Citizen Journalist: Haters
The hate machine is busy screaming across America. Let’s turn it away from Mount Dora
A bad spirit has infected politics everywhere you look. Snarly and bellicose, it has spread like kudzu across the country, choking out civility and compromise.
Welcome to the hate machine.
Angered at middle America’s faltering fortunes and fearful that whatever is left will soon be taken by someone from without or given away to someone within, frustration has passed despair and is now charging up hate mountain.
And front and center, the bull-horn of 21st-century media is pumping up the volume wherever we turn.
Like a pack of war dogs, haters turn on friend and foe alike. Witness the feud between Donald Trump and Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, who angered the leading Republican candidate by asking him in a debate about his habit of calling women he doesn’t like “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.” Trump boycotted the final debate because she was a moderator in it, tweeting “I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct. Instead I will only call her a lightweight reporter!”
Leave it to his supporters — jackboots on the Internet — to take Trump’s heat and run with it. “@megynkelly U r going to cost FOX to lose big money on Thurs.Debate should be done by a REAL journalist w/talent not a trashy skank like you” went one tweet. It does make you wonder if there’s anything more hateful than a braying pack.
An analysis of tweets from the 24 hours after Trump’s announcement that he wouldn’t be participating in the debate gives you a sense of both the ardor and tooth to the hate:
If you think it’s bad now, just wait for the attack ads of the coming presidential election to berserk our way. And then imagine what kind of hate they will unleash from the believers.
Where does this come from? You can point to the radio tirades of Rush Limbaugh and the high-decibel assaults of Fox News. Ironically, Republicans are suffering worse for their news that was meant to disrupt the Democrats. The Republican establishment — whatever of that remains — have set the tone of staunch and unremitting opposition to President Obama and any attempt a compromise on so many issues that Washington has been in lockdown for 8 years.
The growing supremacy of the Internet is much at fault, with its echo chambers of one-side affirmation, ratcheting further the outrage and offering endless permission — like a porn site, only political — to rant and troll. The hate squawkbox is defiant, blistering, uncompromising and utterly resistant to self-reflection. The strongest evidence (though hate politics infects everyone who defaults to it) is found in the conservative online media; they are, in true digital fashion, disrupting conservatism as it has been embraced by the Republican party, pushing extreme positions (the most succulent clickbait) and then fiercely attacking Republican leaders if they take a single step toward the compromising middle.
For all the toxic brio of this discourse, the results have been disastrous for the Republican Party. No Republican president for two consecutive elections. The Affordable Care Act remains, even after a disastrous attempt in 2013 to shut down the government to force President Obama to repeal the healthcare act. A refusal by the Republican congress to sanction any bill on immigration or gun control let to executive actions by the President on both that so far have not been successfully challenged. And most believe that the likely Republican Presidential candidate will be an extremist who will lose.
So who wins? As Jackie Calmes points out, the Republican Party is becoming a nuked desert; yet for the conservative media vanguard, that loss provides a grand silver lining for them:
They and their audiences repeatedly get to set the agenda, to provoke a confrontation in defense of what they see as conservative principles. And when the fight fails — well, that is Republican leaders’ fault for not fighting hard enough. Conservative media can always find a like-minded politician — say, senator and presidential candidate Ted Cruz — to say so. And with each loss or retreat, conservative media and its readers, viewers and listeners are only further enraged at the Republican establishment.
So it isn’t surprising that the frontrunners for the Republican nomination are the establishment disrupters Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Cruz is the Washington politician who is fighting for the extreme, but Trump is the consummate outsider, a billionaire businessman who campaigns like he’s still the boss on his reality show “The Apprentice,” firing left and right every element who would belay success for the corporate juggernaut.
(On the Democrats’ side, party-elect Hillary Clinton, who began the race so far ahead of the Democratic “socialist” Bernie Sanders that no one saw her as having any competition, is now in a dead heat with Sanders going into the first primaries. Their contest has none of the rancid aggression of the other party, but that’s not to say outsider politics isn’t also disrupting the Democratic Party establishment as well.)
In the hate machine, everyone hates everything and everyone else. Everyone in Washington hates Ted Cruz. Trump hates everyone who isn’t on Team Trump. Republicans hate Obamacare and Democrats hate the NRA. Billowed up to a false sense of unanimity in their separate online echo chambers, each side becomes so convinced of their own rightness versus the utter stupidity of the other side that any connectivity to the whole seems permanently ruptured.
Which is, of course, a win-win for the hate machine, which lives on to hate to greater heights.
And if haters breed still more haters, either in support and jihad-hot opposition — hey, it’s just more fodder for the machine.
While the kudzu of hate keeps spreading, the civility of one country comprised of differences sinks further from sight.
Perhaps foolishly, I once believed that the toxic vapors that have infected our national politics would not seep into the little city of Mount Dora.
But it’s hard now not to draw that conclusion.
Watch the video of the Jan. 26 council meeting and you’ll see what a divided town this is, how fierce the opposing sentiments are. Thankfully the hateful extremes were less evident than they’ve appeared on social media, but still the arguments burned.
How positions on the looming resignation of Mr. Pastue could vary so widely is astonishing. Standing between them, hearing both, is like a “Twilight Zone” episode where someone walks a ledge between parallel universes. Any argument sounds just as rational in reverse and upside down — maybe our brains are becoming like binary computers — but take a step back to see that madness when opposites are too hotly true.
The main division of the Jan. 26 meeting lay in whether speakers had confidence that the new council could be trusted to make the right decision regarding Mr. Pastue’s resignation. If they didn’t trust the last council, then the new council’s direction was embraced; if they did trust the work of the last, then they found it hard to trust the present one. Suspicion fanned by accusation darkened the view both ways, and at times the anger bordered on hate.
Well, the hate is here in Mount Dora; for how long, who knows. But it’s clear that the middle ground of local politics has become difficult and confrontational. The 2012 council election saw an influx of negative advertising we had not seen to such a degree in this town. A politics website started in 2015 stirred up an electorate with distrust of city government.
Nastiness began cropping up, jagged and hurtful. Our present deputy city manager had been a candidate for the city manager’s position, but when he received a threatening letter from “a concerned citizen” he removed his name from consideration. Sunshine Law violation charges were filed against four council incumbents last spring; though the state’s attorney decided not to pursue the case, their re-election campaigns were damaged. An incumbent council member’s campaign website was bought out from under him — some say by someone in town — when the deadline for renewing the site had passed. Was getting into office so important that such measures were justified? In Mount Dora?
One council member whose seat was not up for re-election last year told me the experience of a council meeting last year where citizens who had showed up to protest the city’s streetscaping project. “In all of my years of working in government, I have never found myself being screamed at by someone telling me I didn’t know anything.” What was the point of such anger? In Mount Dora?
Since December, city employees fearful of “big changes” and whether their jobs were at risk began showing up at the clinic with stress-related in such numbers that an alarmed HR manager informed the city manager. And what big changes could cause such anxiety among the people who make a city operate?
In Mount Dora?
Someplace Special has begun sounding like, well —
Where does the line get crossed between anger and hate? Hard to say, but once it has been crossed, thinking degrades into emotional swamps where the really ugly stuff comes from. That’s the conclusion of University of North Carolina’s Micheal McKuen, who discovered that those
experiencing anger and similar emotions seek less information overall, less information from the opposition, and more information that reinforces their prior beliefs. (McKuen) characterizes anger, disgust, contempt, and hatred as components of aversion — an emotional strategy people employ when encountering familiar, negative stimuli. When confronted with such conditions, MacKuen suggests, we fall back on well-worn coping routines. These often involve either ignoring the disturbing information or seeking information to confirm prior views. (“Trump-Rage: How Political Anger Clouds Our Thinking,” Tamar Wilner, Skeptical Inquirer, Jan. 4, 2016)
Echo-chambers like Fox News or Daily Kos are havens for affirming stubborn, unchallenged beliefs about who to blame for the country’s problems. And they do it with heat and volume up high enough so that howling becomes the only register.
Given the sorry state of our national media, it’s not surprising to hear the same spew locally, in the same eerie register of the big-league blowhards. Not surprising, the way things are going these days — but sad nonetheless. Because once that howl takes over the local discourse, sides widen, hostilities brew, and compromise becomes a quaint relic of the past.
I found the most touching comment at the Jan. 26 council meeting from a long-term resident who was appalled at the venom coming from both sides. “Twenty years ago, we had strong opinions, too. But always the community came first.” Where did that go?
And what can the city’s leadership do about it?
Councilman Mark Crail’s recommendation that council and city manager approach the problem as if they were in marriage counseling offered a hopeful solution. Here’s what he suggested:
“First, do you want to stay together, or has the relationship been so badly damaged that the only way you can see to move forward is to split up? If the answer is yes, move on — if not, we’re done here.”
“Second, Even though you think your behavior has been mostly justified and maybe has been caused by some simple misunderstanding or miscommunications, would you concede that at least some of the problems in this relationship are your fault? If yes, we can move on — if nothing was your fault, we’re done here.”
“And third, okay, there is plenty of blame to go around, but what if we were to agree on a plan to address the things you can’t stand about me and the things you do that drive me crazy? Could we agree to stay together while we work to define who does what in our relationship and try to learn how to stop doing those things that honk the other person off? In the mean time, we won’t make any rash decisions and we’ll work on the things we both agree need to be done around here?”
The problem is that once that ice-hot feelings get into the relationship, it’s hard not to say, we’re done here. On Jan. 26, council voted down a motion to allow Mr. Pastue to discuss at greater length his SWOT proposals before the council decides on his resignation. Mr. Pastue has said he would be willing to discuss those things at the Feb. 2 meeting, but that won’t happen unless the council that he’s valuable enough to the city to hear him out.
Hard to see that happening. As Lauren Ritchie reported, Mr. Pastue said afterwards “that none of the council members ever have told him why they would rather he left or what he would have to improve to keep his job. None of them have stated the source of their displeasure with him in a public venue, either.”
Why is it that when hate gets into politics, you’re either screaming — or deathly silent?
As partnerships go, you can’t suck much more than this.
For the good of the city, I sure hope there’s room still for council and city manager to decide on marriage counseling. No one but the score-settlers believe that the near and long-term future for Mount Dora will improve with the sudden departure of its senior management team. (And if you still don’t think this is about Mark Reggentin as well, go read the comments section of the political website’s Facebook page. Always, by the ranters ye shall find the strategy.)
I doubt I could have any effect on council’s intentions — not now, anyway, perhaps not ever — but if the city ever wants to boot hate politics the boot from its center, I suggest it consider a story from myth.
Remember the Labyrinth of King Minos of Crete?
Quite an cunning device by the inventor Daedalus, a maze of circular turns and spirals so confusing that all who dared it (initiates and criminals and the assorted virgin sacrifice) became wholly lost. Only halfway done, they arrived at the Minotaur’s lair where they were soon turned into toothpicks by the raging man-bull. Doodles of the labyrinth’s design were popular throughout the ancient world and found scratched under aqueducts and on lintels and other places the locals dawdled — a sort of early Rubik’s cube.
The fate of all who entered Labyrinth was pretty certain — blunder through the maze round and down to the dark certainty of doom — and yet, as I said, that was only half of the design. The labyrinth on the left side proceeded from the center up and round and out to daylight. Eventually the hero Theseus killed the Minotaur, but all the while there was a secret way out. The noted mythologist Karl Kerenyi writes:
We may think of this construction as an ingenious composition of endless spirals or meanders (depending on whether the drawing is round or angular) on a delimited surface. There resulted a classical picture of this procession, which originally led by way of concentric circles and surprising turns to the decisive turn in the center, where one was obliged to rotate on one’s own axis in order to continue the circuit. (Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 95–6)
Only by making that decisive, self-reversing turn at the center could the way out be found — still a confusing maze, but through halls slowly brightening with promise.
The way out of the labyrinth, then, involves a radical change of one’s own perspective.
Hate politics is like that labyrinth, a path inexorably heading toward one, inevitable, bloody conclusion. We know the cliff we’re headed for. A hundred fifty years ago, divisions in this country marched straight into rending civil war — 620 thousand Rebs and Yanks killed. Fifty years later, contentious European nations who wouldn’t back down from their nationalist rhetoric marched straight where no one believed things would go, the four-year trench grave of Flanders. Twenty years later, everyone thought Hitler would learn political restraint, but he waltzed 6 million Jews into the ovens. Fifty years later ISIS and the West are doing the dance now, strafing at each other as the Middle East stumbles toward its Minotaur. e
Again and again, the march of the righteous aims straight at hell. Don’t think there’s something deeply worrisome about armed militia facing off against the U.S. government in Oregon? When it gets tense enough, one potshot can turn into war. Donald Trump isn’t going anywhere, even though no one seems to like him (even among his supporters), and so many of those he’s enraged hate him. Despite every prediction of traditional politics, there may be nothing anyone can do to prevent thathater from disrupting his way into the White House And then what dance with the devil — Minotaur, politics of fire — will we find ourselves two-stepping two?
How can the haters be stopped? Remember — it’s not about opposition. The way out of the labyrinth we’re stuck in takes decisive, personal turn toward each other.
It’s got to stop here in this little town. If we can’t do it here, it won’t be accomplished anywhere.
There will always be haters, bullies who are the abused kids who grow up to take their vengeance on the world. Former Mount Dora Topic editor knew more than a few of them, including Sheriff Willis McCall, one of the worst haters in Lake County history.
She called them bores. “Every town has two or three of them,” she once wrote. Bores, as she found, are equally odious and tedious. McCall terrorized the county’s black population from 1948 to 1972, getting confessions with lead-filled hoses, planting evidence, “disappearing” young men and kicking an inmate of his jail to death — never suffering a single legal consequence and all the while calling Reese “a damned liar” and sending justice her way in the form of KKK members burning a cross in her yard, throwing bombs and poisoning her dog. Odious and tedious, right to the end.
Looking beyond the bores, Reese instead chose to focus on the example of those who worked in partnership with their neighbors and community and country. Forgiving the wrongs done against them, these role models refused to let hatred perpetuate itself.
In a June 11, 1959, page 4 editorial of the Topic, Reese wrote about a young math instructor at the University of Pennsylvania whose 3–1/2 year-old-girl had been murdered by a 15 year-old boy. Instead of demanding “caveman vengeance” of “the gallows, the gas chamber, the electric chair” — he made the decisive turn. Standing dead center in his grief, he searched for the humanity of his daughter’s killer. Something made that boy into a killer — had twisted his heart with hate — how could it have happened? Strangely, only one truly so grieved could understand. He concluded,
Where a human being is denied an outlet for, and even an understanding of, the hostility, rage, fear, destructiveness that are as much a part of his nature as the desire to love, then something must explode.
Reese commented,
… he was saying that love must go deeper than this. It must be attuned to the darkness of the soul of another, as well as to its light that shines so beautifully on the surface. It must deal with the darkness intelligently; not simply trying to drive it underground with surpression and of the labeling of it as ‘bad.”
This man, she wrote, transformed hatred into compassion by looking into himself and saying, this thing of darkness I call my own.
These days, hater politics is the bat it’s all to easy to pick up and start swinging. Let a city manager resign, go after the deputy city manager, find a new city attorney. Empower citizen committees to direct city staff. Let the employees go. Or rise up and lead a recall effort to remove the council members who were voted in to get the bums out.
But beware. Behind every charismatic Trump there always a Putin. Division breeds divison. What seems outrageous today maybe become passe before long. Eventually the only folks who will be interested in politics will be score-settlers and those colisum enthusiasts who prefer bloody swords to olive branches. Plenty to worry about our national stage, and enough locally to keep this writer awake at night.
Alternately, we decide to stand still for the moment, look withing, and say that maybe marriage counseling is a better step than the one that leads off the cliff.
Mount Dora’s politics needn’t be so oppositional. Real political power — that power that guides growing communities — is built on healthy, strong and growing partnerships. As the former mayor of Minneapolis Sharon Belton once said, “Partnerships between government and citizens and communities save money, produce better outcomes, and increase citizen ownership in politics.”
Resident Merry Hadden said it best during public comment at the Jan. 26 meeting. What she said to council resonates from the center of our local labyrinth:
“This is an incredibly divided community, and I feel that you all could be a model for all the people here who are so divided. If you can come together and work together and act as role models, maybe the citizens can come together too and stop the name calling. Everybody is so tied to their ‘rightness.’ By us all getting so right, we have become so divided. I ask that you all follow the lead Mr. Crail started by trying to find a way for this community to heal.”
The choice is ours to let hate drive this town, or we all make a turn, take it down a notch and consider who our neighbors are — and ask just what part of Mount Dora they aren’t also citizens of. Maybe we’ll make that move now. I’d like to hear more about what made prior councils rubber-stamps. What is it about Mr. Reggentin that so enrages people. It’s better than defiant silence.
Maybe more bloodshed is required. Maybe we can’t stop what’s been released. Maybe some bridges can’t be un-burned, as Mark Slaby has said. Maybe Someplace Special is already Someplace Awful — another Florida swamp developing into a nightmare — because nobody made the move and said Enough.
Bullies aren’t easy to stand up to. It takes a wrench to stop the hate machine.
It takes a village — not to fight, but to partner.
— David Cohea (djcohea@gmail.com)
