Hostility--Part 2
This promised post has been churning along out of sight inside my cranium--in search of a starting point and logical connections, while other urgent matters received attention.
I finished an earlier post with this summary: "Believing the hyped-danger-rhetoric hypes the fear which hypes the hostility." The statement came at the end of telling about the second of two recent local incidents when a resident attacked a person who installed a new electric meter at a private residence. I believe the two people who acted with hostility feared that the new electric meters were causing harm of various kinds. I'm making a connection between these fear-based events and some of the otherwise-incomprehensible behaviors of supporters of a certain candidate in this presidential election campaign.
Caveat: In order to communicate as clearly as possible, I'll skip many of the balancing qualifiers that would normally be inserted as I go along.
I believe loyalty to a "savior" candidate is a logical result of loyalty first to fear-mongering media commentators who have been riding high on the talk show airwaves since 1996 when Fox News came live. Never before this, while reaching this large an audience, had so many public and political events been painted in such sinister terms. Loyal listeners came to believe that every media story had a darker backstory--one that the "liberal media" didn't want you to hear. Those brave souls who told the dark stories became heroes to their admiring listeners, serious moral failures in some of the heroes notwithstanding. The internet era has brought additional "heroes" to the fore--in the form of print sources that pop up relentlessly in social media news feeds, at least for those who have clicked on those links in the past.
Against that background, a presidential candidate who promises to confront all those dark things looks like a hero too. Never mind that he has no rational plan in place to actually do more than speak boastful words about the force of his own personality and power to influence. Never mind that hostility is expressed in copious amounts by that candidate. Never mind that the candidate incites acts of violence.
I have seen professing Christian loyalists offer no answer when pressed to say what evil characteristics or actions would mark a threshold beyond which they would personally withdraw support for this candidate. Why can't they see that reasonable and responsible and Christian thresholds have long ago been crossed--with no apparent effect on the loyalists' adulation?
Matt Walsh may be right when he cites two heresies that serve as blinders for many such Christians: the prosperity gospel (God wants you to be rich) and the compartmentalization of life into sacred and secular (life outside of church need not be affected by matters of faith). It's true that if you believe you are entitled to wealth and that a leader's morals are irrelevant, an immoral person who promises you wealth will hold a lot of appeal.
Do you see how it works? Once enough fear has been generated, people are willing to overlook almost anything otherwise troubling in a person who promises to protect from those fearful prospects. If he promises also that good things will happen for you under his leadership, so much the better.
People loyal to the DDT/TNT candidate (or however the mix of explosives and poison is properly labeled) protest vociferously when anyone draws parallels between Hitler and the afore-mentioned presidential candidate. The comparisons between the German citizenry during Hitler's rise and the American citizenry now are, in my mind, the truly frightening similar aspect between 1933 Germany and 2016 America. I'll leave the Hitler personality for others to parse, but as we all know, citizens believing his fear-mongering speech vilifying the "other-ness" of anyone (Communists and Jews primarily) who is not "us" (the Nazis) reached unthinkably horrible measures in Germany. I note too that one of Hitler's campaign slogans was "Freedom and Bread"--very appealing in an era of widespread joblessness and poverty following the Great Depression and the German humiliation of World War I. People believed that Hitler would be "good for business." This link tells the story credibly. If you click on the next part of the story at the bottom of each page as I did, you can keep on reading for quite a while.
"Don't ever forget what happened [during the holocaust]," an elderly survivor told Marvin and Rosa N. recently in Israel. Part of what happened then was that an entire citizenry believed the rhetoric of a leader who vilified those who were not Anglo-Saxon by "race." Americans who do the same thing today are indeed forgetting or doing something worse--remembering, while embracing the attendant hostility. That's a grim result indeed of something that began several decades ago when people began to embrace fear-inducing rhetoric and allowed it to poison their minds and hearts.
"For God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind." 2 Timothy 1: 7.
I finished an earlier post with this summary: "Believing the hyped-danger-rhetoric hypes the fear which hypes the hostility." The statement came at the end of telling about the second of two recent local incidents when a resident attacked a person who installed a new electric meter at a private residence. I believe the two people who acted with hostility feared that the new electric meters were causing harm of various kinds. I'm making a connection between these fear-based events and some of the otherwise-incomprehensible behaviors of supporters of a certain candidate in this presidential election campaign.
Caveat: In order to communicate as clearly as possible, I'll skip many of the balancing qualifiers that would normally be inserted as I go along.
I believe loyalty to a "savior" candidate is a logical result of loyalty first to fear-mongering media commentators who have been riding high on the talk show airwaves since 1996 when Fox News came live. Never before this, while reaching this large an audience, had so many public and political events been painted in such sinister terms. Loyal listeners came to believe that every media story had a darker backstory--one that the "liberal media" didn't want you to hear. Those brave souls who told the dark stories became heroes to their admiring listeners, serious moral failures in some of the heroes notwithstanding. The internet era has brought additional "heroes" to the fore--in the form of print sources that pop up relentlessly in social media news feeds, at least for those who have clicked on those links in the past.
Against that background, a presidential candidate who promises to confront all those dark things looks like a hero too. Never mind that he has no rational plan in place to actually do more than speak boastful words about the force of his own personality and power to influence. Never mind that hostility is expressed in copious amounts by that candidate. Never mind that the candidate incites acts of violence.
I have seen professing Christian loyalists offer no answer when pressed to say what evil characteristics or actions would mark a threshold beyond which they would personally withdraw support for this candidate. Why can't they see that reasonable and responsible and Christian thresholds have long ago been crossed--with no apparent effect on the loyalists' adulation?
Matt Walsh may be right when he cites two heresies that serve as blinders for many such Christians: the prosperity gospel (God wants you to be rich) and the compartmentalization of life into sacred and secular (life outside of church need not be affected by matters of faith). It's true that if you believe you are entitled to wealth and that a leader's morals are irrelevant, an immoral person who promises you wealth will hold a lot of appeal.
Do you see how it works? Once enough fear has been generated, people are willing to overlook almost anything otherwise troubling in a person who promises to protect from those fearful prospects. If he promises also that good things will happen for you under his leadership, so much the better.
People loyal to the DDT/TNT candidate (or however the mix of explosives and poison is properly labeled) protest vociferously when anyone draws parallels between Hitler and the afore-mentioned presidential candidate. The comparisons between the German citizenry during Hitler's rise and the American citizenry now are, in my mind, the truly frightening similar aspect between 1933 Germany and 2016 America. I'll leave the Hitler personality for others to parse, but as we all know, citizens believing his fear-mongering speech vilifying the "other-ness" of anyone (Communists and Jews primarily) who is not "us" (the Nazis) reached unthinkably horrible measures in Germany. I note too that one of Hitler's campaign slogans was "Freedom and Bread"--very appealing in an era of widespread joblessness and poverty following the Great Depression and the German humiliation of World War I. People believed that Hitler would be "good for business." This link tells the story credibly. If you click on the next part of the story at the bottom of each page as I did, you can keep on reading for quite a while.
"Don't ever forget what happened [during the holocaust]," an elderly survivor told Marvin and Rosa N. recently in Israel. Part of what happened then was that an entire citizenry believed the rhetoric of a leader who vilified those who were not Anglo-Saxon by "race." Americans who do the same thing today are indeed forgetting or doing something worse--remembering, while embracing the attendant hostility. That's a grim result indeed of something that began several decades ago when people began to embrace fear-inducing rhetoric and allowed it to poison their minds and hearts.
"For God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind." 2 Timothy 1: 7.
posted by Mrs. I (Miriam Iwashige) at
7:38 PM
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