1932 — Conversion Disorder
We’re going to keep talking about this because I can’t stop wondering why you’re so blind to it.
Well, that’s not true.
I don’t wonder; I’m appalled. The rational part of my brain totally understands why, thus far, the vast majority of our “leaders,”“journalists” and, frankly, far too many of our regular citizens, rather than seeking some means, ANY legal, Constitutional means of keeping Donald Trump away from the Presidency are, instead, doing all they can to normalize him and his cronies.
Some of it can be chalked up to spinelessness — Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio and stacks of other self-described “principled Republicans” are lining up like pigs at the Trump trough because, regardless of anythng they say in public, what they really are is grasping leeches, happy to suck the blood out of their country if it advances some dubious political, religious or, more likely, financial goal. Like all whores, they are for sale.
Then there are the so-called True Believers who, for whatever their personal defect, truly support the goals and activities of the Trump klavern. These people are the sort that love what they perceive to be a strong hand and will do anything they can to make themselves useful, because they think the strength will rub off. Eager lapdogs who will claim, later– should the Good Guys eventually win, (something that’s, at best, uncertain at this time) that they were only following orders.
The latter group make up an extreme minority of the body politic. Very few humans are actually evil.
This leaves the mass. This leaves the 53% of white women (who voted) who voted for this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhsSzIS84ks
Conversion Disorder. This is when a person or, in this case, a huge number of people, due to some traumatic anxiety subconsciously convert their entirely mental disfunction into a physical state. It used to be called Hysterical Blindness but there were social connotations so the condition was, quite rightly, renamed.
White America has a problem and it is White America.
Your problem is this: while a great many of you are lovely, basically decent, live-and-let-live types, 100% of you have been nurtured on certain myths and tropes that help reinforce the basic social construct that you are innately superior to every other ethnic group on the planet simply by virtue of your genes. (Donald Trump has stated, explicitly, that he believes this to be true, by the way.)
Whether you consciously accept this as truth, whether or not you consciously work against this, it remains part of the brick-and-mortar of your existence and it has probably led to the death of our society as we’ve known it
You can’t see your racist sisters, brothers, cousins, parents and friends as anything but “troubled” or “misunderstood” or, even, “funny.” You don’t let obvious and obviously disgusting and dangerous traits- easy for anyone else to see- add up to, “Wow, Mike is really a bagof dangerous shit, isn’t he?”
No. You AUTOMATICALLY give Mike the benefit of every doubt because to NOT give him that erodes your ability to cling to the meme of superiority. That meme is a cancer and it is what has killed us.
We’ve had several windows over the course of our national history through which we might have come out cured or mostly cured of this cancer but, at each of these crux points, we have failed to do what was necessary.
WINDOW #1: THE CONSTITUTION
When the original Thirteen Colonies were trying to form into a nation, one that would have to fight the only superpower in the world for its existence, many of the Founders realized they would need all the bodies they could get to fight that obligatory war. This meant people who had been traditionally kept out of full membership in the society should be given full membership.
There was also the little bugaboo in the founding document about all men being created equal. Setting aside the basic misogyny there for a moment (you can’t really have racism without misogyny) roughly half of the colonies were willing to give the fairly large African-descended population of the country full membership rights.
Of course, the other half balked. Partly due to commerce and partly due the fact that they couldn’t countenance the idea of true equality with blacks. They were so firm on this point they were willing to let the nation be stillborn rather than agree.
So, a compromise was reached. A basic poison of hypocrisy was threaded into our nation right at the beginning and it is that crack which has plagued us since and has led us to this sorry pass. We’ve had chances to put it away but, because of this condition to which I’ll keep alluding, we fail at every opportunity.
WINDOW #2: RECONSTRCUTION
Apologists (and we’ll be calling them racists going forward) will argue that the Civil War was not about slavery but about Federalism and the central government’s move to control interstate commerce. They will claim, often while pounding a fist, that the “real” issue was (and remains) “States Rights.”
On the last score they are right. In fact, all of the above is technically true but the fact these racists choose to overlook or omit is that the commerce the Confederacy was trying to protect from the nasty federal government’s “over reach” was human trafficking on a massive, genocidal scale. They wanted to keep buying, selling, breeding, raping, torturing, mutilating, killing and working to death generations of African-descended livestock who happened to be human beings. That’s it. We fought a war over it and the bad guys lost.
There was even a stab at trying to re-educate these awful, disgusting “Confederates” by embracing them back into the American family and reminding them that “we are all brothers.”
Except the “we” being discussed did not include anyone who wasn’t white. And, though there was a plan implemented to fully integrate the ex-slaves into proper American society (it’s called Reconstruction), resistance to that notion was so strong that it resulted in the murder of the President who put it into place.
His successor, a truly morally bankrupt human being, immediately gutted that one little stab towards fixing the original breach that the Founders were too cowardly to nip in the bud. That second failure is what has led to what is very clearly the death of the USA.
Some will count legal Desegregation as a counter to my thesis here but, remember, we’re not talking about the racists. We’re not talking about the cross burners and the lynchers. We’re not even talking about the elected officials who, to this day, feel free to describe non-whites as intrinsically inferior, little more than animals, and work dilligently to enact laws that serve this veiw or to destroy those that offset it. We’re not talking about them.
We’re talking about “the good guys.” We’re talking about all their families and friends who look at them, listen to them, see what they do to the world, to the people in the world and KNOW it’s evil, know it’s ugly but still can’t bring themselves to actively renounce, denounce and reject the PEOPLE doing them for who and what they are.
Like the election of Barack Obama, legal Desegregation only allowed the majority of white people, I’m talking about the Good Ones here, to roll over and go back to sleep while the bad guys kept working.
And the Bad Guys kept working. Redlining neighborhoods. Zoning them for unhealthy civic projects, the placement of power plants, sewer lines, oil pipelines, medical services, disparities in criminal sentencing based on “race,” use of deadly force by civil authorities based on “race,” modifacation of history texts and more and more at every economic level in every corner of our society. The Bad Guys have worked to soften even the ability to call them out as bad guys in their loved ones.
What does a racist look like? The picture in your mind right now is some metal-toothed skinhead covered in nazi tatoos. Or possibly a Klansman in full regalia. And this is why we’re here. Those are certainly legitimate images for tagging as racists but, like the whole STRANGER DANGER fiasco of the 1970s and 80s, you’re not looking at the right people.
This is what a racist looks like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrY1XltlRWg
Just an average, regular guy. And here’s an average regular girl to match him.
These are just “average all-Americans” whose family and freinds do not ostracize them for their activities but rather coddle and mitigate.
We’re seeing all our Mainstream News Networks and the so-called “paper of record” doing everything they can to normalize virulent, dangerous racists rather than confronting them and exposing the depth of the depravity of their thoughts.
Partially this is a function of commerce but mostly it’s because most of you are too afraid of the outcome to even begin the necessary conversations.
All of which leads us to … you guessed it…
WINDOW #3: DONALD TRUMP and the SOUTHERN STRATEGY
Early on his campaign, while the intelligensia were all giggling, being clever and saying Trump was crazy — “Why would he campaign in this little no-name town? “ “Why does he treat campaign stops like monster truck rallies?” “Why is he not quelling the violence and fascistic/white supremacist activities at and in connection to said rallies?” — I pegged what was really afoot. It has to do with maps.
I said “Trump’s actions are not incomprehensible if you look at them through the lens of White Supremacy.” I invoked Hitler’s rise to power months before the first “pundit” mentioned it.
Jim Crow fell, legally, in the late 1960s and, as happened with the election of President Obama, the “liberal” half of the electorate fell into a cozy and entirely false sense of optimism and “Post Racial” society. As is often the case with Americans, the big, flashy, easy-to-digest legal solution was taken to be a pancea, a cure for the ills that had plagued the country.
In fact Jim Crow never actually fell. While the liberals were patting themselves on the back for a job well done, the Bad Guys (yes, the BAD Guys) were retooling, rebranding and carrying on with business as usual. There was a grace period of, let’s say, a couple years and then everything slid back to where it had been before. We had Redlining, of course. We had covert and overt segregtion in schools and business. We had the constant battle to pass the ERA (constantly shot down. HINT.) and, we had Mr. Nixon’s so-called “Southern Strategy.”
Had impeachment hearings not forced Nixon to flee the White house in disgrace, what’s happening in the USA now- the clear move to racist authoritarianism represented by the incoming Trump administration- would have happened then.
In spite of that impeachment, in spite of the double election of Bill Clinton, the Southern Strategy was successful in not only removing the near perfect balance between the Left and RIght political parties, it also had a more insidious outcome.
Without the Southern Democrats, who shifted to the GOP due to appeals to their racism and sexism, the DNC had a base problem. In order to be competitive the Party had to rebrand itself as “Centrist” rather than “Liberal” if it hoped to win back any of the losses.
The problem with a Left party moving to the center is, by definition, that means they moved to the Right. At the same time the Right is ALSO moving Right of its previous positions, meaning the governing bodies of the USA are really just Pre Southern Strategy Republicans (calling themselves Democrats) and Post-Southern Strategy Republicans (what we have had since,the current GOP).
Things at the local and state levels were not as dire. Democrats and liberalism made HUGE strides via local legislations and via the courts such that, by the time Barack Obama ran for president, it seemed the air had been taken out of the Right’s swing toward oppressive, Authoritarian rule. It very much looked like, FINALLY, the bad guys were going down.*
But that was magical thinking due to a version of Conversion Disorder.
Simply put, the cancer of racism has corrupted our culture from the founding of this nation and, in fact, before. Racism is what made it possible for Trump to win his thin Electoral college win but not the overt kind.
White America’s conversion disorder comes down to this: a basic unwillingness to see their racist children, siblings, friends, parents and spouses as being unAmerican, as being part of the very real suicide this nation is trying to commit.
White America makes excuses for and turns a blind eye towards the dangerous aspects of their racist contingent and this allows that contingent to thrive and grow.
It is racists who blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma. it is racists who murder black and brown people and women and LGBT people all over this county simply for being in their line of sight on the wrong day. it is racism that has driven Right Wing talk radio for the last few decades, actively fomenting its spread.
And White America wrings its hands a bit about this but, ultimately, turns a blind eye. Punishments are not meted out. No one is ultimately held accountable for these actions.
They refuse to see, refuse to hold these people accountable because they’ve tricked themselves into believing these perpetrators are “lone wolves” or in some way psychologically damaged and thus not representative of anything like a trend. Our media colludes to shape this false narrative, thus furthering the notion that the only terorrists in the world come in shades of brown. This in spite of clear, documented evidence that this is simply not the case.
Rampant police brutality cannot occur without the tacit acceptance and approval of these actions by the community at large. Minority populations have been calling the police out on these actions for decades and were told they were “exagerrating” or, worse, were paid political shills who were, themselves responsible for the racial tensions in the US.
And then cell phone cameras became ubiquitous, documenting the truth of these claims on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. The response from White America is one of classic conversion disorder sufferers causing them to repeatedly acquit police who shoot children, shoot fleeing suspects in the back and fallicitate the deaths of non-whites and women in their custody.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2TPlxBIvOQ
Conversion Disorder is literally killing Americans and, unless White America is willing to cure itself, to put the white into lower case and the America into all caps, SOON, it will kill the USA.
*Well, the overt bad guys of the political class went down. The ones on Wall Street didn’t and, in spite of nearly crashing our economy to death, still haven’t. Odd, no?
Of course, during this period we had “Reaganomics,” the so-called War on Drugs which was really a crackdown on minority populations), “Guiliani Time” in NYC and the Riots in Los Angeles over police corruption and brutality.
These all fall into the aforementioned category of the Right pushing back against the strides made by… well… everyone who had previously had a boot on their necks.
