victimhood

What Have/Could We Become? – Part 2


Find Part 1 here.

Letting loose the behavior geek that resides inside my skin, I’m always trying to figure out what seems impossible to figure out, like understanding why common sense people would say and do self-harming things. Let’s start. with an explanation.

The predominant and overriding passion of our time is what Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post labeled “aggrieved victimhood.” Whether you agree with the label or the primacy of it, it’s here and it’s big. I’ve been 7 years questioning where that comes from.

Here’s a piece that was stapled as a late addition onto Part 1:

Maybe you’ve heard about the song Rich Men North of Richmond. It was written and performed by Oliver Anthony, a guy with no professional music experience and who never had anything on a top 100 chart. But this piece has gone viral – over 47 million listens and over 161,000 comments in less than a month.

Anthony’s song tells the story of middle Americans – hard working people – and their suffering at the hands of (in the pockets of) rich guys. The “elite.” The cabal of thieves who have taken their country and their dream from them. I urge you to listen to his song and, as important, read the comments. You’ll begin to understand the depth of the people’s anger that infects this country owing to decades of betrayal .

Did you find yourself doing a “Yeah, but .  .  .” as you read the above or listened to the song? If so, read it again, listen to the song again, and this time imagine that every time you stand up somebody knocks you down, like in those middle America towns that used to have a major employer, but the company moved their production to a foreign country and the town and its families are failing. Rightly or wrongly, people are feeling oppressed.

They reached their Popeye point long ago.

We human beings don’t like getting screwed, which is how so many are feeling, so here’s a BFO (Blinding Flash of the Obvious) for politicians and the rich guys who buy them:

People have a Popeye point, the moment when that’s all we can stands, we can’t stands no more. That’s when the spinach hits the fan.

That’s what we’re seeing from our violent ones.

That’s what we’re seeing from the ones displaying the hateful and vile hats and signs.

That’s what we’re hearing in the incoherent insistence that the election was stolen.

That’s what the pollsters are finding, even if Trump is in prison on election day.

That’s what we’re hearing as our fellow citizens crazily insist that it was okay for boxes of stolen documents and Top Secret papers to be hidden in Trump’s bathroom, ballroom, unguarded basement storage room and in his desk. They believe it was okay because Trump says the Presidential Records Act says that the documents are his (it says the opposite) and they think that it was okay for him to conspire to defy a subpoena, too.

That’s what we saw on January 6 as true believers acted out their anger, believing they were doing a patriotic thing.

Of course, all that and more has happened because valid anger over betrayal was cleverly, deviously, fraudulently channeled inward. So, we must give this fascist devil his due. He is brilliant at mass manipulation, getting otherwise well meaning but angry people to believe lies, that he is one of them, their leader, their savior. They believe that he will lead them to upend the plotters, the conspirators, the thieves who have stolen their country from them. The “deep state.” He told them he will be their “retribution.” He is the strong man who will defeat the forces of evil and in that way make them strong.

Don’t imagine these people are stupid or that they are knowingly acting against their best interests. What they are is duped. Tricked. Manipulated. Cynically used by the manipulator. And they have no idea that a new Trump regime will mistreat them far worse because that’s what happens in all authoritarian regimes.

There is a “BUT” to this attempt to understand and it is a sulfurous and dangerous cloud that hangs over all of us. I refer you to Kirk Landers’ comment to Part 1 of this series. He wrote,

The only other point I’d add to the conversation is that to understand MAGA, I think you have to start with the concept of the anti-Christ – a religious concept that says the greatest enemy of Christianity is fake Christianity. Trump is the archetypal anti-Christ, even though he’s openly stupid and venal. More important, the MAGA hordes are exactly the anti-Christians that the concept feared and loathed.

I agree that these people have a lot to be angry about, but they’re looking for validation, not solutions. And that’s kind of how we got here – people not wanting facts, just wanting to scream their guts out or shoot off a clip of ammo.

I don’t know how you deal with that.

Nor do I. But his construct of fake Christianity echos off the hills telling us a terrible tale, over and over, as we see people doing violent things in the name of the Prince of Peace. As I wrote at the end of Part 1, ‘.  .  .  there is little as murderous and destructive as fervent religious anger.”

What We Have Become is a country where a very large minority has been brilliantly manipulated Mussolini style, Hitler style, Erdoğan style, Orbán  style – charismatic strongman style. A mob energized by the power of anger and hatred. These people feel aggrieved and victimized and they want to hit back and they do so without recognizing that they are hitting back at themselves. As Landers wrote, they want validation, not solutions.

They get their validation in a constant torrent of blood boiling lies and propaganda. That puts fingers on triggers and it’s as dangerous as can be.

What We Could Become is limitless. But it can only happen if and when the majority of us stand up to stop the steal of our country by the anti-everything mob. That means that we have to use our power to re-establish that this is a nation laws, not one of high level manipulative criminals. We have to reverse the theft of wealth from the bottom 95% and redirect it to where it belongs. We have to turn the violent, angry monster around and use that energy for what is productive for a democracy. We have to stop allowing ourselves to be used and abused. In short, we have to treat democracy as a verb.

Writes Frank Levy,

I have long since stopped trying to change people’s minds. I think the most I can do is get those whose worldview mirrors mine to take action to make the world better for their being born into it.

I think he’s talking about you and me.

What We Could Become is the embodiment of the valiant words of our founding documents. So, Teach Your Children Well through your actions, because it will take not years, but generations to set things right. History has shown this to be true. Today is a good day to start.

Need A Dose of Hope?

Read this installment of Steve Schmidt’s travelogue and meet Fred. And watch his embedded video all the way through.

Today is a good day to be the light

______________________________

  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


  • Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    Click me

    JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

What Have/Could We Become? – Part 1


Ed. note: Be sure to read Frank Levy’s response in the Comments section at the bottom of this post.

Eugene Robinson wrote in The Washington Post on August 24,

To understand how completely Donald Trump has transformed the Republican Party, all you had to do was watch Wednesday’s debate and Trump’s surrender to Georgia authorities on Thursday. The vibe was a mash-up of “American carnage” and aggrieved victimhood.

Aggrieved victimhood?

David Corn of Mother Jones used this pic in his newsletter of August 23 that was a takedown of a David Brooks piece in The Atlantic. Brooks had attempted to explain the meanness, the cruelty, the rudeness and the violence of the MAGAs, which are every day events.

I’m no sociologist, but I think there are many reasons for this craziness, this MAGA “aggrieved victimhood.”

  1. Their valid anger at being forgotten, betrayed by our own government
  2. Their invalid whining and rage because life isn’t exactly what they want it to be (jeez, grow up!)
  3. Their all-too-human and pathological need to blame

But that fails to nail down the core of how we became so terribly aggrieved. Steve Schmidt has a clear take on this and he centers it on lost trust, a sense of betrayal. I believe he’s right and my notion is that the loss of trust can be traced directly to our tolerating things we should never have tolerated. For example:

We tolerated decades of deceit over the Viet Nam war, notwithstanding the protests.

We tolerated Ford pardoning Nixon, instead of skewering him with the justice he deserved.

We tolerated the Republicans hiring Ken Starr to go through Clinton’s garbage cans searching for something slimy to smear onto him, even as ethics violator Newt Gingrich and the rest of the thumpers wailed holy paeans to their own purity and goodness.

Reagan and H.W. Bush skated from their Iran-Contra lawbreaking. Republicans made a martyr of Ollie North, as he testified in his medal-bedecked uniform, hand raised high in his declaration. He swore he would tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and then he lied. He and several other perps went to prison – then Bush pardoned them.

As bad as the Great Recession was, with the homes lost, the futures decimated, the hopes dashed, none of the perpetrators went to jail for violating SEC rules and existing laws. Perhaps worse was the elimination of regulations designed to prevent just such a financial collapse. The cost of learning the lessons of unfettered greed was paid following the Great Depression. But ever-present greed won out decades later and we danced to the financial ruin tune once again. Then we put laws back in place (Dodd-Frank), which the Republicans chipped away at until there’s nothing left to protect us. The rich got richer and we’re left waiting for the other shoe to drop. Plus we footed the bill.

There have been decades of “off-shoring” of factories, industries and, most important, jobs for Americans. Towns have been hollowed out and their citizens set adrift, even as our institutions promoted this craziness. Mass layoffs were labeled “right sizing” and millions lost their jobs, their security and their hopes for their children. And the rich got richer.

The mania for deregulation persists, even after the horrid train derailment in East Palestine, OH. That train was over two miles long and had only two workers aboard, as the deregulated and abandoned inspections and safety procedures allowed that toxic, deadly swamp to happen. But removing those regulations did reduce costs for the railroad and provide more money for the executives and shareholders.

And, of course, there were the sex scandals in religious institutions done by televangelists and the Catholic Church.

These betrayals are major trust killers that hurt people. That leads to aggrieved victimhood.

We could go on and on listing betrayals of the American people by our all too self-serving government officials, but you get the point and could easily construct your own list. The point is that the American people have lost trust because we have been betrayed. It isn’t our imagination. And our sense of betrayal is just what a demagogue like Trump or any of the liars use to stoke fear and anger to promote themselves.

Trump delivered his American Carnage address and told us that only he could save us. Millions believed him because they were and are prepared to believe and follow anyone who tells them they are right and righteous and who points a finger at those to blame.

What we’ve become is a nation of millions of voluntary dupes. Some of our leaders stoke fear of the “other” and that has incited hate crimes, murders of our fellow citizens, making us geckos eating our own. Sadly, so many have succumbed to putting most of their mental energy into looking for someone to blame for their ailments – and then acting out.

We’ve let our lost trust and anger fester into a mania to abandon every value we claim to hold dear. In more benign phrasing, we are throwing the baby out with the dirty bath water.

But the solution is not to abandon it all, to “tear it all down.” The solution is to hold accountable all who violated American values and the American dream. Discard the liars who have stoked anger for their own benefit and the cowards who stood by and let it happen.

We can and we must fix this by restoring our democracy – majority rule.
.

There is a start to rectifying this going on now, but it isn’t an easy path forward. Justice is at last coming to a lot of high level perpetrators, traitors to our values, who wrapped themselves in the flag and then spit on the brave words of the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution and on our laws and on our norms.

There is powerful juju driving this vitriolic behavior and we better confront that with something better before the haters seething over betrayals and calling for a civil war start amassing an army of reality denying dupes armed with AR-15s.

Maybe you’ve heard about the song Rich Men North of Richmond. It was written and performed by Oliver Anthony, a guy with no professional music experience and who never had anything on a top 100 chart. But this piece has gone viral – over 47 million listens and over 161,000 comments – in less than a month.

Anthony’s song tells the story of middle Americans – hard working people – and their suffering at the hands of (in the pockets of) rich guys. The “elite.” The cabal of thieves who have taken their country and their dream from them. I urge you to listen to his song and, as important, read the comments. You’ll begin to understand the depth of the people’s anger that infects this country owing to decades of betrayal.

Aggrieved victimhood.

Just an Idea

Adam Grant calls for a better way to find leaders in his essay The Worst People Run for Office. It’s Time for a Better Way. He reports,

Voters overwhelmingly favor candidates who are tall and male and white. We also have a bad habit of attracting and electing candidates with tendencies known as the dark triad of personality: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy

Do you suppose that if we found leaders who aren’t self-centered and deranged that perhaps we’d be led to be less cruel to one another and might just find a way to continue our democracy? Maybe even make this into a place where people are treated fairly and decently?

Crazy, right?

Quote of the Week

From David Corn of Mother Jones:

Cults are cults. Rules, norms, facts, the law, reality, decency—none of that matters. The true believers are enrapt[ured] with the phony narrative Trump feeds them. For these millions of Americans, it’s theology.

And there is little as murderous and destructive as fervent religious anger.

Today is a good day to be the light

______________________________

  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


  • Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    Click me

    JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

What It’s Really About – Part Two


It isn’t about

banning or burning books,

or refusing to do anything to stop the mass shooting carnage

or disrupting school board meetings by spewing hatred

or restricting or eliminating abortion services and other women’s healthcare

or marching with Tiki torches and swastika flags or moronically seig heil-ing while wearing black ski masks and sunglasses and carrying swastika flags. And no, there weren’t very fine people on both sides in Charlottesville.

or inviting despot Viktor Orbán to deliver a Republican Party keynote address

or banning DEI training or banning the teaching of CRT, even when and where it isn’t being taught

or manipulation of our courts

or discriminating against LGBTQs

or the ethics outages of the Supreme Court

or the cruelty inflicted on helpless people at our southern border

or holding hostage our nation and the world economy

or any of the rest of the deranged things the extreme right wing hollow heads have done and are doing.

We see the cruelties they create and we naturally respond. But often we dilute our own power chasing after the latest outrage, because it isn’t about those outrages. It is entirely about them crushing anyone seen as opposition. It’s about them “owning the libs.” It’s about using whatever brutality is at hand to confuse and enrage the liberals and even the moderates. It’s about using violence and the threat of violence to terrorize people, all for one single goal:

It is all about grabing and hoarding
all the power and all the money for themselves.
.

It’s about domination.

To facilitate that, they’re driving our government to fail – as with the idiotic, self-inflicted, wholly without integrity debt limit crisis.

They’ve been doing their power and money grab in plain sight at least since Reagan was sworn in on his happy-face version of discrimination and prejudice.

During the 1980 campaign against Jimmy Carter he liked to pose the question, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Many people weren’t better off, as we had weathered soaring inflation, the Arab oil boycott and more.

His supply side tax windfall for rich people was supposed to be invested to create jobs and better pay for workers, but it didn’t work that way. Supply side economics has never worked that way. It just sent more money to already rich people.

Except for the recent recovery from the pandemic, wages have been essentially flat for over 40 years and the average American’s net worth has declined. While that was happening, the net worth of the top 10% and especially the top 1% has multiplied many times over at your expense.

So, back to Reagan’s (slightly modified) question: Are you better off now than you were 40 years ago?

Answer: Nope.

But the rich have grabbed ever more power and money as our middle class has been hollowed out, because it’s your power and your money that they grab. See the RED font above.

An Example of How They Grab Power

Look at this Breaking News email headline from May 3.

Wait: The Ukrainians attacked Russia not on the battlefield in Ukraine, but inside Russia? In Moscow? In a “planned terrorist attack?” Who’s crazy enough to do that?

Answer: Nobody.

This is a standard bad guys tactic. They accuse opponents and enemies of nefarious stuff – most often of things they themselves are doing – and then they claim victimhood. Think: the Reichstag fire in 1933. Click this link and see for yourself what happened. The headline above is today’s version of the same thing.

Poor Vlad claims he’s been victimized by a Ukrainian drone strike on his capitol – they’re much like Putin’s drone strikes on Kiev – so he claims the right to hit back lethally. But in this case as in so many others, there is never any evidence to support his or any other abnormal psych victimization claim.

We’ve seen over eight years of Trump doing this and before that three decades of Republican extremists doing it, starting even before the performative and falsely named Tea Party bleated out their victimhood.

It’s a highly effective way to justify abhorrent acts to grab power and money. That is to say, it isn’t about the alleged victimizing attack. It’s about using false victimization as a cover.

It is all about grabing and hoarding
all the power and all the money for themselves.
.

These poor Republican babies claim they are victims of Democrats and all their out groups, like Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Asians, Muslims, etc. You know: the non-White, non-Christians. Woe be unto the Republicans, as they suffer under the yoke of the libs! They use their phony victimization to extort our entire country, like they’re doing with the debt ceiling right now.

That is to say, they create victimization crises and then, in a massive leap of fiction, they tell us that only they can save us.

Legislators are focused almost exclusively on self-interest – getting reelected. That’s why moderate Republicans won’t stand up to the flamers – they’d only be primaried by a far right wacko. Here’s what all of this means for you.

Rallying, protesting, marching and the rest are most often exercises in trying to get elected representatives to change their behavior, which they are extremely unlikely to do. We largely waste our energy on lobbying these minor despots.

As I stated in my “NO!” posts last month (here, here and here),

ALL OF THE POWER COMES FROM THE VOTING BOOTH!
.

If you want change, stop chasing the symptoms. Instead, focus your energy on changing the legislators. As Barack Obama implored,

“Don’t boo: VOTE!”
.

And work hard to get others to vote. It’s long past time for tens of millions more of our voices to be heard from that powerful place, the voting booth, saying, “NO!” to the people who want to steal your power and your money. Mark your calendar to do that on November 5, 2024, because either you’ll take action or they will act on you. And you won’t like that.

And that is what it’s really about.

  • You can find What It’s Really About – Part One here.
  • Today is a good day to be the light.

    ______________________________

    • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
    • Fire the bastards!
    • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.

      Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take a lot of us to get the job done.

      And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

      Thanks!

      The Fine Print:

      1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
      2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
      3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
      4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
      5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

      Click me

      JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

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