Approaching resignation

Approaching resignation – beginning to accept that the reality of home includes all the semi-literate haters, the obstructionists spawned by God knows how many repeats of the Andrew Jackson election back in 1828 (I still can’t move on from that book). That demographic is supposed to be dying out, but in the meantime it is still around and still really really loud.

And in the meantime they have created a world wherein in makes sense to blast Obama for not being angry enough about the oil spill. Worse, wherein in makes sense to acknowledge fully that there was nothing on earth that he could do about it (unless as Bob Scheer points out he had spoken out belligerently against drilling in the first place and routed Interior for not enforcing regulations, BEFORE the disaster – and yet of course he couldn’t because he was and is still trying to keep Republicans in the game), all the while excoriating him for not manifesting sufficient rhetorical upset. It is simply grotesque. I cannot be part of a society that has so easily given up on reality.

This does not mean that I like the benighted country in which I am exiled, only that I am beginning to accept that I truly am exiled. This is not a temporary state. I have no home. I mean, what I am supposed to do with Maureen Dowd, Emily Bazelon? People who encourage all the blither and emotion, encourage us to give vent to the worst aspects of ourselves because the atmosphere now gives us license to do that? Nothing. I have nothing to do with them. They should be speaking out against the idiocy instead of stoking it.

Another related reason to deplore my former homeland is the appalling quality of movie reviews in its major publications. I cannot live in a land where David Denby can be taken seriously as a movie critic. I have long been dismayed by what passes for reviews at home – long plot summaries with discussions of whether the characters are “realistic” or compelling. Our reviewers, never maturing beyond a third grade conception of film as an exposition of a literal reality, are blind to anything but the stupidest most fundamental meaning. Denby’s latest ridiculous review of a gorgeous Argentinian film, “El Secreto de sus ojos,” completely misses its point, the problem and importance of memory to Argentianians trying to deal with the past. Not that an analysis would have to spend much time on the political implications of memory – individual memory in that context would do the trick. But my God – the character of Morales does after all stick his wife’s murder in a little cachot in his own house for thirty years, and Denby acts as if the literal level is adequate to explain the significance. And that was in the New Yorker! What’s wrong with us?

How is our literal mindedness in the world of thought related to our privileging of emotion over fact? Manifestations of the same distaste for thinking. Who wouldn’t rather just get furious and bellow than actually think through a problem? And who wouldn’t rather just melt into a thoughtless two hours than actually grapple with a problem? But surely we could manage our natural desire not to think a little better – and at least admit that it is better to think than not to think.

The Great Hatred

I had been blaming Rush Limbaugh for alienating me from country and family, and then I discovered that our great hatred actually took form already during the 1828 presidential campaign during Andrew Jackson, the source to which all that is mean and evil in America can be traced, and John Quincy Adams, avatar of European-friendly intellectualism. Our great hatred is bigger than any of us; Rush only tapped into a hideous sewer that has been roiling for a very long time. I had already discovered the nastiness of the Jefferson campaign, but that was just the newspapers. In 1828 that vicious rhetoric became part of campaigning in general. During that election the parties turned into propaganda machines completely uninterested in spreading the truth about their own candidate and focused entirely upon destroying the other.

Why is it that even when we can all read the history we are still swayed by what people say during campaigns? The lying was there in 1828 working its magic – John Quincy Adams accused of spending tax payer money to buy a billiard table. His family produced the receipts to show that he had bought it with his own money, and they said no more about it. But that wasn’t enough – the lie continued to circulate. Adams refused to “electioneer,” get out in public and defend himself. Of course he was gobbled up by the Jackson lying machine. If you didn’t respond fast and loud you lost the narrative, you lose the narrative, you will forever lose the narrative. The truth held no interest, it holds no interest, will never hold interest. Is this comforting or horrifying? Is it comforting or horrifying that that election of 1828 was, like recent elections, interested only in brandishing fake ideologies (fake because winning is the only ideology, and winning in this context is only vile because the winners use their victory to prove their masculinity), that it was the first in a genealogy that leads eventually to Lee Atwater and Karl Rove? Is it comforting or horrifying to realize that the divisions of my own family and my own exile are not my fault but that of an ancient cesspool of implacable hatred between advocates of states’ rights and advocates of centralization? We are enemies despite ourselves, victims of a fight into which we were born.

Andrew Jackson represents everything most despicable about American politics. A military general supremely indifferent to the rule of law, racist, imperialist, folksy, illiterate, choleric – but apparently radiating that aura of being able to pee long distances and spread sperm all over the rest of us, that stupid swaggering certainty that passes for virility in the backwaters of our divided country. His type is monotonously familiar, and the dregs of society continue to rise up ready to support him and his avatars, cheering him on in the half-witted language of Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin.

I am moderate by nature. I wouldn’t read a book about Andrew Jackson and spontaneously hate him under normal circumstances. I wouldn’t care – he has been dead for almost two hundred years. But exiled as I am, separated from my country and alienated from my family by this systemic divide between Republicans and Democrats, or, I guess by a deeper difference between authoritarians and people who just really don’t care what other people do, I feel am angry. I am furious at Rush for having turned my family against me and furious at Andrew Jackson and his machine, who turns out to have been responsible for the likes of Rush.