The View from My Window

    I quit Facebook in part because I hoped it would help turn down my political temperature, which had been on the verge of reaching a boil. And then the guns began to fire — guns fired by cops, a gun fired at cops. I suppose, in one respect, it worked, because I have been able to follow the events without the need intensely to discuss them; I know what happened, I know what I think, and I suspect I know what’s being said by a certain set of American society, but I’ve prevented myself from being subjected to it, for the most part. I’m vaguely aware that there are some who are declaring that a race war has begun. I’m sure that some believe that the violence between police and the policed — especially the black policed — has become a war, too. But I haven’t seen the words on the page, and somehow the imagination makes me less angry than the fact.

    What worries me, though, is even though I’ve disengaged with the online discussion of the week’s events, my head is still populated with the voices of people that I’ve come to think of, in no uncertain terms, as enemies. They’re angry at me, for being a coastal elite, for being a neoliberal sellout, for being an avatar of white guilt, for trying to take their guns away, for looking down my nose when we speak, for not giving a shit what happens between the Snake and the Allegheny? It’s nothing to how angry I can become at them. I fantasize about committing violence against a faceless other who sometimes seems to blame for society’s ills. That this other is, to me, a bunch of white people who voted for tax cutters and police pushers, rather than a bunch of Mexican immigrants or urban black people, doesn’t change the fact that I default to the same thinking that I find so objectionable in others, just with the symbols changed. If we substituted something racially neutral for the words white and black, something politically neutral for the words conservative and liberal, then you can see that the logical operations I’m performing are no different. It disturbs me that my instincts run in such recognizably dangerous patterns.

    Look, if you’ve read this blog, you know what I think, though I suppose I should lay it out.

(1) First and foremost, that the Dallas shooter was an insane person whose motivations were dressed in the clothing of race war but were not caused by the actions of Black Lives Matter or other social justice movements.

(2) That the problem of gun violence is a problem of guns far more than it is a problem of violence.

(3) That there is and should be no war between races, or between any specific race and the police.

(4) That if such a war were to exist, the police and the people who empowered them to kill fired the first shots.

(5) But that “who fired the first shots” is a natural but destructive worry that only perpetuates violence and makes it feel infinite and inevitable — cf Israel & Palestine, Ireland & the United Kingdom, Pakistan & India.

(6) That these problems are soluble. France and Germany had war for hundreds of years, including two wars far more destructive than almost anybody alive today can truly fathom.

(7) That openness and space-sharing is as close as we have to a solution.

(8) That acclimation, rather than assimilation, should be the goal.

    And I can write these things, and they sound good, upstanding, right, and (let’s face it) nice; but still I have my tribe — the tribe of the urban, the left, the multiculty, the socialist, the skeptical, etc — and when my tribe is threatened I am reduced to just another slavering example of homo sapiens sapiens, troubled by difference, angry, potentially dangerous if threatened. I am, after all, a person, and sometimes that’s not such a good thing.

    This has been a hard few years. I think I know where the blame lies. But so what if I do, if all I do with blame is turn friends into enemies, humans into nonhumans, strangers into targets?

Rage

    So I didn’t put anything on social media about my thoughts going out to the victims of the Pulse shooting, and I didn’t change my profile picture, and I didn’t write about it the day it happened. There are a lot of reasons why not — that such gestures feel disingenuous to me was a lot of it — but the chief one, the one I feel right now, the one I felt last night as I sat in a bar reading a book and imagining what it would be like if someone walked through the front door and blew the head off the nice-seeming hipster next to me, is that all I have is completely and totally impotent rage. The impotence and the rage go hand-in-hand: the former wouldn’t feel so terrible without the latter; the latter wouldn’t exist without the former. They are the parents of my silence.

    Maybe later in the week I’ll find something cogent to say about the way the fetishization of the founders and Scalia-ization of how we read the Constitution has turned the American right into a death cult more dedicated to lethal toys than sane regulation or living in world not completely diamond-plated in fantasies both dark and light; maybe I’ll pile stats upon stats, make an argument, worry less about how little will change, how nobody who matters will hear, and how it doesn’t even matter if they do — because the most important and powerful people in the world, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, already agree, and yet we are held hostage by the vile fantasies of a collection of venal, small, pathetic weaklings who imagine that their guns make them John Wayne, and that their exclusive desire to fuck women and only women makes them the arbiters of what is right and whole and good; they believe that those who neither tote guns nor participate in their oppressive fertility rituals really, on some level, are just borrowing our lives from them anyway, so who gives a fuck if a bunch of fags in some fag club get shot up? Maybe one day I’ll operationalize this feeling, but for now, all I know is that I would like to hit somebody, hard, and let them know that they deserve it as I do it. I won’t — I never have — but for the love of God I would like to. This murder could stop, if the venal and evil motherfuckers who refuse to stop it truly believed that people who are not like them were human. But it fucking doesn’t, because they fucking don’t, and fuck them all right in their smug fucking faces for it.

    This hits on every note in a chord of rage for me, fortissimo, because my family has been forever altered by the fact that my mentally ill foster brother owned a gun, a gun he used to murder his child and then himself; because I have been writing about, striving for, and just really yearning for gay rights since I was 13 years old; because those on the right who wish to pretend that this is not their fault have turned this into an almost literal crusade against those they consider alien again, talking about “radical Islam” as though any of this could be separated from the homophobia and gun fetishization that they preach on a daily basis; because, in a way that isn’t true of a grade school or a college campus or a military base, this is somewhere that I could easily have been, because that kid texting with his mother could have been me, because the dead lying on the ground might have been my friends, gone, erased by a murder machine purchased legally and deployed exactly as it was designed to be employed.

    Fuck it. In the way of the impotently rageful I have no conclusion, nothing useful to add. I just haven’t been right in more than a day. I’ve been edgy and impolite to strangers. I broke my smoke detector when it went off while I was cooking dinner, because I was so angry. This is over. These are my days of rage.