island of elite power that it has become and long been, through dozens of swaps of political ascendancy, with its police and military being the goon squads of powerful people that have nothing whatsoever to do with us.

I have long suspected that the key to creating a robust veneer of peaceful society in a deeply pluralistic nation such as America is a sustained hypocrisy about a collective acceptance of violence- what differs between us is strictly a set of conditions about who may wield it. We are deeply frightened by the idea of violence wielded by people whose values do not resemble our own; we are deeply comforted when it is wielded by people who we are made to believe are closely aligned with our values, especially if they generously offer to wield it on our behalf so that our hands and consciences remain clean.

This veneer is only possible if people refuse the request in my headline- to be honest with themselves. So maybe my request is a bad one, immoral on its face, and it should be ignored, and maybe I should be condemned for it.

Having never lived with the alternative, it’s impossible for me to say.

DISCLAIMER (repeated): This post is not intended to encourage, suggest, or incite political violence or criminal activity of any kind. Readers are admonished to obey all laws at all times without question or exception. All unlawful acts are immoral and are universally condemned.