Two days ago, in the kind of YouTube back and forth I get into sometimes to see if there is any possibility for civilized discourse on the internet, “Joe Blow” called me a “partisan tool.”
No doubt I am, and thus I thanked Joe for (his?) summing me up so well and so quickly. I mean, I had only asked if there was a better way to act like a Governor of one of America’s fifty states than, in essence, attacking another state by shipping fifty unwitting and purposely deceived migrants from Florida to Martha’s Vineyard.
Not according to Joe who, though, he had time to call me names did not choose to actually engage my question.
In a New York Times comment yesterday someone said how “awesome” it was that Desantis had pulled off his stunt. This person meant awesome in the colloquial and high school sense of the word, as in: “You look amazing. Those jeans are awesome,” not in the “inspires awe” sense of the word, which, so far as I can tell no longer exists anyway. (Shock and Awe, a policy of killing people en masse through super-cool weaponry such that the killed embrace the killer’s righteous point of view may have played some part in the demise of “awe's” meaning.)
As it happens, I see Desantis’s stunt as funny, at least conceptually. If you imagine the idea coming up in the writer’s room of a sitcom or the idea being drafted in the notebook of Dave Chapelle or Loius C.K., it only crosses a line, as comedy often must. A Desantis staffer suggests they fly their problem North— “to Martha’s Vinyard,” someone says—and others in the meeting laugh. “That would be awesome.”
But stunts are not governance and leaders, like adults in general, are meant to show restraint when it comes to treating people as props or raw material. As far as I am concerned, the newly deceased Queen was a lightweight anachronism in all respects, but she played her role, old-fashioned, costume-wearing, and over-valued as it was.
Actual awesome would be for a Governor to spend his time coming up with ways to serve his state and, should his state suffer from federal policy, to address this through the political and legal process, to play his role.
But never mind all that.
I had said I would write about anger today and, as you can see, I got sidetracked.
Except to say that while you can feel sad and cry by yourself or feel joy and smile on your own, when you feel anger you look for an object. Something or someone (even if that someone is yourself, as it often is) must serve as anger’s target. Maybe this is why people love to discourse on what makes them angry or in the tone of anger. They think they are getting at the thing, striking the target. “I’ll show you, you partisan tool.”
Among other things, social media is a cosmos of displaced anger, as everyone knows.
In theory, critical thinking is supposed to help with this sort of thing and, also in theory, teaching critical thinking was my job—my role—for more than a few decades.
I pretended that making people better readers of Shakespeare would make them better citizens. By acting as a guide to creative interpretation and a sentry against unsupportable ones I would train students to cultivate empathy, avoid obvious cons.
Well, the election of Mr. Trump made it clear that I and everyone in my profession had failed completely.
But it was always a delusion. If critical thinking could be taught the way humanities teachers imagine, Marvel would not be the formula for entertainment, and the same advertisements for cars, soda, and burgers would not play year after year, decade after decade during the ball game.
At best, what I was doing was holding space for restraint. I was a gatekeeper. A moderator on civility. Despite my failure, I do wish social media had this role built in.
Because in my class, as in most, to go from disagreement to homicidal in one predictable step was not the norm or would, at least, be challenged. “Please explain: Why I am a partisan tool?”
And if someone made a diversionary (tasteless? hurtful? triggering?) joke equivalent to “we should send them to Martha’s Vinyard” people might laugh, but at least a teacher might try to parse it, to say, for instance, that a funny idea is often tragic in reality and indeed, as Stanley Cavell more or less says, the tragedy of tragedy is that comedy has limits.
To broach those limits deliberately and purposefully and because you can is infuriating.
Hmmm, I think I am bordering on the difference between real and fake vs. true and false. And maybe I’ll get into that in a few days, after reporting, briefly, on “The Golden Block” tomorrow.