Put Covid aside for a moment. Disorder is the more worrisome virus.
It is a world-wide phenomenon. There are no ‘centers’ anymore, no median ground unless that place or people are held in thrall by state terror, by Orwellian surveillance and secret police. In those nations whose dictators seem terrified that their own power will not endure without utter ruthlessness, the center does hold but only under the threat of violence.
Everywhere one looks in our country, one sees chasms cracking open in politics, culture, national identity, national myth. I have never known of a lonelier, more isolated, more alienated citizenry. One sees a poisonous social media, a pandemic exhausted citizenry, schools under attack, more insurrections threatened, families and children under immense stress, gun violence at epidemic proportions, a feeling that many accept a moral expediency as long as their goals are met, that ends justify means, that there is ‘one law for me but no law for you’.
It feels as if we have become a polity defined by enemies, a few that are real but most only imagined. The real enemies are predatory threats; their collective actions are there for all to see, their real-world effects apparent. Think mobs at the Capitol and at school board meetings; think voter suppression; think rising murder rates; think economic inequality and the malignant power of most American oligarchs. Think an American Big Tech industry with substantial Totalitarian leanings.
Many uses of the word ‘enemies’, however, are conjured out of fear and cynicism (how best can a talk show drive ratings). The enemy is the other, the alien, the illegal, the n*****, the thug, the stranger, the redneck, the one who is unlike us.
Any group can become the other, even the police. A friend of mine, a young man in his early 30’s and an immigrant, lives in Bedford Stuyvesant. Sometimes he uses dating sites to meet a woman. He estimated that well over 30% of the young women from Brooklyn whose photos and info he looked at used the initials ACAB on their displays — All Cops Are Bastards.
Democrats are the enemies. Black people are the enemies. Trump supporters are the enemies. The Government is the enemy. Militia groups are the enemy. Cops, gangs, service workers.
Things themselves too: vaccines are the enemy, as are cities, laws, automobiles, the oil industry, capitalism, socialism, The New York Times, wolves, pipelines, Native Americans opposing the pipelines.
Anyone who presumes to wield authority is the enemy.
We are coming to the end of something on this continent, the lower 48 of it at least. The City-Rural divide, the Blue-Red chasm, the Secular-Evangelical split, Republican-Democrat, Evidence believers-Conspiracists, Black-White, Wealth-Everyone else, the Tribalists and … I’m not sure because it feels as if we are all gathering into makeshift tribes. Soon that divide will also include those with water and those without, those whose ground is flooding and those who live on higher ground, those who must escape the heat and those already living above certain degrees of latitude.
By definition, an enemy actively harms one. There is nothing neutral or wait-and-see in the word. This is the crucial point: Until an enemy is either defeated or converted, he or she is incurably hostile and therefore may be opposed by any means necessary. An enemy may be reformed but enemies, the plural, the mass, the swarm, must be crushed. Enemies cannot be reformed until they are crushed. Even that may not be enough. Nightmares can be fixed onto the word crushed — everything from restraining to imprisoning, from interrupting to annihilating. Annihilation is the gold standard of how to deal with an enemy. As Stalin said, “Death is the solution to all problems. No man – no problem.”
We aren’t there yet, not in 2022 America, but my God rage seems to saturate the air — gun sales through the roof, people screaming at school board members, at retail workers, at flight attendants, homicides up in cities all over the country, and the unmasked, unvaccinated proclaiming their freedom to infect at the top of their lungs.
It’s not as if we have not seen annihilation used as a weapon, actually watched it unfold on TV in Rwanda with the mass murder of Tutsis by Hutus, in Kosovo and Serbia with Milosevich, in Syria perpetrated by Assad and the Russians, in Ireland where 4000 were murdered in the ‘Troubles’.
There is nothing exceptional about America or Americans. Civil structures can break down here, political conflicts metastasize, vigilantes come out of the poisoned atmosphere believing in their own righteousness. Bad people come to power. Sometimes checks and balances become corrupted. The law, imperfect in the best of times, becomes a weapon of the powerful rather than a shield for the powerless.
The threat is in our hedonism, our yearnings for ideological purity, our right wing and left-wing fantasies. The threat is in a climate we as a species have set to war upon our fragile human creations — cities, nations and their absurd imaginary boundaries, all of the natural world, political stability everywhere. The threat is in our hubris as a species and in our inexhaustible ability to delude ourselves that others may suffer but we are safe.
Threats seem to materialize overnight. The threat is the many who are enamored of ignorance and proclaim it as defiance. The threat is in the old man who holds court in Florida. The threat is in the gerontocracy that holds office in Washington. The threat is in the impatience of those who are tired of waiting, of those who believe in ‘inferior races’, of those who have had it with the rule of law and who believe they have the guns and the right to use them to wipe away all impediments.
Jacqueline Rose wrote that “violence flourishes [under the power] of its own unstoppable conviction.” It becomes “a form of entitlement (3).” *
The ultimate form of disorder is murder and the worst of murder in democracies occurs in civil conflicts that devolve into political free-for-alls’, into rival groups who are certain that their struggle is existential, and their opposition are beasts.
I do not know when or if political assassinations will erupt, again, or if tribal mass murder will blow us into pieces. The first, I’ve seen in 1968. The second remains unimaginable here, but imagination has always been a poor instrument in predicting the worst. Disorder, by its nature, does not obey the laws of reason. It moves according to the laws of hysteria and the laws of physics as applied to weapons. It moves according to the whims of mobs and unreasoning fear and makes use of the tinder-dry fuel of lies and wild conspiracies. Once unbound, it burns down everything in its path. Disorder’s apotheosis is the firestorm, and I know of nothing that is fireproof.
*On Violence and On Violence Against Women
