Hate-Filled SCREED!!!!!!!

We went to a free Shakespeare thing in the park thing last night, here in Los Angeles. We’ve done that before, and it’s a fun summer thing with a bunch of enjoyable elements. The actors who aren’t on stage at the moment sort of hang out at the edge of the clearing, mixing with the people who are just walking their dogs through the park, and families sit around on blankets — so actors wind their way through the audience to get back to the stage, and you have to move your cheese plate so the king doesn’t step on it. Young children get tired of the play and go run around at the back, where they end up mixing with the cast. The repeated announcements that alcohol is strictly forbidden in the city park mix with the sound of corks being pulled, and there’s a bunch of very polite and restrained public drinking that nobody bothers to interrupt. Public space, families, summer evenings. I love all of that.

Also, the play was preceded by a greeting from the “associate artistic director for social justice,” and there was a pre-show drag queen storytime, and there was an acknowledgement of gay and trans artistry, and the artistic director took the stage to do a land acknowledgement, identifying the native people who used to live where the park is and also acknowledging that the park is now found in what used to be Mexico, and then the artistic director welcomed us to a public event in a time of trauma, and she rebuked ICE for harming the community. And then: the play.

The liturgy of the progressive church, a secular evangelical movement, grows and deepens. It takes a good twenty minutes to say hello. The whole performance is so ritualized and predictable now that it might as well be offered from a Book of Common Prayer, and include a bunch of “and also to you.” Like Episcopalians, they seem to recite a great deal of it without thinking about the meaning. There’s a considerable element of automaticity.

In that cultural climate, mild deviation from the ritualspeech is reflex-heresy. Here, watch:

Mollie Hemingway, history’s greatest monster, said that a middle-aged man with a wife and two children was behaving poorly by pretending to be a woman who has a scientifically validated ladybrain. This is “gratuitous cruelty.” She implied that a male is a man, and has obligations to his family that properly obligate him to exercise restraint and moderate his behavior. Vicious! So cruel! It’s not disagreement: It’s fear and malice and ugliness and ignorance and and and! If you were near Jeff Stein when he went into his windup on this one, you’d have to wipe up the spittle.

The brittleness of the adherents is the foreground of the social practice. You’re always on thin ice. The pleasure of the church is the availability of chastisement rituals to the laity. You get to scold, which is like free champagne.

Similarly, I live in Los Angeles, I spent a bunch of time in academia, and my wife works in television. This is my social milieu. I feel every word of this description in my bones, because I’ve also met these people:

The DSA rich kid “whose entire life is about projecting their appropriateness.” This triggers a parade of faces through my memory.

Sample response:

1. There are a lot of left-playacting rich kids and social climbers who are rootless and pop-culture obsessed, and their politics are performative;

2. “this hate-filled screed.”

Endlessly, plain description and the expression of reasonable, ordinary sentiment produces responses that are batshit hysterical to the point of psychosis. Listening to late-stage bien pensants is barely removed from listening to lunatics who scream at city buses from the pile of garbage they occupy on the sidewalk. If you didn’t read this paragraph carefully, be aware that I just dropped a hate-filled screed.

And so, to link this to the nauseating political events of the week….

I’m forced to wonder about the social milieu occupied by senators. My bet would be that they spend most of their days in a social environment in which quite ordinary and reasonable sentiments produce shocked, angry, scolding responses.

They’re cowards and fools, and I’m not forgiving them. But I doubt their compasses work, anymore. “Oh, I can’t throw undocumented people off of Medicaid — that would make Americans so angry!”

In the right rooms, the absurd performance reads as normal. Our system of cultural enforcement is about as subtle as a cattle prod. It’s extremely boring, but the relentlessness of the ritual punishment somehow makes it work somewhat often. Our politics can’t overcome our…whatever that is.