Saturday, November 24, 2018

What Part Of Trump's Real Base Is Made Up Of Lonely And Violent Right Wing Misfits He Manipulates With Ease?

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History is filled with lonely, alienated misfits acting out in the public square-- sometimes with dire consequences. 19 year old Gavrilo Princip came from a desperately poor peasant family in Bosnia, lived alone in Sarajevo, joined violent fanatic groups, got expelled from school and assassinated the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, setting off a chain of events which led to the biggest deal in world history 'til then: World War I which, in turn, led to the deaths of tens of millions of people, the collapse of political stability throughout the world and, eventually, to World War II. If Gavrilo had only eaten better, had a better body-- he was a scrawny, malnourished little guy-- had a girlfriend! Today, the NY Times published an OpEd by Arthur Brooks, How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart-- When People Have A Hole In Their Life, They Often Fill It With Angry Politics. In America today, we all have an a-hole in our lives and his classic, weak man's divide-and-conquer style of management has turned our country into a bubbling cauldron of angry politics.

Brooks himself is a bit of a misanthrope. He's a right-wing kook-- head of the neo-fascist American Enterprise Institute-- who grew up a musician when Seattle was rockin' and rollin'-- except his instrument was French horn. Perhaps if he had taken up guitar or drums, America would have turned out less insanely right-wing itself. Jimi Hendrix was getting all the girls. Bassonists and French horn players don't necessarily get laid after a gig. Violent right-wing domestic terrorists are virtually all lonely, desperate and mentally impaired males. They're also the tip of the Trumpist spear. "America," wrote Brooks "is suffering an epidemic of loneliness."
According to a recent large-scale survey from the health care provider Cigna, most Americans suffer from strong feelings of loneliness and a lack of significance in their relationships. Nearly half say they sometimes or always feel alone or “left out.” Thirteen percent of Americans say that zero people know them well. The survey, which charts social isolation using a common measure known as the U.C.L.A. Loneliness Scale, shows that loneliness is worse in each successive generation.

This problem is at the heart of the new book Them: Why We Hate Each Other-- and How to Heal, by Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska. Mr. Sasse argues that “loneliness is killing us,” citing, among other things, the skyrocketing rates of suicide and overdose deaths in America. This year, 45,000 Americans will take their lives, and more than 70,000 will die from drug overdoses.

Mr. Sasse’s assertion that loneliness is killing us takes on even darker significance in the wake of the mail-bomb campaign against critics of President Trump and the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, both of which were perpetrated by isolated-- and apparently very lonely-- men. Mr. Sasse’s book was published before these events, but he presciently described what he believes lonely people increasingly do to fill the hole of belonging in their lives: They turn to angry politics.

In the “siloed,” or isolated, worlds of cable television, ideological punditry, campus politics and social media, people find a sense of community in the polarized tribes forming on the left and the right in America. Essentially, people locate their sense of “us” through the contempt peddled about “them” on the other side of the political spectrum.

There is profit to be made here. The “outrage industrial complex” is what I call the industries that accumulate wealth and power by providing this simulacrum of community that people crave-- but cannot seem to find in real life.

Why are we becoming so lonely? One reason is the changing nature of work. Work is one of the key sources of friendship and community. Think of your own relationships; surely many of your closest friendships-- perhaps even your relationship with your spouse-- started in the workplace. Yet the reality of the workplace is rapidly attenuating, as people hop from job to job, and from city to city, as steady work becomes harder to find and the “gig” economy grows.

Mr. Sasse worries even more, however, about a pervasive feeling of homelessness: Too many Americans don’t have a place they think of as home-- a “thick” community in which people know and look out for one another and invest in relationships that are not transient. To adopt a phrase coined in Sports Illustrated, one might say we increasingly lack that “hometown gym on a Friday night feeling.”

Mr. Sasse finds this phrase irresistible and warmly relates it to his own life growing up in Fremont, Neb., a town of 26,000 residents. He describes the high school sports events on Friday nights that drew the townspeople together in a common love for their neighbors and community that made most differences-- especially political differences-- seem trivial. He relates with deep fondness the feelings he experienced, after moving away for a couple of decades for school and work, when he returned to Fremont’s small-town life with his family, and the deep sense of belonging it created.

In what might be called “the social capital of death,” Mr. Sasse charmingly describes the sense of being rooted that it gives him, at a robust and healthy 46, to own a burial plot for himself in Fremont’s local cemetery. A précis of Mr. Sasse’s recommendations to America thus might be this: Go where you get that hometown-gym-on-a-Friday-night feeling, put down roots and make plans to fertilize the soil.

That can be a tricky proposition for many of us. On reading the book, I asked myself where I might get that hometown-gym feeling, where I have natural roots, where I can imagine being buried. No specific place came to mind. I have no Fremont-- not even Seattle, my hometown, which is a perfectly nice place, but one I unsentimentally left behind 35 years ago.

All this is particularly germane to my wife and me at the moment, as we prepare to move from Maryland to Massachusetts in the coming months. We fear the loneliness we are sure to feel as we enter a completely new place where neither of us grew up or has ever lived. Is a thick community and the happiness it brings out of reach for rootless cosmopolitans like us?

I recently put these questions to Mr. Sasse. He told me I had it all wrong-- that moving back home and going to the gym on Friday aren’t actually the point; rather, the trick is “learning how to intentionally invest in the places where we actually live.” In other words, being a member of a community isn’t about whether I have a Fremont. It isn’t about how I feel about any place I have lived, nor about my fear of isolation in a new city. It is about the neighbor I choose to be in the community I wind up calling my home.

And there lies the challenge to each of us in a country suffering from loneliness and ripped apart by political opportunists seeking to capitalize on that isolation. Each of us can be happier, and America will start to heal, when we become the kind neighbors and generous friends we wish we had.


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3 Comments:

At 5:44 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I agree that America has a loneliness epidemic underway right now. But to show that loneliness is to invite attack by the crowds of bullies who band together to make themselves feel powerful at the expense of the poor unfortunate who crosses their path.

It has ever been thus, but not so frequently noticed.

In the past, one might gerner status from one's job, or athletic prowess or artistic talents. But our society has become so competitive that it no longer matters how good someone is at something, for someone else will attempt to prove to be superior, or to tear down a superior if that isn't possible.

Societies shatter when cooperation fades away. This nation is very close to that point, something the NRA has worked for over the course of decades. I don't track gun sales, but I'd wager they are up. As John Lennon noted once, Happiness Is A Warm Gun - and the gun dorks get satisfaction from lovingly stroking their steel penises.

 
At 7:23 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well, what would you expect when all of society preaches and teaches everyone fear and hate of 'the other'.
In the '30s, bankers' greed created a level of misery rarely before seen, but everyone was equal in that regard. We elected a government that, astonishingly, actually worked diligently to help everyone EXCEPT those who did not need help.
The world war also brought people together, or maybe we would end up wearing swastikas and murdering all non-Aryans.

But ever since, it's been fear and hate (communism, uppity blacks, uppity women) followed by more fear and hate (terrorists, islam, immigrants, blacks, latinos, gays).
And it isn't just politics. It's the churches. And, perhaps the most ominous development, politics (both parties) and the "Christian" churches have merged into god's sanctified cabal of fear and hate. 70% of americans are in this street gang.

The Nazis want a fuhrer and fear/hate everyone who still yearns for a liberal democracy.
The leftys fear/hate naziism.
We, a nation/society of fear and hate own 3 guns per person.

But, underneath all of this social and political tinder, are the greedy.

The fear and hate are being stoked by greedy opportunists for fun, power and profit. The churches enjoy increasing market share and profit. The NRA enjoys increased influence, market share and profits for their corporate sponsors. The parties enjoy ever-"mushrooming" donations from their corporate sponsors, lest they be left behind in the public profitgasm. Banks, amazon, google, facebook and dozens of others have bought themselves immunity from Sherman and any other kind of official impediments to their world dominance.
Their only impediments are each other. And that will work itself out in short order... until the world is owned and operated by at most 3 or 4 corporate lords, unless our destiny is another world war that kills 6 BILLION (WWII killed 2 orders of magnitude fewer).

And American voters will support and affirm it all the way... because our "leaders" and clergy will exhort us all to do so. And because we are all too fucking stupid to do any different.

And soon after that? Earth will start culling all species because OURS is too fucking stupid to do any different.

 
At 8:12 AM, Blogger Glenn Wiech said...

That guy is moving to Massachusetts? He should stay in a shithole AEI made in the midwest or the south. It's tiresome that these cheerleaders for the rich settle themselves in "liberal" states with all the amenities and investments they've blocked in much of the rest of the US.

 

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