Posted on 01/21/2019 12:52:13 PM PST by servo1969
One of the most chilling aspects of the hatred fanned by the duplicitous reporting on the videotaped incident regarding the Covington students and the 60-something Native American has been the venomous rage directed against the face of one of the students, as well as the conclusions drawn about the expression on the face and what it might signify about the person.
I've talked about Orwell before in connection with all of this, and I'm going to bring him up again, because the anger unleashed resembles Orwell's Two Minutes Hate (although this hasn't been limited to two minutes at a time). In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell wrote of the feeling stirred up in the audience--interestingly enough, by a propaganda film designed for the purpose:
A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.
The image that provoked a truly hideous rage in an enormous number of people on the left and some on the right was of a teenaged boy named Nicholas Sandmann, whose statement can be found here along with the video screenshot that seems to have sparked the most outrage:
"Bullying" doesn't even begin to describe what has been done to Sandmann by supposedly responsible and thoughtful adults. Even if the original story of what occurred had been true--and it was most definitely not--the depth of the rage would be way out of line.
Here's just one example:
That smug, entitled smile is instantly recognizable. https://t.co/rOs0ybXDD5
-- Slate (@Slate) January 21, 2019
From the article by Ruth Graham, which shows us what the author is fantasizing based on the manipulated story and video:
I think the real reason the clip has spread is simpler: It's the kid's face. The face of self-satisfaction and certitude, of edginess expressed as cruelty. The face remains almost completely still as his peers hoot in awed delight at his bravado. The face is both punchable and untouchable. Many observers recognized it right away.
What is it they "recognized"? A face that is now permissible to hate, apparently; they're not shy about writing about their hate and signing their names to it. That face is white, male, and supposedly "privileged" (whether they know a single thing about that person's actual life circumstances or not). I have come to think of it in a kind of shorthand as hatred towards the "frat boy" in their minds. And it's not new, although I've never before seen a national eruption of this hatred expressed towards someone who is not yet an adult
This hatred is bigoted and prejudiced, pure and simple. The hatred's origins lie not just in the work the media had undertaken to shape its audience towards feeling this hatred--although that is most definitely part of it--but it also is an opportunity for the viewer to draw in all sorts of historical references to other white men and/or boys they have grown to hate, and to make often-absurd parallels.
Graham obliges by telling us who those other white men she hates might be, the ones Sandmann supposedly resembles and conjures up in her fevered brain [emphasis mine]:
The face is in this photo of a clutch of white young men crowding around a single black man at a lunch counter sit-in in Virginia in the 1960s, and in many other images of jeering white men from that era. The face is the rows of Wisconsin high school boys flashing Nazi salutes in a prom picture last year. The face is Brett Kavanaugh--then a student at an all-boys Catholic prep school--"drunkenly laughing" as he allegedly held down Christine Blasey Ford. Anyone who knew the popular white boys in high school recognized it: the confident gaze, the eyes twinkling with menace, the smirk. The face of a boy who is not as smart as he thinks he is, but is exactly as powerful. The face that sneers, "What? I'm just standing here," if you flinch or cry or lash out. The face knows that no matter how you react, it wins.
There are hints there of what's going on in the minds of the haters. A reversal in which the white Sandmann--who actually had been "crowded" by the Native American, Phillips, and was also the object of bigoted racial taunts towards whites from the Black Israelites--becomes falsely identified by Graham with bigoted white aggressors from the past, solely on the basis of their races. Blacks and Native Americans are victims, whites are victimizers, because of the way they look.
The Kavanaugh reference is obvious, and shows the damage done by that entire brouhaha--the stirring up of this same rage against the supposed predations of the "laughing" preppie. Before that, we had the "Jackie" lies in Rolling Stone and the demonization of a fraternity as a result. And prior to that, of course, the Duke lacrosse team falsely accused.
Graham also alludes to more personal origins of this feeling, which for some people at least comes from high school experiences in which some white jock or frat boy was mean to them. That has become a stereotype, reinforced by countless teen flicks and TV shows where this is a stock character. The person is seen as entitled, self-centered, rich, powerful. And hated, well into adulthood.
It's a pernicious, dangerous game being played here. People such as Graham are now perpetrators who see themselves as the righteous ones. This hatred is growing thanks to the awfulness of Twitter, although it was around long before Twitter ever came to exist. One of the most memorable examples comes from 2003, when TNR's Jonathan Chait wrote a piece that begins "I hate George Bush" and goes on to say [emphasis mine]:
There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I'm tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too. I hate the inequitable way he has come to his economic and political achievements and his utter lack of humility (disguised behind transparently false modesty) at having done so. His favorite answer to the question of nepotism--"I inherited half my father's friends and all his enemies"--conveys the laughable implication that his birth bestowed more disadvantage than advantage. He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudopopulist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing--a way to establish one's social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.
There seem to be quite a few of us Bush haters. I have friends who have a viscerally hostile reaction to the sound of his voice or describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche. Nor is this phenomenon limited to my personal experience: Pollster Geoff Garin, speaking to The New York Times, called Bush hatred "as strong as anything I've experienced in 25 years now of polling." Columnist Robert Novak described it as a "hatred ... that I have never seen in 44 years of campaign watching."
Bush, at least, was a grown man and a public figure who had put himself in the limelight. Sandmann is not. And yet the root of the rage appears to be the same.
The people hating on Sandmann ought to be ashamed of themselves, but there is no indication of even a flicker of that feeling. Nor are they likely to damp down their hatred based on the evidence of Sandmann's innocence.
They know that face, you see, and it's the face of their enemy.
[ADDENDUM: Some people on the left have been deleting their most rabid tweets, apparently. I would bet a large sum of money that this is because they are afraid of lawsuits. These boys were not public figures, so Sullivan would not apply even for the newspeople.]
I used to wonder how seemingly decent people could look the other way while the Nazis murdered millions of innocent people. But what is happening in this country makes me wonder no more.
BookMark
This Phillips clown is all tom tom and no ponies.
I see you still have a statement condemning the victims who were verbally assaulted by a group of African Americans and physically assaulted by a long time activist up on your website. It is unwise to spread the same falsehood which the media promulgated on Saturday. Thanks to which your children, whom you are supposed to protect, are now subject to death threats from Hollywood and the Twitterverse. It is well past time that you remove your untrue and offensive statement and apologize to the students. A real Shepherd would meet with them in person and talk about the situation and the dangers of bearing false witness against thy neighbor. As of now, the students seem to be the only adults in the diocese.
This may be the ultimate Rorschach test for America. Half see a sneering, belittling little prick, and the other half see a brave, confident and steadfast... I’m talking about the aboriginal American of course.
To be precise,
a WHITE CONSERVATIVE teenage boy.
One time I did not smile and I reacted to the taunt. She cursed me and I reacted in kind using a similar word. By the time I got home that night I was seething mad at everything and everybody and that is not my nature. I had to walk things back and I finally figured out that something demonic came home with me. It took me a couple of weeks to wrangle that thing out of me with prayer, fasting and consulting a priest.
So, when facing evil the only thing you can do is smile.
There is no lower form of scum than a Democrat.
Bishops are not our elected representatives. Unless you are a Catholic in good standing, registered in a parish of the diocese, you have no business commanding the attention of the bishop or his staff. Your letters and sentiments will likely be ignored as irrelevant, which in this case they are.
It’s very hard to have any optimism about the future in light of this stuff. Happens too often. Innocent people are selected for termination and are tagged as racist. Then their lives are ruined.
I am a Catholic in good standing, ask my pastor and I have every right to point out poor behavior by any diocese in the known universe.
To be openly conservative in public these days is to be a target. If you are not attacked directly you may be subjected to verbal or physical provocations designed to get you to react inapproriately so as to make YOU the aggressor. It may cost you your job, reputation, privacy, assets or
freedom. Remember that in any of these interactions the default assumption is that you are quilty.
Saw something very like this in the matter of the wrestler disqualified for his massive dreadlocks by the ref. The next day the ref was a “disgusting pig” according to a league official.
To be openly conservative in public these days is to be a target. If you are not attacked directly you may be subjected to verbal or physical provocations designed to get you to react inapproriately so as to make YOU the aggressor. It may cost you your job, reputation, privacy, assets or
freedom. Remember that in any of these interactions the default assumption is that you are quilty.
____________________
Each of us is, by default, proxy for all of us.
This is our equivalent of “the talk” black parents feel compelled to deliver to their children.
I was 8 years old in 1951. My parents had “the talk” with me:
“Remember, when you are out in public and do anything at all, people will not say ‘That little girl with the dark hair did something. They will say ‘That Jewish girl did it.’ Everything you say or do reflects upon all Jews.”
I grew up with people who escaped the Warsaw ghetto. I was 3 months old when my father went to war and 3 years old when he returned. My best friend’s father was killed in that war and the only thing her granny ever said to me, more than once, was “When are you going to go live in Israel?”
I had an obsession with the camps when I was about 14 (1957). Today, I believe it was a form of PTSD by proxy. I experienced a fair amount of prejudice and hate in the 1950s in central Illinois. In high school, we Jewish kids had our own place in morning study hall. We called it The Gaza Strip because we were surrounded on three sides by enemies.
These times will leave a lasting mark on the young, white conservative children in America. They will lose/have lost a form of American innocence by being the objects of hate and libel.This will likely push some of them to excel even beyond the level they reach today. Others will *assimilate* by becoming SJWs and wokescolds. Some will just give up and become a future type of hippie. It is a form of death and rebirth for them all.
My heart just weeps.
No, you do not have that prerogative as a “right” outside your home diocese in normal circumstances. However you do have the right to persist in your ignorance and thus make a fool of yourself. Catholics do so all the time, thus adding to the chaos.
BTTT, FRiend.
*Bump*
Nailed it.
re: “I used to wonder how seemingly decent people could look the other way while the Nazis murdered millions of innocent people. But what is happening in this country makes me wonder no more.”
I used to wonder that too. I now have a better idea how things ‘went down’ in Germany in the 1930’s time frame.
Mine is going out hard copy tomorrow along with one to Archbishop Kurtz.
This has been the straw. I managed to keep it together through the stonewalling sexual assault crisis, but having them jump on this kid before the facts were known just telegraphed the fact that the bishops are in league with the left. To curry favor, to play for popularity and find their social milieu with the elite seems to be more important than leading the flocks.
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