The photo shows the Grenoble UCalifornia study abroad students celebrating a U.S. November election 14 years ago--the one that elected Barack Obama in 2008. We all assumed an exit door had opened on the Bush-Cheney nightmare of the global war on terror and that we would all be gradually waking up. Operation Cast Lead hadn't started in Gaza, designed to instruct Obama that the age of war was just getting started. None of the other stuff had happened yet either--Obama failing to bail out Main Street and indemnifying Wall Street, and renewed forms of white supremacism and white nationalism triggered by having a Black family living in the White House rather than working outside to refresh the paint. I still honor the hope that Obama wanted to inject into the political system and also the hope of these amazing students, staff, and unpictured educators, not to mention all the French people on public transport and in the streets chanting, “Obama, Obama,” ecstatically because of the glimpse of that door open to the better world.There are all sorts of policy deadlocks to discuss, but I'm struck by what used to be called the character issues, by which I mean the disintegration of the personality structures of a majority of white Americans since that day we were all hoping for Obama. I don't just mean the blanket refusal of information and data, though that's very bad, but the widespread toleration, even admiration, for sadistic, degrading activity and the desire for more. The Repubs have canonized a short list of major traits that everybody's parents always tries to keep their kids from taking on:
Being a bad loser, to the point of refusing to admit you lost, also crying and yelling
Blaming everyone except yourself
Cheating
Lying
Bullying
These are all behaviors that R-Whites, for lack of a better term, now celebrate. It's NOT obvious or to be taken for granted that a dominant political party is cool with the degrading, contemptible dishing out of humiliation and scorn to people they don't like. They are cool with making things worse for the obviously unfortunate, the broke, the desperate, the walked-a-thousand-miles to get out of an unliveable situation—what kind of people look on these terrifying flights from horror and work themselves into a state of contempt? They regularly do and also glorify things that would get you suspended from Catholic grade school: mocking the poor kids with bad shoes, beating up the brown kids when the teacher turns her back, accusing the innocent to explain why Jimmy's nose is bleeding, attacking the kids who studied for the test and did well on it, never ever accepting blame for anything, never trying to fix anything, never learning anything, never doing anything better. And instead lying to some refugees to get them on a bus to drop them off on some Dem politician’s corner in a blue city as a funny joke. It’s really the same spirit of throw the firebomb through the Black family's living room window. Except it's the governor of the modern state of Florida doing it, not some backwater klansmen, and with the support of his party, its members, and the state police.
I don't see how we can get anywhere without naming this accelerating shift towards mass pathology--calling it fascism doesn't quite get at the sexual fear, the racial derangement, the hostility to autonomous women, the sadistic delight in seeing people suffer to prove they are lesser than you. I don't know what the name is, but it has to be studied and confronted with both brains and anger until it collapses.
