Meeting the Enemy, Again

The memory is buried under layers, but sometimes it returns and when it does it is vivid.

Mid-1970’s. I was seven. A kid who rode my bus got on, bright blood on his clothing. “She stabbed her,” he said, yelling more than speaking, but to no one in particular. I looked to just outside the bus window where a crowd of kids swarmed around the high school parking lot like agitated bees. I could not see the student who’d been stabbed, could not see the blood that was flowing from the wound, could not see the teenager in what would be the final desperate minutes of her life. For that I am grateful. May she rest in peace.

The individual snapshots of this memory are vivid, but so is my memory of the fear; it was present enough to feel like a physical thing that day. I was suddenly immersed in fear, and it covered me and everyone around me. When violence ruptures the membrane that protects us, fear drives the mind and the chemicals released mindlessly drive the body: to flee, to freeze, to fight. I remember the teenagers running around outside the bus, jerky motions, purposeless movements, running from or running to, driven by fear, by trauma, by violence.

Today, October 14, 2021. This memory returned to me today, unbidden, as I began to reflect again on the violence and fear we live with in this country as we continue to rupture the membranes that protect us. Earlier this week a woman on the news called for a second Civil War in the United States because “they can’t take it anymore,” the it being the politics of the other American political party. I’d like to write this woman off as some kind of outlier to the norm, but this rhetoric is becoming the norm. I’d like to write this woman off as ignorant, a simpleton who does not understand that the first Civil War in this country killed as many as 750,000 people, back when the most popular gun shot three rounds per minute, and now there are up to 10 million guns in circulation that shoot up to 400 rounds per minute, there are groups already organized into militias and paramilitary groups, who’ve practiced war tactics and built explosives, who’ve actively prepped by storing the food and gasoline and only want a match. But increasingly there is an active movement against knowledge, against science and history and scholarship, a movement that is markedly pro-ignorance, with ignorance seeming to be the point and simpletons the result. I cannot write this woman off.

Susan Benesch is a scholar I admire and one of the leading experts in the world on how speech becomes violence. She has spent her life in countries across the world analyzing social unrest and political violence, specifically looking at how the language of violence escalates in a society until the conditions are ripe and actual violence begins. I first heard her speak in 2013 after she had done a project studying the transfer of presidential power in Nigeria, a hallmark election that year for democracy in Nigeria thanks to a peaceful transfer of power, only two years after nearly 1000 people were killed in politically-motivated violence. A comment Benesch made when I heard her speak in 2013 really stood out to me. She told us that for her entire career she had to leave the United States to do her work, but for the first time she knew her work would now begin to include a study of the increasingly violent rhetoric of politics in the United States.

ACLED Map of Armed Demonstrations in past 18 months.

Currently a visitor to Benesch’s Dangerous Speech Project website (dangerousspeech.org) can find reference to a 2020 report that cites the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), which collects real-time data on political demonstrations and violence in 150 countries. It identifies the U.S. as one of “10 conflicts to worry about…”, and a map of the United States based on a report by ACLED shows in the last 18 months there have been 560 armed demonstrations, 97% of which have taken place in public spaces. 54% of those demonstrations have included militia groups and militant social movements like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters. We are a country to worry about: ignorance, fear, violent rhetoric all on the rise, and people are showing up with their guns to make a statement. Even people elected to the highest offices in the land are using the threat of political violence as part of their political appeal. Towards whom are those guns pointed?

The dangerous speech of a recent political ad.

1974. The three-volume Gulag Archipelago was published in English. Written by Aleksander Solzenhitsyn between 1958-68, it is a collection of writings and interviews about the Soviet prison system, but as much as anything it is a treatise on human behavior. Solzenhitsyn writes about how otherwise ordinary people can be turned into bystanders, or into worse: masochists, torturers, murderers. He writes “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” History is full of examples, as enormous as genocide and as small and local as the parking lot just outside my bus that day so many years ago, or the jealous man who shot another man to death in the driveway across the street from my home three years ago with his two teenage children watching. The evil is not out there, far away. It is as close as our own hearts, a whisker-thin line between safety and danger. And I’m afraid the line is moving.

January 6, 2021. An armed mob stormed the United States Capitol on the day and at the very time the 2020 United States Presidential Election was being certified by Congress, overseen by the Vice President. That is incontrovertible. At the Capitol there were thousands of individuals acts of physical violence, destruction of property, and other criminal activity, driven on by mob mentality. That is incontrovertible. People died during the violence and after. That is incontrovertible. United States elected representatives had to be rushed out of the building for their own safety. That is incontrovertible. As of this writing, 674 United States citizens have been arrested for crimes committed on this day while law enforcement officials continue to search for more. That is incontrovertible.

Enter the politics of our times and the spin machinery of our modern media, the deep political divisions, the mistrust, distrust, and animosity of political difference, the talking heads, the propaganda, the willful ignorance and outright denial of what we saw with our own eyes. Enter controversy, disagreement, dissembling, and the Big Lie. The events of January 6 are being investigated by law enforcement, by the Department of Justice, and by Congressional committee, but it is being stonewalled by the new normal of dangerous politics. We can’t even set our division aside to understand and address the real crime, real violence, and a real attack on the institutions and processes of Democracy of January 6: not the thin membrane that protects us, but the very foundations of the rule of law.

November, 1989. When sledgehammers started knocking holes in the Berlin Wall, the specter of the Cold War and the threat of the Soviet Union began to teeter as well. Ordinary people knocked down the concrete wall that had been nearly impossible to pass for a generation. Then the iron curtain of the USSR would fall about a year later. I had lived all of my twenty years up to that point aware that the USSR had a nuclear arsenal that would combine with the United States arsenal to destroy the entire world sixteen times over. But suddenly, and for the next fifteen years or more, the United States didn’t have an enemy to rally against that would fill the void created by the end of the Cold War. The opportunity for peace was at hand because the walls and curtains that separated us from that peace had fallen.

The Berlin Wall: A Generation of Division

But American politics of strength required an enemy to feed the military-industrial complex, the heart of our economy since the 1940’s, and arguably the most important contrast between our political parties. If your political message is that you are the party that protects life as we know it in the United States, you need an enemy who is threatening that way of life. Global terrorism would provide an enemy in 2001, but before the attack on the Twin Towers, the political machinery was busy creating a new enemy, and this one was already inside the United States: the other political party. 

In the lead up to the 2000 Presidential Election, new reasons for political divisions were created, and they were deepened around issues of faith and the American culture wars. Now, instead of being the necessary counterpart of a systems of checks and balances, the other political party was a threat: collection of boogeymen threatening to snuff out an entire way of life. Twenty years later the enemy to fear and loathe is the Democrat down the block, the Republican who fixes your car, the teacher who pushes socialism, or the police officer who makes a life or death decision in space of a heartbeat, the politician from Detroit who wants to provide free healthcare (that socialist!), or the politician from Kent County who wants to tighten border security (that fascist!).

When we met our new enemy, it turned out we knew them all along.

Early 1970’s. Cartoonist Walt Kelly drew his comic-strip character Pogo for an Earth Day strip, the namesake opossum sitting in the woods, staring at a landscape covered with trash. “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” Pogo says.

Pogo was right then, and right now his fifty-year old wisdom is once again our warning. The enemy is us, but not the person who lives next door or sends her kids to the same school or shops at the same grocery store. The enemy is the us inside: that fearful, manipulated part of you that would cross the line in your own heart that divides good from evil. If you love what’s good and would protect it, you must guard the line in your own heart from indifference, from being fooled into thinking your neighbor or fellow American is the enemy, from all of the forces that divide us, before that thin line becomes a concrete wall, impossible to cross for generations.

September 11, 2021. As the twentieth anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers approached, I largely ignored the documentaries and retrospectives on the day. That day remains a trauma, and I was not interested in reliving it. But on September 11 I did end up pulling up a short video on YouTube about the boat rescue in Lower Manhattan I’d watched a million times before, but not for years. That was the story I was drawn to that day, and it moved me to tears, as I watched again the story of the day when more than 500,000 people were evacuated from the areas of Manhattan near the Twin Towers by boats of all shapes and sizes, most of them piloted by the ordinary men and women who work or live around the New York harbors and rivers. I love that story, and if you don’t know it, watch it, learn about it, and you’ll love it, too. People were moved in their hearts to goodness and service for their fellow Americans, their fellow humans in need. It is the best of us, and the best of the US. That day, when we met our saviors, it was us.

September 11, 2001 Boat Rescue

Saturday. My older brother and I drove two hours to Tinley Park, a suburb south of Chicago, to meet our younger brother for a long-awaited event. Together we were going to see the rock group Kiss, the musical and cultural staple for all of us growing up in our wood-paneled basement in Benton Harbor, Michigan in the 1970’s. My older brother was the leader when it came to the records we would listen to, and we listened to Kiss. In all of our memories, it is the soundtrack of the childhood we spent together.

I’ve written many times about how my brother and I are on the opposite sides of the political aisle, and we have disagreed about politics our entire adult lives. It has become harder to talk to him about politics in the last few years, even though I have always loved talking to him about politics. But it’s hard right now. Still, when you’re in a car for two hours, it’s going to come up. We talked with some elevated disagreement about the extremes of his party and the extremes of my party, but then he said something hopeful, and we agreed, beautifully, and got back to talking about rock music. He said if we’re going to be able to put down the literal and figurative weapons we have pointed at each other across the political aisle, if we’re going to back away from the abyss in front of all of us, “it has to be the reasonable people in both parties that lead us in doing that.” That’s the kind of thing my brother says from time to time, this guy who thinks and votes differently than me, but is still his brother’s keeper. We agreed that there are more reasonable people in this country who just need to get up on their feet and join the effort of good will, rejecting the fear and division, actively working to prevent the violence. The line between good and evil is the line between us and them. It is whisker thin. Still, sometimes it feels like we're just hanging on by a thread.

A few hours later we were singing and dancing with 20,000 other Americans of all shapes and sizes. Some in costume. Some in face paint. Some wearing political shirts or hats. Some showing off their wealth. Some letting their freak flags fly. But for a few hours we created a living space together, our voices blending together to sing songs like Doctor Love and Love Gun and I Was Made for Loving You, songs I’ve known by heart for almost fifty years. Songs we all knew by heart, so much more powerful for being sung in unison.

October 16, 2021: An Arena of Brotherly Love

The history of violence of this country is both uniquely personal and collectively shared. The future of violence is already being shaped, but so is every other alternative to it. The lines already cross our hearts: Good. Evil. Enemy. Savior. Neighbor. Brother. A divided country. A country to worry about. Our entire lives have brought us to these moments, the abyss is before our feet, the moment is vivid and the fear is real. Reasonable people surround us. We have choices to make about what happens next. 

 

Political Division, Danger, and the Cross We Bear

 Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here in River City

I knew we were in trouble in the months leading up to the 2000 Presidential election when I drove past a new billboard put up at the intersection of two Michigan highways just south of town. The billboard read IN GOD WE TRUST: BUSH/CHENEY 2000, and the word WE was underlined, just as it is in this paragraph. I didn’t know how we were in trouble then, or how much, or how bad things would get over the next 20 years, but I uttered “uh-oh” as I drove by that day.

I searched Google images for a picture of that billboard as I started writing this piece the other day. I couldn’t find it, but I did find a 2004 version with the same basic message. Both messages hit a chord that resonates deeply in a community like mine, going beyond political platform, poll numbers, and even space for reasoned debate. The message: voting for the Bush/Cheney ticket was voting for Christianity, or (on the flip side),

Christians who voted against the Republican ticket voted against their very faith.

Religion used as a political wedge signals to people that their vote during those elections (and since) wasn’t about politics but instead was about much deeper core issues of identity and doctrine. An appeal to faith does not appeal to reason, to data, or to policy. Faith is an exercise of belief, rooted in identity, and for many it provides unshakeable answers where there is no earthly proof. Human history is full of countless, terrible, bloody events that took place all over the globe when people were motivated to protect and advance the faith, sometimes this faith, sometimes that one, and while the United States has plenty of its own examples of those terrible events, it also enshrined into its founding document the idea that there would be a separation of Church and State, a vital protection for both Church and State and the people who belong to both. These billboards and their messages of choosing sides threatened that separation, that protection.

I also immediately recognized who those billboards targeted: they were aimed at my friends, coworkers, neighbors, and even members of my own family. I knew that for so many of them faith was unassailable, off limits to question, discussion, and reconsideration. And this populist appeal came on the heels of other messages in popular culture that pushed back against the emerging zeitgeist of the information age and the communication age, selling America on an alternative message that thinking, purpose, deliberation, and informed action are a fool’s errand, a waste of time, to be avoided as much as possible, represented so perfectly in the Why Ask Why campaign from Budweiser: don’t think, don’t question, don’t worry about it, go with your basest instincts and belch away any uncomfortable feeling that happens to bubble up in the gut.

Now Friends, Let Me Tell You What I Mean

The Bush/Cheney campaign strategy so completely succeeded in making religion and religious identity core signals to voters that political party identification became synonymous with whether you were for God or against God.  By the time Barack Obama was elected President in 2008 there was a full-on culture war, and religion was the theater of operations. McCain and Palin against Obama and Biden, and the faithful were picking sides. The arguments were getting ugly and more personal, even in my own family. A particularly nasty exchange with one of my own siblings in 2008 led to a year of estrangement and 13 years (and running) of not talking about it again. The topic: was Barack Obama the fraud that Right-Wing media declared him to be. Meanwhile the Internet was as old as a teenage driver and just as reckless. Internet V2 was fueling the explosive growth of social media companies enough for a small startup like The Facebook in 2003 to become a global juggernaut with 1 billion users by the end of Obama’s first term. Division had found it greatest amplifier and the Why Ask Why culture found its perfect audience.

Back in my small town the impact was just as divisive and dangerous, but wrapped in comfortable ritual and people we knew well, like at the annual Memorial Day parade and ceremony held downtown at the memorial dedicated to local soldiers killed in foreign wars. It’s the biggest annual event in a town of 850, where each year several hundred come to the city park to listen to the high school band, prayers, the Mayor, a keynote speaker, a rifle salute, a song tribute, and finally Taps, played on trumpet by a player from the school band to end the ceremony in a tribute that’s always moving, no matter the skill of the kid on the horn.

In recent years at the ceremony the language of the prayers has blended more and more into the language of patriotism, and it has been hard to separate when the pastor is talking about the sacrifice of the military dead laying down their lives for us, and when he’s referring to the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross at Calvary; indeed, the suggestion and more and more the appeal is one and the same: the Cross

has become the flag, and the flag has become the Cross in the blended messages of faith and patriotism. One year the keynote speaker, a well-known and well respected community leader, a veteran and head of a beautiful family, an avowed Christian, spoke with forceful, direct, open assertion that this country is a Christian country and honoring the sacrifice of dead American soldiers was one and the same a duty of faith and patriotism, that he served his country because it is a Christian nation. Not only was there no space for the separation of Church and State in his message of duty, his message was that Church and State are one. Several hundred people clapped along as he spoke, sang along to a local vocalist belting out Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”, and bowed their heads in prayer when the pastor of the local church made sure Jesus was one of the soldiers remembered and honored as the patriotic songs played and the Stars and Stripes waved at half-staff in the springtime breeze. Jesus. America. More and more they were one in the same.

When I was a kid I loved the golden rule of my Catholic education, the one about loving others as I want to be loved in return, and I adored the Christ I encountered as part of a Trinity of love and compassion and mystery. There have been times even as an adult when I have sought that Christ again, the one I learned about in my childhood, from CCD and First Communion classes, from the example of family members who lived their entire lives as the body of that Christ. But I detest and utterly reject the Christ of political division, the S.O.B. of a blue-eyed messiah who is not a vessel of love and peace, but rather a political and social totem, the original golden calf, a greasy-little mobster who can get you a seat at the best table in the restaurant with the right bribe or who can rough someone up in the alley just to teach him a lesson. I hope the churches who worship that Christ go out of business and never open their doors again, because those churches sold their souls for political power, and it wasn’t to Heaven. The Christ I admire and love and have sought so many times in my life is the Christ who loved the peacemakers and fought those who abused power, not the other way around. The other Christ, well, the hell with Him and his divisive politics.  

I suspect it was hard for some to read the words "I detest and utterly reject the Christ" because it was hard for me to write them. But it's come to that. I cannot follow that Christ and I cannot think of any who do as anything but fools or worse. The expected return on that position is the "well-what-about" ism that is the plague of honest reckoning. I understand there are non-negotiable issues of faith for some, such as those who are pure in their pro-life position. I get it. But I'm not really talking to those folks. I'm talking to the ones who are pro-life the same way they the are pro trickle-down economics: because it's an advantageous political stance and not really anything more. Both Church and State are big enough to handle honest differences in theology or philosophy, but we have to be smart enough to tell the difference when it's the wolf wrapped in sheep's clothing.

Friends, the Idle Brain is the Devil’s Playground

Perhaps most problematic about the messages that grew out of the 2000 Bush/Cheney billboard was what was implied in the underlined WE. To have a WE means there must also be a NOT WE, a THEY, or in the language of the dangerous speech that leads to political and social violence, an OTHER.  Radio personalities, thought leaders, and talking heads on 24-hour news cycles made sure the fire of this division was always stoked, and by the time Barack Obama was elected President in 2008 the country was divided by a new Mason-Dixon Line of Red vs. Blue, with a political, social, and cultural divide that became hostile, and that made room for even older hatreds to crawl out of history’s cellar.

I am familiar with historical hatreds because I study the Holocaust and genocide, periods of history when WE versus the OTHER turns deadly. I do not make comparisons lightly and generally actively work against any attempt to make comparisons to the Holocaust, but in studies of media and politics, the science of propaganda was settled more than 20 years before World War 2, when popular propagandists like Walter Lippman wrote in Public Opinion (1922) that "the ignorant or ill-educated meant larger and larger opportunities for both demagogic and public-spirited propagandists to make headway by using fictions and myths, utopian ideals, and 'the noble lie.' Governments on both sides of World War 2 used propaganda efforts, including famously the Nazi government that cloaked its agenda of hatred and world domination in creating the Aryan WE with appeals to Christian imagery and language, and the OTHER who presented a threat to Aryans, to Germany, to the world, and to Jesus on the Cross. Religion could be used to motivate, to justify, to mobilize, to destroy, even against the foundational teachings of a religion that has love and compassion and concern for the stranger as its golden rule.

On January 6 the trouble I felt was coming our way back in 2000 finally arrived in its full ugliness when armed insurrectionists stormed the United States Capital to attempt to overthrow a free and fair election, leading to the immediate deaths of five people (and two more police suicides to follow), that had Americans (in the name of patriotic servitude to a demagogue) beating police officers to permanent disfigurement, even death, that installed a noose and gallows outside the building where hundreds searched inside for government officials to apprehend and perhaps assassinate.

It was the end of a story arc that began 20 years ago with the insistence that there is a patriotic Christian WE in this country that does not question the story it has been told, that carries out its duty without question, reason, or critical thought, that would choose violence against other humans and the foundational texts and principles of both faith and country in the service of a strong man demagogue. January 6 was not the end result of the November, 2020 election: forces in this country spent the last 20 years creating and fortifying a division that made January 6 possible.

Heed that Warning Before It’s Too Late

When I am confused about where to go next, I often find my mind searching backwards, not ahead. The answer about where to go next is often most clearly outlined in the lessons of the past. In this case, I am thinking about my personal past and the lessons about God and country I learned from my grandmother. She was dedicated to both, a servant of both—working the polls each election day all of my life, and serving Communion on the altar at mass as Eucharistic Minister. But she kept them separated, twin pillars deeply rooted at her foundation. It was a joke in my family between my brothers and I about which party grandma belonged to. My Republican brother was sure Grandma was Republican based on her strong Catholic faith; after all, Catholics like my Grandmother were strictly Pro-Life. My Democrat brother was sure Grandma was a Democrat, also based on her strong Catholic faith; after all, Catholics like my Grandmother were dedicated to feeding the hungry and tending to the sick and the poor. But Grandma wouldn’t tell us. It was her private business who she voted for (she insisted), and for years she resisted any effort to reduce either her faith or her politics down to the pettiness of our bickering, good natured as it was.

My grandma knew something and taught me something worth remembering, and I suspect it’s a lesson forgotten in too many other American homes. The United States of America is made stronger when there is separation of Church and State, when good people of all religions feel safe to pursue life, liberty, and happiness without faith as a marker of being a WE or an OTHER. And faith is made stronger when the foundations of that faith aren’t shaped into political messaging, manipulated and contorted into political propaganda that serves a political party, power, message, or man.

At the intersection just south of town there are new billboards. They change all the time. And I still drive through the intersection every day on my way to work on my way home. Recently the billboard was a PSA for good parenting. Before that it was an advertisement for tax services from H&R Block. Life goes on. It will. But it’s also true that our next 20-year track is underway, and we begin 2021 and the next twenty years having had an armed insurrection storm the US Capital and a deadly clash between police officers and Americans who would overturn a free and fair election. Where do we go from here? The past tells us clearly that more danger is ahead, unless we learn from it, unless we think about it and indeed ask Why, and unless we underline the ONE NATION part of our pledge, letting the UNDER GOD part be separated again as intended, where separate matters of Church and State are freedoms, not divisions that undermine both.