So far, after the horrors of what happened in Boston yesterday, hope and love are winning out over fear and hate, but only by the tiniest of ever-slimming margins. I so desperately want to strike a positive note today, to focus on the stories of selfless heroism, generosity, and compassion that are still coming out of this event. As Patton Oswalt brilliantly said yesterday, “when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, ‘The good outnumber you, and we always will.'” Julie Gillis wrote that “we know there is something better than hating and hurting, something that is just as much our birthright as our breath. Love.”
We still don’t know who is responsible for the attack, whether it is a coordinated strike by a group of pathetic sociopaths or the act of a lone pathetic sociopath. This is where the negative comes in. We seem to be wired as a species, or at least as a culture, to focus on the negative or the prurient.
News of overwhelming donations of time, supplies, and blood cannot possibly compete with frenzied, breathless accusations against anyone’s favored bad guy, especially right now, when those accusations are utterly unburdened by the weight of any evidence whatsoever. And so we have the utterly predictable chorus of rants from the usual suspects about who might be responsible. Fox News claims Muslims, without a shred of evidence. Alex Jones claims a government conspiracy, or maybe the Illuminati, or maybe the radio transmitters implanted in his skull by video games. Westboro Baptist Church continues to do everything in their power to ensure that no one except protesters will attend their own funerals some day. Finally, there is the possibility that the Boston attack was the work of right-wing extremists, who most likely are white, and probably male. And that’s where the real hysteria starts.
American distance runner Karen Goucher, who finished sixth yesterday.
If I have learned anything in my exploration of the concept of “privilege” over the past few years, it is that hell hath no fury like a privileged white male forced to confront the implications of his privilege. By “fury,” of course, I actually mean pathetic whining. This is true of most basic challenges to someone’s alpha-male self-image, and it appears to be equally true for ideologues of a rightward bent, when faced with the reality that other people of a further-rightward bent have engaged, do engage, and undoubtedly will continue to engage in acts of domestic terrorism. When the Department of Homeland Security completed a study that began during the Bush administration, and found a heightened risk of homegrown right-wing acts of terror, you might have thought that the agency was proposing confiscating all the guns at Fox News headquarters (it was not proposing that.) As far as I am concerned, given the hue and cry raised about that report, right-wingers doth protest too much when it comes to concerns over right-wing domestic terrorism. Now that an attack has occurred on American soil, they’re not going to wait for any actual accusations to occur—they’re going to start whining now.
Even before 9/11, Arab- and Muslim-Americans had apparently developed what Khaled A. Beydoun called their own distinct “psychosis” in response to news of terror attacks, of hoping that the perpetrator(s) are not Arabs or Muslims:
That gut-wrenching anxiety and debilitating concern, borne out of the implicated guilt that follows every modern terrorist attack from World Trade Center I to Sandy Hook, emerged into a collective Arab and Muslim-American psychosis. Indeed, it may typify best what it has come to mean to be Arab or Muslim-American.
Let’s face it: Americans tend to view Arabs and Muslims as either terrorists or sympathetic to terrorists. The simplest explanation for this is that we are generally both ignorant and stupid when it comes to people who are not from America, or who do not look or act the way white people think Americans should act. I’m not even talking about the fact that many people do not know that “Arab” and “Muslim” are not synonymous. When a terror attack happens, people jump to conclusions, but the population-wide ire directed at Arabs and Muslims does not seem to extend to any other group. Prior to the 9/11 terror attacks, the deadliest terrorist act on American soil was the work of a group of disgruntled white guys in Oklahoma, but we did not pass sweeping legislation that allowed for group of pale-skinned men with crew cuts to be rounded up and shipped off to places unknown in the dead of night for “enhanced interrogation techniques.” We reserved that treatment for the Arabs and Muslims in our midst.
As an aside, I suppose I should allow for the possibility that we actually did render and torture militia members after the Oklahoma City bombings, but if we did, the details of such a plan remain tightly under wraps. What would differentiate this from what we know happened after 9/11 is that we didn’t brag about torturing people.
Now then, we as a nation seem to have no problem blaming Arabs and Muslims for our problems, whether it is warranted or not, but our right-wingers can’t bear the idea that someone might even think that some of them might be involved in terrorism. In fact, right-wingers tend to be the ones openly advocating for the right to rebel against the government, even though none of them have the courage to state openly who, exactly, they intend to kill. People on the right have instead decided to practice some preemptive whining, complaining that President Obama might try to blame them because the attack in Boston occurred on both Tax Day and Patriots’ Day. Oh, and this week is the anniversary of a bunch of other stuff, too. The American right can dish it out, but they shrivel up like slugs on poorly-cleaned gym equipment when asked to take it.
Not to be outdone, of course, the American tradition of conspiracy theories was doing a fine job of humiliating itself almost from the get-go. I am fascinated by the conspiracy phenomenon, but do not consider it worthy of much of my time. As a particularly unintentionally-amusing bit of conspiracist drivel from yesterday demonstrates, nearly all of these conspiracy ideas derive largely from colossal misunderstandings of both Occam’s Razor and the adage “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
I want to look at the good in people today, but my gaze is drawn to the frightened and the angry, those on the losing side of history who, while they will eventually fade away into deserved obscurity, still have the potential of a cornered animal to do serious harm. I want the perpetrators of yesterday’s crime to be exposed for the pitiful waste of genetic material that they are, but I do not want even more pain, anger, or hate. My point in all of this (and I did not set out to write a more-than-1,000-word screed here) is that maybe it is time for those on the right who have, for the most part, uttered their martial rhetoric openly and with little fear, to feel what it is like to be hated and reviled. I would not support actual acts of vigilantism, but I can’t help but think that the defensiveness that is evident on the right today is an example of turnabout being fair play.
Photo credit: ‘Boston marathon mile 25 beacon street 050418’ by Pingswept [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons; ‘Kara Goucher Boston 2009’ by Stewart Dawson (Crop of Boston Marathon 2009 – Leading Women) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
