We, The Spiteful

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/mark-ames/33836/we-the-spiteful

In the summer of 2004, I published an article in the New York Press that answered Thomas Frank's question "What's the Matter With Kansas?" The Bush-Kerry campaign was heating up, and it was clear to me that the American left was going to make the same mistake it's been making for 30 years, and will continue making until it faces some unpleasant truths about the rank, farcical psychology that drives American voting habits. Why don't they vote in their own economic interests? Why don't voters vote rationally, the way we were taught in grade school civics classes? In a rational world, with rational voters voting in their rational economic interests, Bush--who dragged America into two lost wars before destroying the entire financial system--would've been forced to resign before the first primary and exiled to Saudi Arabia; rationally, rational voters would have elected anyone or anything, John Kerry or a coconut crab, over that fuck-up of fuck-ups, George W. Bush.

The answer came to me just I was just finishing my book Going Postal. Researching and writing that book was a real mind-fuck: spending all those isolated months sloshing through Middle American malice. I realized something obvious when I pulled back from all that research and looked at the Kerry-Bush race: malice and spite are as American as baseball and apple pie. But it's never admitted into our romantic, naive, sentimental understanding of who Americans really are, and what their lives are really like.

If the left wants to understand American voters, it needs to once and for all stop sentimentalizing them as inherently decent, well-meaning people being duped by a tiny cabal of evil oligarchs--because the awful truth is that they're mean, spiteful jerks being duped by a tiny cabal of evil oligarchs. The left's naive, sentimental, middle-class view of "the people" blinds them to all of the malice and spite that is a major premise of Middle American life. It's the same middle-class sentimentality that allowed the left to be duped into projecting candidate Obama into the great progressive messiah, despite the fact that Obama's record offered little evidence besides skin pigment to support that hope. (For the record, I called out the left's gullible Obamaphilia during the primary campaigns in early 2008--here in Alternet, and here in The eXile.)

Here we are, in 2011--and although 2004 seems like a different world from today, separated by more events than we can make sense of, the left still hasn't come around to answering that big Kansas mystery about Americans' farcical voting habits. So the left was left baffled once again when, in 2009, millions of Americans volunteered as foot-soldiers to fight for a second-rate TV personality named Rick Santelli and his rich speculator friends at the Chicago Exchange, who called for a revolution to protect their money from "losers" because Santelli and his speculator buddies didn't want to "subsidize losers' mortgages." Next thing you know, these same losers took to the streets to defend the semi-celebrity Santelli, his rich speculator pals, and the Koch brothers from... losers.

That is, they revolted against themselves.


More at the link --

[eleny]

1. "mean, spiteful jerks being duped by a tiny cabal of evil oligarchs"

I could agree with that.

[The Magistrate]

2. The Gentleman Makes Some Sound Points, Sir

[calimary]

3. Sad to say, it makes sense.

[Swamp Rat]

4. "They revolted against themselves."

:thumbsup:

[patrice]

11. BECAUSE they are un-happy and NOT allowed to admit it. nt

[patrice]

12. It's an important point, because, if true, it means we share more, with some anyway, than we realize

[Swamp Rat]

13. Yes we do, for we are all Americans, divided and conquered by the corpofascists.

We The People Divided have been fooled by those who pretend to represent us.

[patrice]

19. Right on, Swampy! "Love"! the tacky, deflating/soft, shiny, plastic thing.

Nailed! it!

[pa28]

5. OK this explains everything.

Must read.

[patrice]

6. What else makes sense of it??? Oppression has exacted a profound price on "our" minds:hearts & that

price is reinforced/rewarded/enabled by "our" churches.

[patrice]

7. More at the link:

"This wretchedness leads to a desire for vengeance, to externalize the inner famine – it leads directly to the Republican camp."

[bobbolink]

8. Wow, talk about mean and spiteful! What a way to bring about transformation and peace.

NOT.

This is a disgusting screed.

[patrice]

9. Ames is making a case for "passive aggression" against things that many on the Left oppose.

It does make sense to me in that it provides a hypothesis for why people do things that are against their own self interests: spite-voting is passive aggression that is elicited by our rat-race, media-dominated, hollow lives.

I agree that his tone is a hard to take, but I have felt for a very long time that no one is talking about where all of this mean-ness is coming from. What is wrong with us? Ames is saying that the SAME things that are wrong with us elicit reactions on both the Left and the Right and both sides are not responding functionally to those absolutely fundamentally cultural issues. The Left gets high on pretty stories about "us" and the Right, feeling disempowered, gets even with passive aggressive revenge voting.

His tone is damaging, but his hypothesis is at least directed at something that no one is talking about, "our" culture, except churches and most churches are either lying about it (for the pay off) or being too passive about it.

[bobbolink]

14. Like passive-aggressive behavior is now a GOOD thing?

This is really disgusting, and I am totally ashamed that this is what we, who call ourselves "progressive", "liberal" have come to.

And right after the commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King! Shame!

Try this on for size.... some of us, and I am one of them, have tried to encourage people to figure out ways to reach out and give the correct and factual information to those who haven't found it. When I do this, I find, usually, a very good response.

To go on the attack, and hateful attack at that, without living up to OUR part of the whole problem, is ..... all I can say is that I am DISGUSTED, and do NOT want to associate with people who are going to ramp up the vitriol and hatred.

So, go ahead and dump all over me. I really no longer care.... I can chock it all up to the source.

[patrice]

20. No, he's saying that we should consider that not all of the bad oppo we are seeing is

well-intentioned ignorance, which can just be fixed if people know/understand our situation better.

He's saying, in addition to well-intentioned ignorance, we must consider that a significant amount of the mean-ness and hate that we are seeing comes with Passive Aggression that rises out of people's un-happy awareness of their own slavery and their own impotence in dealing with what is wrong with their lives/America. This is why I think it's an important article, because it points out that some of those whom we consider the opposition, some of those who are mean and hateful toward Liberal issues, ACTUALLY SHARE CERTAIN MOTIVES WITH US, i.e. the perception that our lives do not work the way that we want them to, the perception that there is something very wrong making them (all of us) unhappy, and they, the opposition, have decided to do something different about those problems than we/Liberals have. They have decided that they can do nothing positive or creative to solve our cultural problems, so they (think they) are getting even, by means of spite and revenge voting, including voting against their own self-interest.

Some of the Right/"Conservative" contrariness and spite arises out of some of the SAME critique of who/what we have become that you hear coming from the Left.

This fact represents at least some shared values. We share some motives with SOME of the Right/Conservatives anyway, i.e. our understanding that America has gone seriously wrong. The Left has just decided to do something more constructive about our problems, while the Right/"Conservatives" engage in spite-voting, a form of passive aggression, in order to get even with "what's wrong with Kansas/America".

This is interesting because it means that at least some of them are not supporting candidates because they think they actually are right for America, but simply as a public expression of spite against THE SAME OPPRESSORS LIBERALS ARE ACTIVELY FIGHTING.

[patrice]

21. The author is not saying that anyone should respond in kind. Did you read the whole thing?

We can't do anything about something we don't understand. If we impute the wrong motives to what we are seeing, e.g. "It's ALL about ignorance", that's not going to work for the ones for whom it is NOT about ignorance. It's not going to reduce the vitriol and hatred amongst those for whom the problem **ISN'T** ignorance/mis-understanding/lack-of-certain-information. Treating everyone the same and assuming there is just something that they don't know isn't going to reduce the vitriol and hatred amongst those who actually **DO** have a sense of the actual truth, but are just reacting to it dysfunctionally, e.g. those who are, to a somewhat lesser degree, similar to Jared Loughner, or like those Minutemen who shot that entire family in Arizona in May 2009.

And what about those who, no matter what you tell them, no matter how much you improve, or help them to improve, their informational base, NONE OF IT MATTERS ENOUGH to change their vitriol and hate? I KNOW people like that; they're very powerful people.

Please don't think that I am a Reactionary: I don't assume that vitriol and hate are functional responses to vitriol and hate. I think there are a significant minority of people whom we SHOULD understand better and we should stop assuming that we know enough about them that all we have to do is _____________________________ (whatever) and that's all they need.

[patrice]

22. It just occurred to me: it could be that the SHARING I'm trying to point to may be Obama's motive in

taking at least a few of the significant political risks he has with "his Liberal base". It could be what drives at least some of his ("traitorous" according to some) policy behaviors that you see so many long-knives out against here at the DU.

If this is true, it's quite a gamble. I hope it works. I have about had it with all of he division.

[patrice]

10. K&R - We should think abou this. nt

[walldude]

15. So is it just right leaning middle americans that are

spiteful jerks? And the left are all really nice people just trying to figure it out? Gimme a break.

This kind of generalization is crap.

[bobbolink]

17. That's what I'm getting out of this right now. Agreed.

[BuelahWitch]

16. "Kerry spoke French. That meant he had sex."

:rofl: I've always said that mean people wouldn't be so goddamned mean if they'd get laid a little more often. People look at me like I'm a red headed jezebel when I say it, but I think in a way that I'm right...

[Urban Prairie]

18. "The answer came to me just I was just finishing my book Going Postal"

Maybe someday the insultingly derogatory phrase of "going postal" will be changed to "going rightwing"


Being an ex-postal worker who worked in the same infamous district (Royal Oak, MI) at the same time as the carrier who "went postal" and killed his supervisor and also killed or wounded several other members in management, I eventually was able to talk to several ex-carriers who had worked at that post office building, during the day that it happened, and who were permitted to transfer to another craft in the months afterward. That emotionally/mentally-disturbed man was subjected to daily psychological harassment by his supervisor, in a manner that would curl one's hair. His supervisor was quite fond of disciplining or issuing suspensions to his subordinates while using a hand-puppet, and making them talk to "it" instead of him, these were of course, mature adult employees, who were treated much like juvenile delinquents by this sadist. Several years prior to his shooting death, this supervisor had been transferred to the Royal Oak PO from another PO in a different state, after the NALC union there filed harassment charges against him to the NLRB.

Just like the Roman Catholic Church swept their pedophile priests under the rug by transferring them to other dioceses and parishes in distant states, the USPS does the same thing with most, if not all of their most "problematic" employees in all levels of management many of whom often had/have direct contact on a daily basis with mostly unionized postal workers, instead of firing, disciplining, or demoting them. I remember one incident in particular, when three employees in management, only one of whom was fired, (allegedly used his USPS-issued credit card online) after they were caught by USPS security (Department of the Inspector General) using a USPS computer with an active internet connection to allegedly view child porn. The other two were suspended and demoted, then both were transferred to another state after word of what they had done leaked out.

[EstimatedProphet]

23. It amazes me that this does come as a surprise to people

Has everyone forgotten the term "dirty hippie"? did no one hear how, after every tragedy that has happened where the left was ever involved since Kent State, the left has always been painted as dirty unAmerican lazy spoiled brats that deserved whatever happened to them? The right has a very strong contingent of bullies.