Plenty of stupid to go around

Narrative is so appealing compared to a rigorous look at the actual

I'm far from the first or even the fifty-thousandth observer of the post-American landscape to note that our nation is perilously polarized.

Actually, you know what? It’s probably time to retire the term “polarized” as it’s been applied in this context. The accurate phrase now would be “brittle to the point of irreparably cracking up.”

But for all the factions, camps and movements on the scene, nearly all of them have one thing in common: They swallow utter hooey without a moment’s hesitation. It’s amazing to watch ostensibly grown-up human beings sign on to narratives that collapse like a balloon at the slightest pinprick.

There’s the ostensibly sharp distinction between the Antifa types doing the rioting and looting in cities across America and Black Lives Matter, which can be seen in video footage chastising the rioters. If that’s all the further one looks into it, one gets the impression that BLM is a paragon of moderation and that it embraces a vision of nothing more than the same kind of justice and respect for persons who happen to be black that whites take for granted.

Um, no. The chastising you see in the news coverage is about difference in tactics. It’s the same tension within the Left one has seen since the 1960s. It’s the question of whether fomenting revolution in the streets or taking control of society’s established institutions is the more effective route to the common aim of fundamentally transforming the country and the West generally.

BLM’s policy platforms explicitly call for abolishing law enforcement, racial separatism, and reparations.

It may have a separatist vision, but it does “make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead,” “foster a queer‐affirming network” and aim to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.”

You have to hand it to them, they’ve been effective. Their cultural influence has all manner of business organizations puking all over themselves to show that they see how mired in the sin of indifference they’ve been. The NFL, the New York Times, Cummins and Eli Lilly, to name a few, have made gestures of repentance in the last couple of days.

And much of the post-American public watches the demonstrations that are now well into their second week and thinks, “Gosh, since they’re so worked up, there must be some kind of new vision of justice at hand.” But we never quite get a specific depiction of that new vision, other than the BLM’s platforms, which are woefully short on prescriptions for implementation.

Face it, what’s needed to prevent more Breonna Taylor and George Floyd type deaths is better police training and better law-enforcement HR perceptivity that would weed out Derek Chauvin types before they got assigned to patrol duty. And that point is now well made and action will be taken.

And we’re now seeing that stridency begets stridency. Witness the guys forming a line parallel to the bike trail in Crown Point, Indiana, down which protesters were walking. The guys standing along the side of the path were deliberately decked out in their redneck best, wielding powerful rifles and sporting beards and sunglasses. Who didn’t think this crowd would start showing up at these daily rituals?

Now, let’s wander over the center line of the ideological spectrum to the right side.

There’s the swath of the punditsphere that, while not of the rabid Gateway Pundit-Newsmax variety, has sufficiently given itself over to Trumpism to portray the St. John’s Church stunt as some kind of noble and inspiring gesture.

Speaking of which, that crowd subjected us to yet another of its interminable hair-splitting squabbles, this time about the original reportage that the Park Service used tear gas to clear the way to the church. “It was only pepper balls!”, as if people’s eyes didn’t get blasted anyway.

And I haven’t actually seen anything to this effect yet, but I don’t think that I’d be going out on too much off a limb to predict that MSNBC’s hiring of Lisa Page as a legal analyst is going to elicit howls of “further proof of the Deep State - Fake News axis!” from the fevered Trumpist die-hards by noon today.

They jumped right on the Mattis piece in The Atlantic, taking such tacks as cherry-picking a reasonably good Trump speech at the SpaceX launch and completely overlooking the ample evidence backing Mattis’s claim that trump doesn’t even try to pretend to unite, or framing Mattis as a bully who picks on “Afghans and Iraqis, strange foreign people who don’t have lawyers & media allies as our homegrown domestic terrorists do,” but is a “quivering pup” when he wades into domestic matters.

Never mind the current and past generals who have weighed in to support Mattis.

The remaining, quite obviously dwindling minions of the Very Stable Genius’s cult, for all their passion about seeing Dear Leader re-elected in November, don’t seem to have a plan to persuade anyone outside their ranks. “Yeah, but . . . “ isn’t going to get the numbers among evangelicals and older Americans back up.

I suppose no one comes to reality without some degree of tint to his or her lens. But mid-2020 post-Americans seem perfectly willing to don glasses that present a view that doesn’t jibe with what their other senses, particularly their common sense, tells them about the world in front of their noses.