Two Hundred and Twenty Nine

I’ve been online all morning, reading about terrorism and Trump.

 

Trump was elected because he’s a businessman, not a politician, and most Americans are tired of corrupt politicians.  As president he’s put profits before people, as most businessmen do; but he’s done it so ruthlessly that most people claim he’s an anomaly—preferring to forget that violence, as Malcolm X said, is as American as apple pie (All empires are violent, but some are more violent than others).

 

Trump said he loves the poorly educated because their votes helped elect him.  He’s poorly educated himself, but he (or his handlers) knows enough to (mis)label the protesters anarchists.  He claims they use violence as anarchists did at the turn of the last century (and jihadists do now) to terrorize people and undermine the social order—ignoring the fact that most of the protestors are nonviolent.  The few exceptions have been identified as agents provocateurs—Trump supporters who use violence to discredit the protests.  Far from seeking to undermine the social order, the protesters seek to transform it into the democracy Americans used to pretend it already is.

Trump claims the protesters are being misled and manipulated by his enemies, and don’t know why they’re protesting.  Everyone knows why they’re protesting, but he only sees the protests as a challenge to him.

Not a challenge to his power—he claims he’s all-powerful—but a challenge to him to use his power to ameliorate the current crisis.  Trump does nothing, and even denies there is a crisis, because he doesn’t want to be a dictator, as some claim.  He wants to be a figurehead—not just respected, but loved—without doing anything to earn either.

Some compare Trump to Hoover.  That’s unfair to Hoover, who did nothing to ameliorate the Great Depression, while Trump actively exploits and exacerbates the Greater Depression to enrich himself. 

 

Several of the comments I’ve read online note that Trump’s more violent supporters use vehicles as weapons, driving cars or trucks into crowds of protesters.  This practice has become so common that it’s been given a name:vehicle ram attack.  

Some people claim rammers are inspired by jihadi suicide car bombers (These people don’t include Trump himself.  Formerly a rabid Islamophobe, he now seems to have forgotten the jihadis—perhaps because they target the West, but not him specifically, and he cares only about himself), but vehicle ram attacks remind me of how much Americans’ love of cars resembles their love of guns

Liberal Americans often claim inadequate men, or men who feel inadequate, love guns because to them a gun is a surrogate penis.  That’s obviously absurd.  A gun is used to kill, while a penis is, or can be, used to create life.  But I understand why those who believe the Freudian myth that men are naturally sadistic and women naturally masochistic (a myth that's used to justify not only inequality between men and women, but between powerful and powerless—and supposedly emasculated—men) might see a gun as a surrogate penis, and using it to rape and/or kill a woman (or another man) might be the only way they can achieve orgasm.

It’s equally obvious that to inadequate men a car is, or can be, a surrogate gun. 

Opponents of gun control often point out that cars kill more people than guns.  That’s why powerless men, or men who feel powerless, love their cars as much as they love their guns.  Both give them the power of life or death over others. 

When I was still taking daily walks, I frequently encountered drivers who gunned their engines and moved their cars forward as I was crossing a street, as if about to ram me.  Driving a car gives powerless men, or men who feel powerless, a sense of power—and most ordinary American men feel powerless nowadays.  No longer respected as they think they should be, they feel in control only when in their cars—or better yet, their trucks.

Every empire is founded on, and maintained by, violence.  The United States, which was founded on genocide and slavery, is now an empire in decline, so its masters are escalating the level of violence they use to control their slaves; and those slaves, unable to defend themselves, relieve their frustration by threatening strangers on the internet, or pedestrians with their cars.  

 Now Trump has escalated American violence to an unprecedented level.  His daring has emboldened his supporters to drive their vehicles into crowds of protesters.

Psychologists who’ve studied vehicle ram attacks, trying to develop a profile of the typical rammer, have given up because the typical rammer is an ordinary law-abiding citizen who suddenly goes berserk for no apparent reason.  These psychologists seem unaware that society as a whole has become more violent, so it’s precisely ordinary citizens who are most likely to become violent.  When extraordinary violence becomes the norm, only those with extraordinary self-restraint are able to avoid going berserk.

The rammer sees himself as a lone hero defending a social order threatened by a rebellious mob.  The lumpenproletariat who elected, and still support Trump no matter what he does, see this billionaire as one of them—an outsider, despised by the crowd.  Trump learned from Reagan how to present himself as an outsider, an enemy of a corrupt government, even though he heads that government.

I’m glad whites are finally joining the protests.  Perhaps it’s because they realized blacks aren’t the only victims of violence in America.  As some have pointed out, there are more poor whites than poor blacks in America, and the police gun down unarmed white men more often than they do unarmed black men, because there are more whites than blacks in America (facts which white liberals usually dismiss as true, but irrelevant—and rightly so, because those who point them out do so only because they imagine these facts somehow delegitimize the protests).  But I doubt white liberals do realize blacks aren’t the only victims of terrorism, and anyone who challenges the status quo becomes an enemy of the state.  

White middle class American liberals (Most American liberals are white, and see themselves as middle class whether or not they actually are) rally to the defense of those they recognize as victims of injustice out of a sense of noblesse oblige, not because they realize that they, too, are victims.  White American liberals see themselves as belonging to the ruling class, not only in America but in the world.

We’ve made some progress by acknowledging black Americans should have the same rights as white Americans, but we still assume middle class Americans, whether black or white, are superior to working class Americans, whether black or white.  Racial injustice complicates American injustice, but it neither limits nor defines it.  Class trumps race.

I wish racists were sincere when they counter the protesters' shouted slogan “black lives matter” with “all lives matter”, but I doubt any American will ever say “all lives matter” and mean it.