The Hanging Judge, Part 3

This essay follows my prior entries, The Hanging Judge in the Court of Public Opinion and The Hanging Judge, Part 2

So there I sat, watching the Facebook furor over the Covington Catholic kids burn itself out, in the time-honored online moral panic style, when something happened. Somebody posted a story about a Lincoln, Nebraska, woman who abused an animal. Apparently this twenty-something woman let an adult pitbull starve to death inside its kennel in her home. So this responsible citizen posted a Facebook story about the case.

Including the woman’s photo, full home address, and date of birth.

If you wanted to deliberately put somebody in danger, I cannot imagine a more effective way than posting everything necessary to whip readers into outrage than sharing a rage-inducing story, then tacking on the target’s full identifying information. I can imagine no way this person didn’t know this action would result in people demanding righteous payback, a common coin of online discussions today. (No, I won’t link to the story. This woman has been jeopardized enough.)

The responses to this story were predictable: I hope this woman dies in a fire. Somebody should lock her in a kennel and starve her. What an evil bitch, she deserves everything coming to her. Imagine any vile, repellent response you want, I read several of them. And when I posted a comment suggesting it was irresponsible to dox a private citizen, the same sort of comments got directed at me, accusing me of being complicit.

This mirrors the patterns I witnessed with the Covington Catholic kids. Complete strangers, who know nothing of the accused’s background or what might have precipitated the shameful action we learned about later, rushed to demand summary retribution. And if you demand people slow their roll and maybe let cooler heads investigate, you risk getting caught in the rush to condemn.

Because yes, it’s infuriating that somebody would starve a dependent animal to death. You know who else was infuriated? The local PD, who, according to the story, had already arrested her. She now rests upon the mercy of the court system, dedicated to fairness and justice. Which is how it should be: if we let people undertake vigilante justice, then “justice” becomes the purview of whoever has the biggest muscles and strongest sense of self-righteousness.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, dedicates an entire chapter to the pitfalls of an honor-based society. His definition of “honor” involves two important elements: maintaining a positive personal reputation, and avoiding offending others. I’ve known several people, mostly current or former military, who believe America suffers today from a paucity of honor. But evidence over the last two weeks makes me think we, perhaps, suffer an excess of misplaced honor.

Nick "the Accused" Sandmann

Because social media groups people by shared values, people like me get flooded with progressive fellow-travelers. Thus I’ve seen people attempting both sides of the honor equation. People I know post several politically themed memes and diatribes daily, but don’t much get involved in direct actions like public protests or contacting their elected officials. This form of “reputation progressivism,” also called virtue signalling, aims mostly at maintaining good image.

Simultaneously they take highly visible offense at perceived transgressions. From Covington Catholic to Calvin Trillin, I’ve had the distinct displeasure of watching good friends flip their shit about perceived public sins on FaceTube and InstaTwit for several years now. By whipping themselves into a highly public lather, they reassure friends that they’re still “allies” of whatever oppressed people have fallen under their rubric this week.

Watching this same outrage directed at a local story, I understand, most people expressing their anger at this negligent dog-killer probably aren’t evil. Most probably won’t pursue this woman and hurt her. But most don’t have to; it only takes one self-righteous arsehole to do something which feels right in the moment, but only makes things worse.

Because, deep down, honor is never wholly satisfied. If somebody punches me once in the nose, I don’t feel redressed punching back once; I keep punching until my aggression is depleted. Then, because I escalated, they escalate again. We see this in multiple honor-based cultures, from medieval Europe to the America of the Hatfields and McCoys: if you kill one of ours, we’ll kill one of yours, and I don’t care who started it.

Somebody needs to step off this wheel and let lawful justice have its say. From national concerns to hometown criminals, we must stop displaying public outrage as righteousness theatre. Because we can never, truly, see the consequences further down the line, until they’re close enough to run us over.

Right-Wing Radio and the Lonely White Voter

Alex Jones

We have this provocateur at work who brings his stereo to the jobsite every day so he can listen to hours of talk radio: Alex Jones, Limbaugh, Hannity. I call him “provocateur” because, when he and I have to work in close proximity, he locks eyes with me while cranking the volume to truly disruptive levels. He knows I'm a red-state progressive, and he blatantly wants me to say something, so he can claim he's being oppressed by the “lib'ruls.”

So I've learned more about talk-radio politics than I've ever wanted to know. I’ve observed the way these bomb-throwers manipulate anger to retain listeners’ loyalty. I witness the elaborate rituals involved in creating and designating “others” who need loyal right-wingers to control and muzzle them. But of all the lessons I’ve gleaned from this unwanted immersion in the echo chamber, none has struck me more than how friendly it is to insiders.

Recently, Alex Jones paused between enraged rants over “the wall” and scripted plugs for protein shakes and testosterone supplements, to remind listeners how beloved they are. “I’m not the InfoWars,” Jones purred into the microphone, in a tone downright fatherly, though retaining his trademark growl. “You are the InfoWars. I’m just the spokesperson. You make this possible, you and your loyalty and your willingness to go to the barricades.”

In that moment I recalled something Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber wrote, that Christian media companies like Trinity Broadcasting Network often make people feel welcome and loved at times when traditional congregations don’t. They came into people’s homes, shared the Good News, and offered a loving embrace, through the television. Churches, by contrast, have often fallen short in their outreach to shut-ins, the sick, and the poor.

Nadia Bolz-Weber

This willingness to make people feel welcome during their lowest times, correlates strongly with where people spend their money. Bolz-Weber notes that many Christian parishioners write TBN and its member ministries into their wills, excluding the congregations that stood by them during times of good health, but vanished during their convalescence. Likewise, conservative radio lets certain groups feel included when the political mainstream has apparently turned deaf.

We could enumerate various reasons why populations which once served as the backbone of the progressive movement have thrown their lot in with conservatism and the status quo. Republicans do a better job at message management than Democrats, who often lose interest in outreach between election cycles. Certain progressive mainstays, like labor unions, were outright racist and haven’t changed with the times. Et cetera.

Yet I find these explanations unsatisfying, simply because I spend significant time around the demographics which have been abandoned by progressivism. The traditional explanations for progressivism’s decline—both parties’ active courting of Wall Street money, the big-tent coalition sundering into feuding identity groups, old-school racism—are all ancillary to working Americans’ biggest issue. And that is, I propose, that they feel lonely.

Donald Trump’s campaign turned heavily on promises to re-enfranchise “the Forgotten Man,” a vaguely defined figure who, somehow, felt adrift in contemporary politics. He never explained who this “man” was. But judging by the electoral coalition that supported Trump, the largest number of people who threw their weight behind him were White, heterosexual, and predominantly male. Honky dudes believed themselves abandoned in today’s politics.

Georgetown law professor Sheryll Cashin notes that, if you disaggregate the very rich (who, in America, are mostly White), the average wealth disparity between Black and White Americans falls to just $5,000. Now of course $5,000 is lots of money if you don’t have it, but it won’t buy you penthouse access on 5th Avenue. Poor White people in America probably aren’t bad off by international standards, but by American standards, things are pretty poorly.

Donald Trump

In today’s politics, you seemingly have to be already rich to run for office as a Republican. Meanwhile, Democrats have thrown their weight behind identity politics. If you’re White and poor in America today, you feel left behind. No wonder White union-style voters substantially throw their weight behind candidates like Donald Trump or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, political bomb-throwers who basically promise to be different from anything you’ve seen before.

Right-wing radio, like Christian television approaches people who already feel lonely and dispossessed, and offers to welcome them unconditionally. Of course, both are money-driven instruments, whether they seek tax-deductible donations or sell you erectile dysfunction tablets. But they clothe themselves in the robes of righteousness and welcome. Those who would counter their influence, should ask themselves why they haven’t welcomed the lonely yet.

We'll All Be a Monkey's Uncle

Kaitlyn Greenidge, We Love You, Charlie Freeman

The Freeman family of Dorchester, Boston, has accepted a job at a rural research academy. Because all four family members speak fluent sign language, they’re perfect lab workers to teach an orphaned chimpanzee sign language at the Toneybee Institute, which specializes in teaching primates to speak. So they accept the job over they very young daughters’ objections. Because hey, obviously it’s just a job like any other, right?

Arriving at the Toneybee, the Freemans find themselves the only Black family in Courtland County. The chimpanzee they’re hired to teach proves obstreperous and unwilling to learn. The White students at Courtland County High School, far from greeting Charlotte Freeman with the hostility she expects, seem largely indifferent. And, deep within the institute’s archives, Charlotte finds evidence that the research history is anything but benevolent.

Debut novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge writes a story that, on one level, almost dares you to tease out the autobiographical elements. Charlotte Freeman, the first-person narrator who tells us about half the novel, is roughly Greenidge’s age, a displaced native Bostonian, and shares a smattering of other characteristics. Her primate language backstory includes elements people who enjoy reading science, like me, will recognize from genuine science.

But in other ways, one gets the feeling this novel answers back to previous “great” literature. Charlotte Freeman, fourteen years old in 1990, shares characteristics with famous child narrators, like Holden Caulfield and Scout Finch: a heated childhood perspective, recalled by an adult. That’s just one moment I noticed celebrated White authors’ storytelling subverted by being retold from a Black perspective. You’ll undoubtedly notice even more.

The Freemans have different responses to Charlie. While Charlotte considers him a nuisance and dislikes the inquisitive White research staff, her younger sister Callie throws herself wholly into being a chimp’s sibling and desperately tries to win Charlie’s love. Charles Freeman takes a day job teaching high school geometry, the only Black teacher some students have ever known. Laurel Freeman becomes Charlie’s full-time mother, which starts to blur some boundaries.

Kaitlyn Greenidge

Thrown outside their longstanding comfort zones, the Freemans find their identities disappearing into only one or two characteristics. Surprised by White classmates’ relative nonchalance, she discovers the only other black student in Courtland County; together, they test a mix of revolutionary politics and nascent sexuality. Charlotte’s story increasingly becomes about her deeply felt but directionless anger. She’s earned the right to be pissed off.

While Charlotte’s school days are intricately described, Callie’s education basically doesn’t exist herein (which furthers my belief in Charlotte’s autobiographical qualities). Instead, Callie struggles to win Charlie’s affection, but measures love in human terms: Callie wants a baby brother, Charlie wants a fellow chimpanzee. In desperation, Callie turns to literal wizardry in an attempt to breach Charlie’s defenses.

The parents start off loving and middle-class, but Charlie changes their dynamic. As Laurel’s life orbits permanently around Charlie’s unreasonable demands, Charles disappears into his day job, becoming a stranger. When a disastrous Thanksgiving dinner hastens a collision between the sacrifices Laurel makes for Charlie, and Charles’ brother’s Black Power rhetoric, all semblance of family returns to the dust it came from.

Greenidge’s back-cover synopsis promises the Freeman family will discover shocking secrets inside the Toneybee institute’s history. Well, it’s a Black family in a mostly-White community, and we’re readers, we remember Tuskegee. We already know the discovery will be forthrightly racist. We enter the story with two questions: what will it be? And, how will the living handle learning the secrets the dead strove to conceal?

(As anybody who has taken a postgrad creative writing workshop knows, Black issues are treated as “racial,” but White issues are “normal.” Greenidge plays with that expectation, to great profit.)

One element I think gets short shrift, is sign language. Though the Toneybee Institute hires the Freemans because they speak fluent ASL, it doesn’t get discussed much in the book, besides a few orphaned references to Charlie mimicking the occasional sign. One wonders whether he actually understands what he’s saying; and one never quite finds out, because that story component doesn’t merit enough word count to matter.

Notwithstanding that quirk, Greenidge creates a story of how the need to make a living, and get along in the world, changes people, in ways they usually couldn’t have predicted. The characters undergo their respective journeys and emerge, in unique ways, changed. The novel isn’t “about race,” but it’s definitely tinged by racial experience, which readers will receive their own ways. Because we, too, are changed by the Freemans’ journey.

The Hanging Judge, Part 2

This essay follows my prior blog entry, The Hanging Judge in the Court of Public Opinion

The photo that started it all: Nick Sandmann and Nathan Phillips at the Lincoln Memorial

Let’s start with an uncomfortable confession. I’ve never set this confession in writing, because whenever I’ve spoken it aloud, hearers have responded with shock and outrage. It makes me uncomfortable inscribing it for posterity, knowing it might, someday, get taken out of context and used against me. But here goes:

Back in high school, I used to flash the Nazi salute for laughs.

Not once or twice, either. I did it frequently during the summer between my junior and senior years. It even carried over into my senior year somewhat. In my significantly white suburb, I thought I was being dark, edgy, and ironic, doing something so patently absurd that, obviously, anyone could see I meant almost the exact opposite from what that signal originally meant.

Then, during my senior year, a trusted adult took me aside. He explained, in conversational tones, that I didn’t come across as ironic or grimly humorous; I came across as a dickhead, and I was probably attracting the attention of people whose friendship and support I probably didn’t want. He didn’t scold me or dress me down. He just explained how I appeared to others, in a calm, dispassionate way.

I can’t help remembering that experience this week, as the flame-out about the Covington Catholic boys and their confrontation with Omaha Nation elder Nathan Phillips continues. I’ve seen adults, teachers even, demanding the iron fist of law come after these boys. I’ve seen demands for righteous payback. I’ve watched grown women and men reduced to screaming.

And I’ve wondered: what if adults had treated me that way at that age?

Let’s be clear. Those boys behaved reprehensibly. No matter who started their confrontation with Mr. Phillips (and video shows it wasn’t them), they certainly escalated it. Their behavior, including shouted war whoops and “tomahawk chops,” shows not only that they had racist thoughts in their heads already, but that they’d had time-honored racist tropes modeled for them by adults. Plus, red hats, dammit. Red hats.

So I’m not making excuses for them. Rather, I believe we need to evaluate whether our response guides children out of error, or causes them to defensively retrench their behavior and set their attitudes for life. I think you can guess which side I fall on.

Children, by definition, cannot govern their responses. Whether this means their emotional reactions to minor stresses, as when they collapse into rage or tears after a difficult test; or the way they retaliate when confronted, kids do this because they don’t know any other way. Because they’re children, and self-restraint, decorum, and equanimity are learned over time. Which children haven’t had.

In obvious terms, this reflects the fact that children are young. But it also reflects a neuroscience reality: human beings are born without fully functioning brains. Let me get pointy-headed a moment. At birth, humans have a brain stem and amygdala, so we’re born capable of fear and anger. But we’re born without a cerebral cortex, meaning we’re born incapable of reason, restraint, and self-control.

Let’s go further. Most people’s cerebral cortex isn’t fully developed until age 25. Even more important, the anterior cingulate, which governs the relationship between the cortex and the amygdala, isn’t developed until around age 30. And how these two sub-organs develop depends heavily on live exposures.

A childhood of fear, anger, and retribution causes a larger amygdala. And a larger amygdala tracks positively with addiction, domestic abuse, and racism. (Correlation doesn’t imply causation, of course, but the correlation is strong.) A childhood of nurturance, guidance, and justice causes a larger cortex and anterior cingulate. That tracks with composure, restraint, and yes, anti-racism.

The calls for payback against the Covington Catholic boys are chilling. One I’ve seen even said it’s okay to punitively wallop these boys because of family separations at the border. Really? As a Christian, I believe only Jesus can bear the guilt of others’ crimes. Punishing these kids because the President their parents voted for did something shitty, will reinforce attitudes of fear and hatred I suspect they already have.

If we don't break the pattern, this may be what we see when these boys grow up

Demands for eye-for-an-eye retribution don’t fix the underlying problem. These boys, with their undeveloped brains, did something hasty and revolting. We, the adults around them, have a responsibility to teach them better, as one adult did for me. Instead, we’re reinforcing the patterns that probably created their bigoted behavior to begin with. We’re doubling down on the hatred that warps their future.

And someday, we’ll all have to pay for what we’re doing right now.

My Personal Theory About Teddy Bears

This family used to live in Section 8 housing across the street from me. Many times I’d be sitting on the porch with my then-girlfriend, watching the kids running wild in the grass having fun, as kids do; when one boy’s mom, or maybe gramma (hard to tell) would appear at the door. I never saw this woman, an enormous muumuu-clad cube, without curlers in her hair. And I never heard her speak to the boy without saying the word “fuck.”

“Get the fuck in the house!” she’d bellow, with all the grace and dignity of a Kodiak bear in rut. Or “You need to clean your fucking room!” Or “I told you not to make so much fucking noise!”

One otherwise peaceful day, my girlfriend and I watched this boy stride from the apartment with a large, white teddy bear in his left hand. We watched the most remarkable performance: as he walked across the lawn, this boy would repeatedly punch his bear in the stomach. He’d step out with one foot, swinging his arms wide, then step with the other foot, bringing his arms together and punching the bear. Step, swing; step, punch. Step, swing; step, punch.

The combination was bizarre. He obviously cared enough for his bear to bring it with him, but also considered it something acceptable to punch. He didn’t show any apparent malice toward the bear; he just kept punching it, as casually as I’d slap my briefcase if distracted. He drove a doubled fist into his bear’s midsection casually, neutrally, like he was slapping his thigh with the music playing inside his head.

Martha Bear

In college, my girlfriend gave me not one, but two teddy bears, because she thought it cute seeing me hold them. I bestowed names and personalities upon both. Unlike the bears I had in childhood, which were mostly boy bears, these are both girl bears. Sarah Smack is (present tense) cantankerous and combative, ready to answer slights with swing fists, but frustrated because her soft paws make little difference. Martha Bear, by contrast, is demure and amiable, eager to talk out differences.

I still have both bears. And thus my postulation begins. As a boy, I don’t remember thinking my teddy bears, and other stuffed animals, were anything but inanimate objects. I gave them names, and imbued them with personalities, but I don’t remember not knowing they were toys, or that the personalities I granted them came from my brain. I’ve long since forgotten most of their names, sometime around the point I gave them away to my sister or neighborhood kids.

Their personalities returned whence they originated: my head.

Like the kid in Margery Williams’ classic childrens’ book The Velveteen Rabbit, my stuffed toys became real in exact proportion to how much I invested myself in them. Now, nearly twenty years after I received her from my college girlfriend, Sarah Smack remains real because I imbue her with reality which comes from myself. I give her identity, I give her reality, then I return love to the identity I have created.

I believe children, and perhaps to a lesser degree adults, bestow a portion of their own personalities onto teddy bears, or other suitable substitutes. I’ve seen adults do something similar with vehicles, craft projects, even their houses. We give these inanimate objects names, attribute personality characteristics, then love the thing we’ve created. But we know, fundamentally, we love the fiction which exists exclusively in our heads.

We’ve essentially located a nexus of ourselves externally, in our bear, truck, hobby, or whatever. Then we love that piece of ourselves. Children love bears, dolls, and toys, because doing so teaches us to love ourselves; adults keep doing likewise because we never stop needing to learn to love. Especially in today’s massively isolating technological environment, we constantly must re-teach ourselves how to love.

Except that kid across the street experienced Mom’s love as constant outbursts of verbal violence. So he expressed his love for the externalized piece of himself by holding it close, then punching its gut. Not long after seeing that, his family moved away; it’s been nearly a decade, and he’s probably verging on adulthood. I hope he doesn’t still love himself through displays of reckless violence.

We see teddy bears and other fluffy toys as childlike expressions of naïveté. But every day, I see adults engaged in self-destructive behaviors because they haven’t learned to love themselves. I truly believe more grown-ups could profit from hugging a teddy bear.