Cannibalism in the United States

November 28, 2016

Election season is not over yet, though the election has passed.  Our national nightmare continues.  (Do we even have a word for horrific visions that haunt our waking hours?)

Jill Stein (who?), one of two alternative presidential candidates, has decided to call for a recount of the popular vote in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.  These were identified as the "battleground states" in the presidential contest, the states that would determine the outcome of the election.  Some were surprised that voters embraced Donald Trump.  Margins were narrow enough, perhaps, to justify the expense of bureaucratic cost and emotional energy required to undertake such efforts.  No one, I think, expects that the results will shift the ultimate decision.  

My concern is not with the recount itself, even less with the principles of democracy behind such an initiative, nor with the real or imagined consequences of the result.  My concern is with the irritation and inflammation of the wounds opened by the campaign, wounds that continued strife cannot hope to heal.  Trump has fired up his Twitter feed in response.  It is hard to share in the shock or surprise that greets his latest outburst.  Twitter was invented for the likes of Donald Trump, and has become the medium of choice for those who have aligned with him, who feel (or have felt, until now) excluded from deliberations that occur within the corridors of power in these Divided States of America. 

Like many, I have been thinking all too much about conspiracy theories, paranoia, and the politics of fear and hate.  Over the past two centuries of our country's history, forever since the Old World powers of England, France, and Spain became fed up with New World graspiness, our national pathology seems to have suffered from periodic bouts of internal cannibalism, where we turn upon each other in some frenzy of self-hatred and suspicion.  The roots in fact stretch as deep as European settlement on the continent, the famous Salem witch hunts first establishing the genetic mutation of this self-immolation masquerading as moral patriotism.  Others have already drawn parallels to Jacksonian populism, to the national hysterias set off by Joe McCarthy and George Wallace, to the lesser cancers fed by David Duke.  And now we are in the clutches of the most terrifying of cannibal kings, Steve Bannon.  

As a country, we have long behaved as a republic of haters: our hatred of England gave us our national identity; we wrapped Spain and France up in that hatred for a half century following the Revolution, all the while nursing an inwardly focused hatred of slaves and Native Americans.  We have proved the concept in our malevolence toward each successive wave of immigrants: Bohemians, Italians, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Jews; for years, we devoted untold resources to targeting Communists, and now, of course, the dreaded "Muslim."  Apparently we find enemies everywhere, and we are possessed by the idea that they wash ashore in droves.  Traditionally, our animosity has been trained on identities, be they national, racial, or religious, but we also have succumbed to hatred of the rich as well as the poor, of our institutions -- Academia, Wall Street, the Corporation, the CIA, Washington -- and of the people associated with those institutions, including labor unions, teachers' unions, CEOs, "hedge-fund guys," politicians.  We are, in fact, equal opportunity haters. 

This mutation has evolved to reveal a powerful susceptibility to conspiracy theory, the idea perhaps most famously captured in McCarthy's tagline, "There's a Red under every bed."  Whoever the current focus of our paranoia, we condemn them all for plotting to deprive "us" (whoever "us" is) of "our" America.  And such suspicion, of course, drives the delusion that our recent national election was somehow "rigged," that the call for a recount is evidence of both collusion and fraud, or perhaps that some nefarious network of cyber-criminals, once thought to be Russian, must be at work.  In any case, we cannot trust anyone.  Everyone is suspect.  As Walt Kelly's Pogo proclaimed some time past, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."  

The nightmare from which we cannot awaken is this notion so starkly revealed by the outcome of the election, whatever it may be, that we do not know ourselves, do not understand each other, and, frankly, don't trust each other.  As we talk in conciliatory post-election talk of dissolving the shells of our Balkanized bubbles, we must acknowledge, too, the underlying disease from which we may be hoping to recover.  Our greatest risk factor, as hard as it is to admit, is our predisposition to hate.  We may reach out, we may find connection, we may even work together toward common good. But lingering doubt continues, it seems, to fuel smoldering suspicion, a volatile mixture that at this moment in our national history has burst once again into the flames of hatred.

And the conspiracy theorist in me pauses to ask, who benefits from all this hatred?  What does Steve Bannon want?