Whose Comfort?
I was riding the Red Line North to Howard last month when a fairly average looking man absolutely lost it because another man was standing with his back to him for a few stops, and he thus presumed he was being actively disrespected by having a rear end a foot away from his face, and further, that the standing man must be gay and was deliberately humiliating him. This was expressed in much more homophobic and vulgar terms.
He fulminated out loud for about three minutes but finally moved to a different seat, while the standing man wisely didn’t engage. His actual sexuality remains unknown, but it didn’t matter, intolerance and rage had sought out their target.
I did the normal calculations about when and how to intervene if needed, while another man finally offered the man who had just finished having a profanity-laden snit this smug platitude from across the aisle: “People are getting too comfortable out here…”
Leaving aside the absolute lack of provocation and the level of sexual insecurity that would cause a man to fly into a rage over a situation literally prompted by the design of the train, and how homophobia is a guard rail against interrogating what “masculinity” is or could be, this sentence which was meant to encourage him after after he suffered this imaginary slight was what really stuck with me. “People are getting too comfortable…”
By “people,” in this situation he of course directly meant people like me, but this statement speaks more broadly to a larger issue in this moment, as anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-women and anti-history bills rooted deeply in racism are being proposed and passed at local and state levels, and books are banned or burned: the continued weaponization of unexamined comfort as a presumed right of the majority, and generally the white majority, which cannot forfend deviance from whatever “norms” they believe should have never been anything but inviolable in the first place.
Just by standing there, the man on the strap somehow aggressively projected “the other,” and in an atmosphere of increasing intolerance that somehow called for a correction.
The cult of victimhood on the right in particular has always been puzzling to me. Even now, with changing demographics, the white male Christian majority still holds most of the power in what is supposed to be a secular Republic.
But, especially in a post-Trump world, the grievance has become the message, nevermind that actual oppression is actually very unpleasant and the Conservative victim complex cannot actually coexist in tandem with it, so it must be denied and erased.
And certainly we have seen over decades that the right wing’s most consistently successful strategy has been to weaponize the cultural grievances of poorly educated whites to maintain the wealth and patriarchal status of a white elite that could care less about them.
Trumpism didn’t totally change that dynamic, but now the useful rubes want to be on top too, and they are not politely masking their general intolerance and bigotry as the GOP old guard would have it, and unfortunately they are increasingly totally driving the direction of the GOP.
And while it’s undeniably psychologically advantageous in maintaining the cohesion of any given group to make sure the members of the group believe that there are many hostile forces arrayed against them, (it’s particularly useful in the Evangelical context where the perceived enemy is actually Satan,) as that assures that the members of the group will then fiercely gird themselves against any possible incursions against their cohesion by a perceived other, and in fact the worst strains of current conservatism render any actual experience of oppression completely unnecessary: for instance, this week’s convoy protesting against already lifted mandates. The experience of perceived grievance is the only point.
The viral New York Times op-ed of March 7th purportedly bemoaning conservative self-censorship turned out not to be just a sophomorically written collection of talking points and imaginary grievances, but a literal Psy-Op by the folks at “Fire,” for whom the slighted author is apparently an intern.
The same group who were not very coincidentally advertising their “Free Speech” organization in the Times just a day later with an image of MLK delivering the “I Have A Dream Speech,” which, if you clicked on the link, led directly to their email collection page, which features an anodyne paragraph about the purported war on free speech that is apparently raging in this Country.
Of course, this organization is really interested in only a select kind of free speech, which depends on the forced silencing of the other kinds.
There is not even a legitimate rhetorical equivalency between a conservative-leaning University student pausing before blurting out whatever half-baked opinions they hold at the age of 19, and Government bodies actually trying to legislate out of existence the actual history of American racism, anti-semitism and Native genocide, while also trying to erase gay lives, prevent women from accessing safe abortions, and attempting to make any aspect of living a dignified life impossible for transgender people, but the “debate me” crowd would purport differently.
And not coincidentally. what word comes up again and again in these retrograde “save the children” gambits at running the clock back to a time when those totally or even partially outside of the White Patriarchal Christian order were made to understand through violence and erasure that they had no voice and no possible social mobility? “Comfort.”
Whether you are talking about bad faith efforts at rewriting American history to paper over the sickening violence and cruelty a slavery-based economy necessitated to shield little Johnny from the reality of the United States as a historical institution, or attempting to codify into law that accepting parents of transgender children are actually child abusers, the end goal is the same, to weaponize the contradictory yet coexistent senses of entitlement and victimhood that seem to animate a large sector of this Country, and use that emotionally charged perception to create foot soldiers in a very particular crusade, to place power entirely back into the hands of those who held it unchecked for Centuries, and did unspeakable damage with it all throughout our history, which a body politic might reasonably be less suspicious of if access to the actual historical record is curtailed, and the insistent voices of those who cannot live authentic and unbothered lives under such an order are not gagged.
There is a reason that the “final, most essential command” of an authoritiarian regime, as George Orwell’s wrote, is that its citizenry “reject the evidence of their eyes and ears.” Dissent and cultural pluralism are both kryptonite to fascism, and in their embrace of demagogic morons and retrogressive social policies the current conservative movement has laid its motives bare.
In their framing, comfort rightly belongs to the already comfortable, no matter how alight they may be with manufactured grievance, and not to anyone who dares to flout their eroding but still existent grip on power.
This why there is such urgency behind the attempts to erase and silence minorities of every stripe. Pluralism has been winning, but the electoral victory of President Obama certainly lit a fire under American racists that one hundred percent created a vacuum for a craven demagogue like Trump to be sucked into power.
Little by little, by the grace of individual bravery and political tenacity, those outside the long-standing power structures have built cultural capital, but being unable to win on ideas or by popular consensus, these retrogressive forces are going to continue to use every legal and rhetorical means to repress, erase and destroy the most vulnerable among us, no matter how craven the means.
They may not eventually win, or be able to bring their worse fascistic fantasies to life, but the very narrow defeat of the January 6th insurgency should show us how narrow the tipping point is right now, and illuminate just how clearly these people have told us who they are, and what they are capable of, in service of their one and only goal: to hold onto their completely undeserved power by any means necessary.