My immediate reaction was "No way. Do you want to get me lynched?" That was foolish; she immediately pounced on the fact that this was exactly what was wrong with universities; that they create an environment of such social pressure for conformity that no one with nonconformist (in this context right wing) views could express them publicly. She has a point. There is a degree of liberal values "one-upmanship", an "I'm holier than thou" scramble for the highest of moral high-grounds.
So I began to wonder what might happen were I to do as she dared me. How might such an episode unfold? Here's how I imagined it.
I enter the room. There are shocked looks. No one says anything initially. After some polite conversation I may be asked "WTF?" but I demure and say simply that I'll have a few words to say later on.
Then, at an appropriate moment (not sure yet what that moment would be), I pick up a glass and tap it repeatedly with a knife until the room quietens down. Then I say this.
"You may have noticed my hat this evening? I think many of you were a little shocked, perhaps by the crassness and vulgarity of wearing a hat indoors.
But I suspect that you are more disturbed by what this hat represents. Since it was popularised by a lazy, misogynistic narcissist who ran for office only to massage his own ego and to enrich himself financially, a man who tacitly endorses white supremacists and explicitly endorses accused child sex offenders, this hat, then, comes with a considerable amount of baggage.
But if we step back for a moment and think in the abstract about the words themselves, are they necessarily contentious? "Make America Great Again".
Perhaps one's immediate reaction, and one not contradicted by the tweets, speeches and actions of, to use Rex Tillerson's pithy description, the "fucking moron" in the White House, is that he is hearkening back to a 'golden age', perhaps the 1950's, of "Mad Men", a growing middle class, rising economic prosperity for everyone, "what's good for General Motors is good for America", 2.2 kids and suburban tranquillity. But that was a fiction, for all but white Middle America. It wasn't the lived experience for minorities, for people of color, for non-heterosexuals, for Jews, for civil rights campaigners. It is an artificial image, a narrative written by the white men who held the reins of power; in government, in business, in society, at home.
So while a goal of "American Greatness", by the way, a construct open to a myriad of different and possibly contradictory interpretations, may seem only mildly controversial, perhaps it is the word "Again" that is problematic, implying that somehow America is no longer "great".
And that opens up a more liberal, progressive interpretation of the slogan. If American greatness lies in its moral leadership, in tolerance for a multi-ethnic society, in social mobility, and a striving for social justice, there is, now, an urgent need to make America great again. For in less than two years, the orange buffoon has done more damage to that notion of greatness than anyone in their worst nightmares might have imagined.
He has systematically undermined trust in the essential institutions of civil society. He has disparaged the serious press, the courts, experts and intellectuals, the civil service, and occasionally Congress, its members on both sides, and the military. He has stirred racial and religious hatred. He lies so frequently (and poorly) that the joke "How can you tell when he is lying?" "When his lips are moving" is no longer funny. With a few exceptions, he has surrounded himself with incompetent sycophants instead of well informed thoughtful advisers. He has, with bull-in-a-china-shop finesse, tried to disrupt a delicately balanced international order for no good reason, other than to differentiate himself from a predecessor he clearly hated, (probably just because he was black). He is a laughing stock in our corridors of power for his ignorance and his lack of judgement. He is considered a joke by foreign leaders; "stupefyingly ignorant" was Britain's Foreign Secretary's description. For many he is a poster boy for the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Thanks to the electoral college, Russian meddling, Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, Jim Comey's bizarre announcement about Hilary's emails just before the election, and some miss-steps by the Clinton campaign, there is quite suddenly a huge opportunity to make America, if not great, then not as reviled and ridiculed as it has become since June 16, 2015.
So MAGA really means kicking Trump out of the White House (and his spineless enablers in the GOP--whose dogmatic lust for power has obliterated any semblance of morality, humanity and compassion--out of Congress to boot)".
No comments:
Post a Comment