Grievance Society: an incoherent ramble

I had a kind of odd confluence of reading matter today, which has led to some odd musings, of which I will try to make a kind of sense here. It’s really a Tohu Bohu (more even than usual), and I haven’t really come to a conclusion, but it’s a blog, innit?

Andrew Cline, on one of my favorite blogs, Rhetorica, posts about how difficult it is to be a liberal in a conservative town just now. It’s not even that, really: he’s discussing the delegitimization of opposing viewpoints, the sense that people who differ from you politically hate you, lie to you and are trying to destroy you and yours. It’s a dispiriting post, particularly as I have been toying with moving his bookmark from my ‘lefty blogs’ category, since his blog does not strike me as lefty in the sense that Pandagon or Nathan Newman are. As he says, he’s trying to understand the world and describe it in a particular way; he may well be a lefty, but he’s not trying to score points or even influence votes. So when he feels attacked as a traitorous profligate lying obsessive hater, it feels like the tone is out of control.

Then, in the marvelous Studs Terkel book Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who've Lived It, I read Stetson Kennedy talking about running for Congress in 1950 as a write-in candidate protesting segregation.

When I went to vote in my precinct, there was a mob waiting. They’d been there all day. I don’t know where they got the liquor on election day. They were armed with beer bottles. Two deputies pulled me out of the voting booth and hauled me off to jail.
p. 398

That put the earlier complaint into a different context. One of the things that makes me proudest of my compatriots is the rarity of that sort of thing. Yes, things got ugly in 2000, but in all honesty, it’s a pretty good place to have an election. And votes get cast for socialists, and even get counted.

Then I happened on an interview with John Carroll (not to be confused with Jon Carroll, of the SF Gate, nor yet John Carroll of Greater Boston). In the interview, Mr. Carroll says that the destruction of the World Trade Center did change much of our national psyche, for the worse. After pointing out that Americans felt, on some level, guilt for our place in the world, “not just the wars, but the cost of our affluence to impoverished people”, he adds that after the towers fell, “we got to feel like the victim. And despite the trauma of the event, there was a kind of national relief. We were released from our unconscious feelings of guilt and were allowed, like other people, as we imagine it, to strike out without criticizing ourselves.”

So, three passages, one of which seems clearly to comment on the other, but the third of which started me thinking about the first two in a different light. It was the line about the relief in the aftermath of being attacked, the sense that it was, after all, pretty simple and we were all together and we knew where we stood. And the viciousness that greeted the small shout that we shared responsibility for the murders. We were the victims, and that’s what was important. And, of course, we were the victims (although my own life wasn’t damaged at all, except extremely indirectly by economic forces).

So I started wondering about this whole sense of grievance, this sense we all have all the time of being aggrieved, of being attacked. The rhetoric of blogs is of course heightened to the point of irresponsibility, but much of the sense is of defense against attack. Of course, the left felt, justifiably, that John Kerry was being attacked with lies and smears. Many veterans felt aggrieved by John Kerry’s anti-war stance and his congressional testimony thirty years ago. Both of those were represented as personal grievances, as the sort of I’ll-get-you-for-this thing that keeps people awake at night, cursing.

Look, I don’t have much in the way of social insight; I sit in my apartment a lot and read books. I’ve let myself get cut off from most popular culture in the last year. So any generalization I make is likely to be not only wrong because it’s a generalization on a blog, but wrong because I’m an observer who hasn’t observed much. But it seems to me that there’s a huge emphasis, culturally, on grievances. On feeling like somebody’s done you wrong. On taking it personally. I think much of the contest-television (which I have never watched, I’m afraid) derives its drama from that, and I think much of the fad of memoirs derives its satisfaction from that.

I think we, as a culture, personalize so much of what happens that we see a vote for a different party as an attack on everything we hold dear. Now, I think, and I repeatedly say, that Our Only President is incompetent, lazy, and dishonest, and that he has surrounded himself with a secretive cabal who have made this country and the world worse for the inhabitants thereof. That’s what I think. But I understand that people disagree with me, and I understand that many of them have both rational and irrational reasons to support his election to a new term. They aren’t voting that way to destroy me and my family. And I’m not voting my way to destroy them. We’re working together. We’re having an election where people don’t get attacked with broken bottles. If more people vote for the Republican in this next election, it will not be because they hate me, but because they think that the Republican would be a better president. It may well be that they think that because they feel aggrieved, because they think that me and mine are attacking something basic that they love. It may even be true. I’m just saying. I’ll have no grievance, as long as the votes get counted and nobody gets hurt.

I suppose I should add that it’s certainly possible that some of the people who oppose me hate me, either individually or as part of a group. Most, though, don’t—or at least wouldn’t if they didn’t think that I hated them, either individually or as part of a group. This grievance thing, too, as a communal work.

                           ,
-Vardibidian.