summer of hate
Music: Frausdots: Couture, Couture, Couture (2004)
I overheard someone say on television that "when you are a hammer, you think everything is a nail." I've been feeling that way lately as if I have become a human hate sensor: I just keep seeing hatemongering everywhere and over and over and am wondering, what new imaginary of violence has this summer brought? And why? What's up with all you mean haters out there? Can't you just make a Mint Julep or Mohito and chill the fuck out?
Chip posted a link to Frank Rich's NYT Op-Ed this morning that advances something of an answer: conservative pundits have been changing the tone of their attacks on the Obama administration, as if to "activate" psycho-haters across the country. First Tiller is assassinated, then the shooting spree in DC happened in the span of two weeks. Rich reports that even Fox News anchor Shepard Smith made an open plea to viewers to be careful and perhaps even be worried, that paranoid extremists have been sending more and more vituperative email messages to the network (heres the video). Camille Paglia's essay on "hate radio" also notes a marked shift in tone on political talk shows; it started in May, but now it seems the conspiratorial muttering is getting louder and the "the Right" is teetering into a "paranoid mood." Rich warns that violence, including increased presidential assassination attempts, is coming.
Rich's essay makes for good reading after watching O'Reilly's abuse of Joan Walsh of Salon:
Rich and Paglia's stress on tone is absolutely precise: O'Reilly is sniveling, practically spitting, doing everything in his emotional power to get Walsh to scream at him. It's not what he is saying that is important; it's what he's feeling---what he is projecting---and the pedagogy he is teaching. While the weapon is the brutality of insulting speech, O'Reilly is nevertheless performing a kind of violence on Walsh. He is "teaching" the viewing audience how to target and destroy a political opponent (never let them speak, create false dichotomies, and so on).
As I wrote about last week, hatred is another name for projective identification. Projective identification is when a person "projects" onto others something about themselves that they dislike. You and I tend to dislike those people who remind us, in some way, of a part of our "self" that we loathe. There is no hate for its own sake; hatred is always about "me" and that other person who is not me. Hate is one of the ways that people develop and maintain a positive identity. O'Reilly is displaying in this clip pure hatred toward Walsh, and through her symbolic destruction his identity as reconfirmed.
Last week a Slovenian reporter interviewed me for my take on Carrie Prejean, the Miss USA who was fired for saying on television that she is against gay marriage. Do you think she was fired, I was asked, because of political correctness? I gave the careful, academic answer (it's a newspaper). I think, however, it's more to the point to say that Prejean was fired because she was a hater; that is, she chose this very hot, political issue---especially for Californians---to take a stand about. I think for most people, taking a stand and fashioning one's identity on denying full humanity to other people is just not very pretty. Beauty contests, of course, require you to be pretty.
Homophobes and racists and anti-abortion crusaders are rising, the Republichristians are mobilizing, the academy continues downsizing. I don't mean to be needlessly apocalyptic, but I am sensing the hateful paranoia too. How long will it be for this new mood to affect my daily life in some material way?