In my 9th grade European history class, a classmate of mine had a genuinely difficult time understanding the concept of heresy. “If you follow Christ, you’re a Christian, aren’t you?” he said. “How could they say those other people weren’t Christian?” He simply could not comprehend that the basic ideas of his Sunday school lessons had ever been in question. To him, a thing like that couldn’t even be controversial, much less something people literally died for. It’s just obviously true by definition: Christ, Christ-ian, what more do you need to know?
The answer, of course, is that the Pope and the Inquisition got to define Christianity, and if you disagreed, they would burn you at the stake.
At the time, I thought he was an idiot, but he’d run into something pretty profound there: it’s really hard to discuss things when you don’t agree on the basic premise or definition of the issue in question. Worse, these kinds of ideas are so basic, so fundamental, that it’s hard to even recognize them as assumptions. Of course a Christian is a follower of Christ. What else would it be?
Well, ask the starovery. Or Emo Philips.
I thought about him recently when reading Thomas Zimmer’s recent piece on the nature of America, where he explores Trumpism not as an aberration but as a recurrence of a long-simmering conflict. Is America an idea about unity and freedom and equality, imperfectly executed, bending slowly toward justice? Is it a nation defined by the white Protestant men who founded it, with tentative privileges granted to minority groups only to the extent that they don’t disrupt the natural order? Everyone in that fight says they’re defending truth, justice, and the American way. And not only are they disagreeing about what those things mean, they can’t even comprehend how someone else would disagree.
I thought about him again when I saw a Facebook exchange between a guy who was appalled by ICE disappearances and torture, and a friend of his who said he shouldn’t get so upset about those perfectly normal legal arrests. “It’s not like anyone’s actually being fed to alligators,” he said. “That’s just a harmless joke.” One of them could not understand how anyone could be so cruel, and the other could not understand why anyone would be upset.
Or think about the way some leftists regard America as fundamentally harmful, and have a hard time comprehending that someone like me might actually like it. If I say “America has not always lived up to its ideals, but it can and will do better: look at our progress on labor and human rights and the environment,” they will say “America has always lived up to its ideals: look at slavery and CIA-backed coups and ICE raids.”
Meanwhile, all of us reasonable right-thinking liberals are baffled that a teacher in Idaho had to take down a classroom sign reading “Everyone is Welcome Here.” How, we ask, could a sign like that be forbidden? Who doesn’t want to welcome students in a classroom?
Well, that depends on what we mean by “everyone” and what we mean by “welcome,” doesn’t it? Because, let’s be honest, it doesn’t mean that literally everyone is welcome. It means “We don’t bully LGBT+ students here.” It means “Don’t be racist in this classroom.” Bullies and racists see “everyone is welcome” and read “YOU are not welcome,” and they hate it, and then of course they must ban it.
Point is, the people who now dominate the Republican party recognize that their definitions of words like “American” and “Christian” and “Everyone” and “Welcome” are under threat from people who want to include gays and minorities, but not bigots and fascists. They see that their understanding of the entire world is under attack.
Point is, there are a lot of people whose reality is so completely alien to us that it’s hard to recognize the conceptual country they live in. It’s not just strange, but upsetting that they cannot see same world we do. These basic concepts are foundational, and like a building’s foundation, we often take them for granted until we look at them from a different angle and see how tilted they are.
Nobody likes that feeling. It’s part of why this fight is so bitter and intractable.
News
A few days ago I made a list of things that were worrying and upsetting me.
This is a different list.
- Insurance companies are still not prepared for climate change, and governments are still not prepared for their impending failure. This has been coming, obviously, and the failure to prepare for it is equally obvious.
- Both ICE agents and impostor vigilantes are running around armed and masked and indistinguishable.
- A lawyer called an ICE office trying to figure out where to send paperwork to file appeals for a detained client. They gave her the number for a local Taco Bell.
- The USDA’s new hardiness zone maps are out, and show climate change impacts, so I assume the regime will be attacking gardeners now.
- Vermont school superintendent detained, interrogated at border.
- Even God Cannot Hear Us, a first person account of ICE detention.
- Trump used an obvious antisemitic slur in a speech and the Department of Homeland Security posted a Hitler joke on their official social media account and nobody gave a shit.
Secretly Ironic 