America’s Violent Middle Ground between Tragedy and Farce
For no apparent reason, I woke up thinking about Karl Marx’s much maligned quote that history presents itself first as tragedy, then as farce. This was written sometime in the early 1850s when there was an abundance of farce and tragedy in the air. Marx was actually reaching back to 1799 when Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in a coup and comparing his actions to those of his somewhat farcical nephew, the bourgeois King Louis Philippe. Marx tended to see history constellate this way, earlier writing that Caesar left behind the play-acting Octavius, and we know how that turned out. The dialectic is clear in Marx’s thinking. Every giant must be followed by a dwarf.
Marx apparently had the time to reflect on these historical mood swings. Inhabitants of 21st century America, perhaps not so much. There seems little that offends the tastes of the New York Post, but they did call out JC Penney for promoting back-to-school clothes with an Orlando theme. I am fairly sure where Karl Marx would stand on the gun debate. After all, he considered government a “giant parasitic body,” a view that might today attract a fair number of comrades from across the political spectrum. He would likely cheer with equal zest the Florida politician raffling off an AR 15 and the gun control sit-in U.S. Democratic senators held in that august chamber.
Marx’s arc of human folly and limitations still seems to hold a lot of water, though we might want to add some well-decorated, semantic way-station where we drown ourselves in verbal nonsense, non- sequiturs and what the late S.I. Hayakawa, a U.S. Senator and President of San Francisco State College, referred to as the pitfalls and pathologies of our everyday language. His “Language in Thought and Action” that I read as an undergraduate would still be fit reading for every member of Congress.
Perhaps Hayakawa’s greatest contribution to semantics was his warnings about the dangers when a society becomes “fixed” in what he called a Marxist two-language orientation that infects our government, politics and religions. This state exists along a spectrum. At one end, we might place some of the monstrosities, absurdities and criminalizing of the Other that we hear in our current, walled-in political discourse. At the far other end would be an array of fascist states. For Hayakawa our unconscious impulses are at work when we invoke simple-minded arguments and view the world strictly through our unclouded either/or lens. How deeply these unconscious elements influence the national discourse and action will dictate how potentially dangerous the outcomes could be. When a nation is seized by this two-value orientation and is taken over by an array of unconscious feelings that cluster around this archetype, then we are back in Nazi Germany. Psychologist Carl Jung said that, in effect, that nation was caught in a murderous complex which fed on the stereotypes, tribalism and bigotry that long festered in the German psyche or unconscious. Language is always the facilitator.
I’ve wondered what Hayakawa might have said about the effect of social media on the dynamics of language. His comments about the Niagara of words, the notion that the word is not the thing, the use of snarl words and purr words, the “one-word, one-meaning” fallacy, words with built-in judgments, noises as expression, advice to the literal-minded, dead metaphors and the value of unoriginal remarks suggest he might have been quite comfortable in that unruly theater.
Hayakawa wrote about “affective” language, including verbal hypnotism, dead-level abstracting, alliteration and the like. The author also mentions the use of simile, metaphor and irony as ways to project our interior space to the outside world: this is how I feel. I wonder what Hayakawa would say about the current gun debate in which America goes from an unfathomable crime scene to well-rehearsed and well-entrenched policy positions in the time brief enough that the “thoughts and prayers” anthem can be uttered by politicians to a disbelieving public. I’ve suggested in other places, such as “The Archetype of the Gun”(Kindle), that the gun triggers a host of psychological, cultural and mythological feelings that are largely primitive and unconscious. The Second Amendment might be the rallying cry but the archetype is where the power lies. Of course, some of this chatter is what the NRA calls marketing, but the raw archetype is never far from the surface. Follow a debate about gun control on social media and we are quickly in that no-compromise, emotional land of the two-valued orientation where the world is black and white and Animus rules, big time. He is also heavily armed. There is no mistaking that pronoun.
As we know, language often fails us and we are left with some version of Samuel Beckett’s, “I can’t go on, I must go on,” a nod to literature when everything else fails. The Chicago Sun-Times has moved in the other direction with its homicide watch, telling the story of every murder in the city. This is an effort to counter the proposition that murder is a run-of-the mill narrative. This has been a heroic effort and I salute the paper for its tenacity in telling the stories of murder-victims-as-humans. Still, when reading about someone killed while on LSD, or the body pulled from Lake Michigan or the woman shot while sitting on her porch, there is a numbing familiarity in these details. Recently, eyebrows were raised when a prominent Chicago psychologist reportedly murdered his wife, also a psychologist, then killed himself. Here the narrative takes a different tone. The Sun-Times article reads like an eloquent obituary of a loving, accomplished, loved and respected couple who died. But the man murdered his wife. The gun hangs like a deadly motif over a still unfolding narrative. Zip codes still matter.
Other outlets that address gun violence have focused on data or a kind of dead-level abstraction with a sardonic, biting twist. “Hey Jackass!” with the subtitle, “Illustrating Chicago Values,” attempts to get beyond the wall of inane chatter, nonsense words and Second Amendment piety in describing gun violence, starting with the 30-Day Stupidity Trend that provides data on those shot and wounded, shot and killed and other homicides. Next the site provides a diagram of 2016 shot placements with the head, chest and back being the top three positions shooters aim for. No coverage of this kind would be complete without a shot clock. A person is shot every 2.17 minutes; murdered every 13.21 minutes. And the 2016 Shot-in-the-Ass-O-meter is 94 YTD. The site is angry, unrelenting, and totally in your face. Perhaps the arc of the gun debate will make www.heyjackass.com required reading in every community, if only as a mirror of our collective madness.
“Hey Jackass” spits out vitriol about gun violence, political bullshit and the disastrous cost of these crimes to Chicago as if this vitriol is coming from the barrel of a gun. The site spouts the street gospel of contemporary urban America. Neither gang-bangers nor police nor an uninformed citizenry are outside the barrage of this very unfriendly fire.
Perhaps during these tribal times we need to follow, consciously, these “Hey Jackass” guys for a spell down that dead-reckoning language tree and combine cant, ridicule and the punishing weight of data sets to neutralize the righteous choruses on both sides of the Second Amendment blather locked in Hayakawa’s rigid two-value orientation. The semanticist would understand the necessity of the detour.
Karl Marx would likely be on board. He’d be looking for a revolution. I’d settle for a little political courage and fewer dwarfs in Congress.
“Hey Jackass” indicates that in about 80% of gun homicides in that area no suspect is charged.
Jackass says there’s enough blame to go around.
