This week, Representative Paul Gosar (Q-AZ) posted a cartoon depicting him as a hero fighting against monsters including the president and Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Violent rhetoric and death threats are nothing new on the right, and Jared Yates Sexton has a good concise explainer about it:
This isn’t by accident. The political environment we inhabit has been systematically and relentlessly prepared for violence as an option, creating a base prepared for eventual bloodshed or overthrow by force, but also necessitating that meaningless and principle-less politicians like Gosar embrace ever-increasingly dangerous rhetoric as a means of gesturing to that radicalized base.
But it’s not confined to the right. These sorts of nasty jokes are plenty common on the left:
I would pay a reasonable amount of money to watch a 10-week series where 12 contestants take turns beating the living shit out of JD Vance in a tent while the original GBBO hosts announce how much time they have left and make quips, if netflix is listening. — Mass for Shut-ins (Podcast) (@edburmila) November 10, 2021
The one that made me truly concerned, though, was a recent post on Gawker titled “The Joe Manchin Trolley Problem:”
A trolley problem is usually just a thought experiment, but in this case it happens to be a remarkably robust analogy with regard to Manchin and the doomsday blanket situation. On one track we have the millions of people living and bound to be born in coastal areas who will find their homes and lives literally underwater in 20 years, plus the various social and political implications of displacing them at roughly the same moment we radically diminish nature’s capacity to support life. And on the other track we have Joe Manchin. The normal person who feels some obligation to the future and comes face-to-face with this seemingly total failure of our usual systems must ask him-/her-/themself: Would it help if I killed somebody?
The author immediately clarifies that this is a thought experiment, please don’t literally kill a senator. But it’s not a great rhetorical trend, and who knows how close it brings us to “will no one rid me of this turbulent priest” territory – especially given the remarkably strong power of of parasocial influencer relationships.
Extended Metaphors
I’ve been watching my motorsports and I’ve been reading my political theory, and I can’t stop noticing how success feeds on success, how each team or person or family wants to keep the best for themselves, how an external rule-making body has to step in to level the playing field or it’s a pointless experience for everyone. In MotoGP, there was a period when Michelin would make special tires the Saturday before each race and ship them overnight to their top sponsored riders, giving them a key advantage of tires tuned perfectly for their riding style and the day’s predicted track conditions. This was wildly expensive for Michelin and a major setback for everyone who didn’t get their special tires. It made the sport worse to participate in and worse to watch, and that’s why the sport changed the rules to put everyone on the same tires. Today, the field is somewhat more even, although competition + money continues to produce weird expensive advantages for some teams (don’t ask me how ride-height and launch control systems work, but apparently they were very expensive to develop, and lack of them was a key reason Suzuki had such a terrible season this year).
But wouldn’t you want the very best, if you could make it happen? If you knew the super-rich were buying university admission with seven-figure donations, wouldn’t you be tempted to spend hundreds of thousands bribing a coach? Or tens of thousands for actual sports and international volunteering and tutors and coaches? Maybe a bigger mortgage to move to a better-ranked school district? Or if you don’t have the money to buy your way into a good elementary school, what about enrolling your child in the better school district a relative lives in, even if you don’t live there?
This isn’t just an American problem. China’s recent crackdown on cram schools is a bid for equality (and also increased state control over education, and a possibly counterproductive impetus to the creation of illegal underground tutoring rings, while South Korean regulators spend a great deal of time trying to limit hagwon hours.
(Illegal underground tutoring rings. Illicit math smugglers. A rough crowd, you know. Maybe the spice of the forbidden will make homework more appealing?)
Meanwhile
I had a much-delayed annual physical recently, and the NP asked me if I was in therapy. I said no, are there any therapists available? She laughed and said of course not, have you considered an app instead?
Reading
- Toronto Life profiles an international drug lord
- Climate trauma
- How to plan for your first few weeks as a ghost
Secretly Ironic 