A lust for violence

For almost twenty years now I have been noticing conservative men coming up with highly-detailed, extremely violent scenarios involving women and children. It is often about their families, but sometimes just hypothetical women. 

The main ones that come to mind were Bill Napoli, a former South Dakota state senator speculating about when abortion might be allowable, and Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty, going off on I don't remember what. 

It was off-putting, like "Why is this image coming to you so quickly? How much time are you spending on this?" However, I think I did learn to understand it more recently. That involved a "reporter" (I have to use the term loosely) who posted an excerpt from the novel he was working on. 

Now, this time the brutalization was directed against the male protagonist, but what really made the difference in perception for me was that it was clear that this was the prelude to bloody, vicious revenge. Think Taken or John Wick.

Because those conservative types are generally religious and Christian and moral (I feel like there should be some more quote marks there), they know they should not be vengeful, violent people. However, given dominator culture and patriarchy and that will to exert your superiority, it is easy to feel drawn to those macho man fantasies. How can one reconcile those conflicting impulses?

Make the target of the violence so bad that they deserve it. 

I acknowledge this is based on speculation on my part. 

I am not sure that your target being an absolutely vile person would truly justify your own brutality. Like, you can fight to protect people, but maybe you should only be violent enough to end the threat; not enough to recreate a gory video game. 

Also, it is because of my respect for the power of the mind and imagination and visualization that I suspect sending your thoughts in that direction wouldn't be healthy.

Those thoughts can be really important, but the real point of this post is that the idea of this virtuous, productive violence does not pan out.

This post is kind of inspired by "Try That In A Small Town", and I would argue that burning a flag or spitting on a cop should not be capital offenses. However, it is more inspired because I heard about the song not long after I heard about Michelle Tandler's desire to bring back lynching.

For my next admission, I had not heard of Michelle Tandler before. In trying to learn more about her, I can't really tell what she does. The funniest thing I have read regarded the results of a Twitter poll from April where the results were that she should get a job, but what she was going to do was start a podcast. 

https://protos.com/david-sacks-backed-michelle-tandler-shutters-another-business/

I have to assume she comes from money.

Anyway, the article has the quote:

100 years ago in SF people were publicly hung for their crimes. Often by vigilante groups that wanted to send a message. The hangings worked. Crime would plummet after a few of them. Often for many months at a time.

https://twitter.com/michelletandler/status/1645067621191286784 

There is more in the thread and she doubles down on her premise as people push back: vigilante justice would save lives and make her feel safer.

I think it is important to note that at that point in the long and repugnant thread, she is taking inspiration from the murder of Bob Lee, founder of Cash App. She was tweeting on April 9th, apparently assuming that Lee's murderer was a homeless drug dealer. Four days later, we learned that it was a tech consultant that Lee knew:

https://apnews.com/article/cash-app-bob-lee-founder-stabbed-13dab701a332328c531b3c6c444983fd

The threat is not usually the vulnerable person on the street. Sometimes, yes, but most of the time, it's someone you know.

Now, as someone whose businesses apparently fail a lot, Tandler could easily end up being a tech consultant; does she really want vigilantes hunting those down?

But of course the 100 years ago hangings that she was referring to was a rise in Klan-based violence in San Francisco. Now, the Klan generally does claim that they are all about protecting the virtue of white women, but they are really about upholding white supremacy, which tends to come with plenty of misogyny. 

It doesn't make me feel safer.

As it is, the homeless population already is on the receiving end of more police violence than other residents of San Francisco; do they really need vigilantes too?

https://sfstandard.com/2023/08/24/san-francisco-police-use-of-force-homeless-people/

If you really want to protect your family, do laundry and wash hands: 

https://twitter.com/designmom/status/1225052146963550209 

I'm not the only person to notice the fantasies about families being raped. It's weird.

It is also a great time to re-examine wearing a mask.

Aldean as prelude

I guess it's time to talk about Jason Aldean, but I am not going to spend too much time on him, specifically. Mainly, he was reminding me of something else.

I will address him, just in case anyone isn't caught up. 

Country singer Jason Aldean released a song, "Try That in a Small Town". It subtly promotes racist violence. That became more apparent after the release of the video, which was filmed at the site of a notorious lynching in 1927 and race riots in 1946.

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/20/1188966935/jason-aldean-try-that-in-a-small-town-song-video 

This NPR article covers most of what I was seeing, but I will make two additions. 

The less important one was many people pointing out that Aldean himself is not from a small town. He was not born in one, did not go to school in one, and does not live in one. His affiliation with small towns is more imagined than real. Actually, the could end up being important. The article does note that he is not the song's writer.

More disturbing is that in a promotional TikTok, Aldean featured an old article about the abuse a small town editor faced for speaking up on equality and satirizing racism.

https://www.billboard.com/music/country/jason-aldean-try-that-in-a-small-town-tiktok-jim-crow-era-newspaper-clip-1235377144/

It's not necessarily easy to find a 1956 article from a small town newspaper; you have to assume that it being featured was deliberate. That means any defenses about people taking care of each other in a small town and it not being about racism at all rings hollow. 

The song is about supporting each other in racism.

Looking for an article summarizing that, it was not too surprising to see that there has been harassment against a TikTok creator who pointed out that some of the video footage supposedly portraying big city violence in the United States is stock footage from Europe.

https://gizmodo.com/tiktok-jason-aldean-video-destinee-death-threats-1850673721  

One of the funny things for me was a meme going around of John Mellencamp being able to write a song about a small town without it being a racist dog whistle. While that is true, there was also his misleading footage and prejudicial song about Portland. I wrote about that just two months ago:

https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2023/06/seeing-portland.html 

To be fair, Mellencamp's "Small Town" was from 1985; it's been a while. It was long ago enough that he had added the "Mellencamp" but not yet dropped the "Cougar".

Now, it would certainly be possible to spend some time on people talking about family values with an undercurrent of racism, like Ronald Reagan starting his presidential campaign in Neshoba County, speaking about "states' rights" where three Civil Rights workers were murdered just sixteen years earlier. 

That is not a coincidence or an accident; that is delivering the key to the code that when you say "states' rights", "law & order", and "family values" what you mean is white supremacy. If you are pro-racism, pro-slavery, pro-misogyny, pro-marginalization of everyone beneath you -- because it means that there are people beneath you, and you like that -- we want you to know that we are for you!

Then, because it's a dog whistle, if you would never say that you are pro-racism, but "family values" and "law & order" sounds good to you, and you don't mind the racism so much as long as it's not shoved in your face so that you have to admit the ways in which you are falling short, well, we can be a pretty good party for you too.

The problem with that is that there is so much cruelty on the white supremacy side that you have to constantly find ways to blame the people experiencing the cruelty for what is happening to them, which will harden your heart. 

And I would not have even written this post, except for this nagging memory of something else a few months earlier.

That's where I'll pick up next time.

Fallout

Okay, one more movie.

With Oppenheimer's release, there have been a lot of articles about the development of the atomic bomb, its testing, and those results.

There is a lot that can be looked over, about what other options existed and what the results would have been. We could spend a lot of time on that.

I want to focus on one aspect and its ramifications:

https://www.latimes.com/delos/story/2023-07-26/oppenheimer-atomic-bomb-new-mexico-cancer-aftermath

The articles talks about the survivors of those who died after the Trinity testing.

In the film, both the test site and the Los Alamos Laboratory in Northern New Mexico are remote, unpopulated areas — a depiction that’s largely in line with most historical accounts of the Manhattan Project. The reality is starkly different. The land acquired by the U.S. government to build and test the bomb was occupied, as was the 150-mile radius surrounding the Trinity Test — areas settled predominantly by Hispanic and Native American ranchers and homesteaders.

“There are some glaring omissions,” Cordova said of the film. “There was a level of racism, obviously [to the Manhattan Project]. They so easily invaded our lands, our lives, and destroyed them both.”

It is too easy to look at areas where the population is not white and then just kind of look through them: nothing to see there.

That is terrible enough. However, the point I want to make from it is that it doesn't stop there. 

The article mentions how the fallout spread to other states, specifically mentioning Arizona and Oregon, but not Utah.

And yet, I already knew that it hit Utah. That was not so much the Trinity testing, but additional testing in the 50s, ending in 1962. Keeping that testing stopped was an important issue in the 1964 presidential elections.

https://www.abc4.com/news/local-news/downwinders-exposed-to-radioactive-fallout-encouraged-to-apply-for-compensation/

I knew about it because I knew families who were affected, including children born after the testing was done. 

Members tend to know a lot of other members; you probably know someone who was affected. Maybe you have read Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams.

This is the point I want to make: no matter how much more palatable different types of oppression can be made by targeting them at the marginalized, they never end there. They spread. The pool expands. New enemies need to be found to maintain momentum.

Frankly, it disgusts me that this point even needs to be made. We should want everyone to do well and we should have gotten over racism and every other bigotry long ago.

Since we haven't, maybe the occasional reminder of self-interest can be helpful.

Plain speech

I keep thinking I am going to write about Jason Aldean, but I've got one or two movie things to cover first. I guess music will just be something to look forward to.

As a preview, that post will be about racist dog whistles (and foghorns); today's post is about language that is casually, accidentally racist.

Before I get to that, let me say that there was a different recent issue, where an Instagram post where a common religiously-based Black expression was accused of being anti-Semitic. For years, Black parents and grandparents have pointed out that no matter how good Jesus was, people betrayed and killed him, kind of as a way of reminding you that you are not untouchable, and as a consolation (or "get over yourself") when you do get betrayed. The issue arose because someone pointed out that "they" would be Jews, so it's anti-Semitic.

Okay, that sounds to me like attempting to police Black people's speech, but that there could also be a reason to think about how some expressions are used. I'm sure we can use Jesus as an example without being anti-Semitic, but there is plenty of anti-Semitism. There can be complicated thoughts and there can be tone-policing, and a mix of both.

So I am aware of that, and that is all the comment I feel a need to make on that. My issue is going to be simpler, and probably more applicable to the good-hearted but not always radicalized white people most likely to read my posts.

Moving on, for our next movie I turn to Barbie, which I really enjoyed and thought was an excellent movie. However, there was one "joke" that it was easy to ignore unless you are Indigenous.

“Oh My God, this is like in the 1500s with the Indigenous People and smallpox. They had no defenses against it.”

https://nativeviewpoint.com/what-was-that-indigenous-smallpox-line-in-the-barbie-movie/

Depending on how you calculate, there were an estimated 3 million Indigenous deaths from smallpox.

I knew about the line because I follow a fair amount of Indigenous people, and it bothered them. I won't even say that it ruined the movie for all of them, but it pulled them out of it, hurt, and not for any good reason.

I think I know how it happens. You have a line that is okay, and you want to punch it up a little; what can you add?

We have many phrases that refer to Indigenous issues that have become common usage: "powwow" "low man on the totem pole" "off the reservation"

Think about that one. They had been confined to reservations after their land was taken yet again. Generally there was no hunting, the farmland was poor (if it were good land, they would be moved again), and while the government promised supplies they were consistently bad about keeping those promises. Therefore, sometimes the residents would form hunting parties or do something to try and get more food.

Hilarious, right?

I suspect the reason those phrases are so popular is that there are still so many people who have this idea that it's all in the past, where there isn't anyone around to whom that matters now.

Guess what? There are, they saw your movie, and it made your good time hurtful.

I don't believe there is any intent to harm, but you can cause harm without intent. 

To put it a different way, imagine the line like this:

“Oh My God, this is like in the Holocaust with the Jewish People and Xyklon B gas. They had no defenses against it.”

Uncomfortable, right? But we are more used to remembering the Holocaust. It also wasn't as long ago, except for the ways in which we still are not fair to Indigenous people, which by the way is the North American shame, so maybe we should be more aware of that!

I am not saying we should forget about the Holocaust; fascists and Nazis seem to keep popping up more and more so we better remember it. There are more things we should bear in mind.

I saw some calls to erase the line from the movie, and I think that would be okay. You can mention immunity without it.

"They were never exposed to patriarchy; they never had a chance to build up any immunity."

Is that line less funny? Only if you need racist reminders of conquering other people for a laugh. Surely we don't.

I do spend a lot of time on racism, so let me go over the non-racist factor in this, which I think is this feeling that we need to make things better or fancier.

I bug my sisters about this a bit, because when they are posting something is always "the cutest thing ever!" or "hilarious!" Some people pump up with profanity.

Logically, there cannot be that many cutest things ever, or the bar was set pretty low and is easily exceeded. A lot of the things posted as hilarious are really just kind of funny.

There's nothing wrong with being kind of funny.

I think it becomes this form of justification, like you need an extra reason to be good enough to share something that you found cute or funny or interesting. You liking it is reason enough. If someone else doesn't like it, you hyping it is unlikely to change their opinion.

This may not sound that important, but when there is this sense that what you are saying is not fancy or colorful enough, a lot of the things that get pulled in are related to bigotry in some way. Historically, the way many people make up for their inferiority is to cling to their perceived superiority over someone else. 

The ones that are more obvious fall out of favor more quickly, so the ones with staying power tend to relate to the most marginalized groups. A lot relate to disability.

But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. -- Matthew 5:37

The comes from a segment on false swearing, where people would look for ways to strengthen oaths because if the oath was not strong enough, maybe you would break it, or the person you were swearing it too wouldn't believe you. Really, you should just be the kind of person who does what they say they will. Not fancy, but honest and reliable and acting with integrity.

If you are not a witty person, peppering your speech with racism and ableism is not helping anyone.

If you are a person I am connected to on social media, I probably like you enough that I will give what you say and like a chance. 

If you are connected to people for whom you are not enough, reflect upon that.

There are other options.

Related reading:

https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/culturally-offensive-phrases

http://deareverybody.hollandbloorview.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/DearEverybodyTipsonAbleistLanguage2018-19.pdf