I was never a fan of Billy Graham. I considered him a raving bore and a probable nitwit. But I was disturbed to read that his death was greeted by a torrent of abuse from leftwing and “moderate” media, as if hundreds of pundits had been storing up rage against him for the past 30 or 40 years. Some of it made me gasp. Literally. Here is the tweet with which someone named Lauren Duca, a figure at Teen Vogue, of all places, bade farewell to Graham:
Have fun in hell, bitch.
“Bitch,” in that sense, started as prison talk for “male homosexual.” After prison it spread to other locales, such as Teen Vogue. Duca’s opposition to Graham seems to have resulted from Graham’s opposition to homosexuality.
I have never been a fan of Quentin Tarantino, at all. I think his films are vulgar and obvious. I am aware that he has recently become a politically controversial figure, not because of his “art” but because of his alleged countenancing of his friend Harvey Weinstein’s alleged crimes. But I gasped at the weird screed about Tarantino that appeared on a widely read rightwing site that sometimes publishes good things:
He’s a slobbering, drooling, film-school nerd who stuffs his movies full of bloodshed and curse words, apparently hoping no one will notice the Uber-geek behind the camera who’s likely wearing either panties or diapers. He bears the unmistakably soft air of someone who’s never been punched in the face.
For all of his films’ alleged danger and violence, it’s always seemed barkingly obvious to me that he’s a twerpy fake who’d burst into tears if he chipped a fingernail. He’s an emblem of a generation which truly knows nothing beyond pop culture and gets nearly all of its “life experiences” from a screen.
I’m sure I’m not the only person who finds this stuff — the leftwing sample and the rightwing sample — literally sickening. What kind of people enjoy these things? This is not H.L. Mencken. It’s not Lord Byron. It’s not Zola. It’s not Mr. Dooley or Sinclair Lewis. It’s not anyone who ever attacked an enemy with wit and insight. It’s not even the vicious polemics of the American revolutionary period, of the Jackson and anti-Jackson movements, or of the Crisis of the Union in the 1850s. It’s garbage.
What gives it cultural license? What allows it to be either cheered or justified — as the canards about President Obama’s birthplace were cheered, and, much more prominently, as the constant charges of treason against President Trump are cheered?
What kind of people enjoy these things? This is not H.L. Mencken. It’s not Lord Byron. It’s not Zola.
Some of the attraction is simply to lynch-mob attitudes. Many years ago I visited a friend who rented an apartment in South Boston. He was gay and Jewish. He had trouble getting out of his place without being ridiculed and threatened by local Catholic youth. Those days are gone. So are the days in which interracial couples were taunted and threatened on the streets of Northern cities. (I don’t have to read about it; I saw it.) But the same mentality, if you want to call it that, is visible in the fanatical attempts to exile from schools and colleges anyone who expresses rightwing ideas, many of which are simply the modern-liberal ideas of 20 or 30 years ago. The same mentality is visible in the frenzied hunt for people who, 30 or 40 years ago, allegedly violated some sexual code. And no, I am not in favor of sexual harassment, however defined. I just don’t like lynch mobs, even when the target is guilty.
But there’s something else going on. Since the 18th century, at least, it’s been noted that people are seldom embittered when they lose a contest they didn’t think they had any reason to enter. I’m not bitter about my failure to be elected to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, or to be chosen president of my university. But I would be embittered if an assistant professor in my department were given my office and my committee positions. I would be still more embittered if that person asserted his or her right to my perks.
People on the Right, many of them, are embittered and hateful because, for many years, they have been treated as second-class citizens — their distinctive ideas removed from the schools, their gun ownership restricted and threatened, their religion mocked by the most prestigious figures in popular culture. They eagerly applaud every attack on their supposed superiors.
I’m not buying it. If you want to preserve traditional culture, a war of abuse is not how to do it.
People on the Left, many of them, are embittered and hateful because they have grown used to their culture’s institutionalized authority and prestige. The leading figures of government who did everything they could — and are still doing everything they can — to get Trump unelected are not just opposed to his ideas, if any; they are angry, angry, angry that nobodies from the Right have seized their own cultural thrones. No attack on the infidels is too vulgar for them, or for many of their supporters in the media.
Me, I’m more sympathetic to the people on the Right — not the people on the Right who threatened me when I visited South Boston 40 years ago (they’re not there anymore), but the people on today’s Right who are basically (in my view) fighting a defensive battle against those who want to take their guns, their schools, and the power of their votes away from them. So the offended persons lash out, not just at the political establishment, but at all its heirs and assigns, including such heroes of the self-entitled cultural elite as actors and movie directors.
So I get it. But I’m not buying it. If you want to preserve traditional culture, a war of abuse is not how to do it, you slobbering, drooling, twerpy fakes. Neither is the home-family-“cops are wonderful” cant in which the Right has long been marinated. And, my leftist friends, if you want to assert your own values, try to do it by communicating something valuable, or at least plausible, and not such stupidities as “Trump is a traitor,” or the kind of talk one hears on the prison yard — you bitches.
