I Really Wanted To Ignore This…

There’s a lot I don’t understand about popular culture. Why anyone would waste time following the Kardashians, for example, or a number of other so-called “celebrity influencers”–people famous for being famous–mystifies me. So when the media began its coverage of the recent Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trial, I basically ignored it, although I did wonder why a pissing match between two obviously damaged, wealthy celebrities was worth the pixels being wasted on it.

But then, reactions to the verdict highlighted a very unattractive aspect of American culture–especially the widespread superficiality of what passes for “analysis” these days, and our “either/or” “bright line” approach to subjects that are considerably more nuanced.

Ever since the jury in that lurid case handed down what has been characterized as a win for Depp, pundits have insisted that Heard’s loss is the beginning of the end of the #MeToo movement. Now, they say, women will no longer feel safe publicly accusing their abusers.

This, in a nutshell (and I use the term nutshell advisedly) is hogwash. But it is a peculiarly American version of hogwash, and it illustrates one of this country’s least attractive cultural predispositions. Americans’ instinct for simplification and over-generalization. (Those predispositions are what prompted my admonition to students to use two terms more frequently than they previously had been wont to do: it depends and it’s more complicated than that.)

When #MeToo emerged, I applauded. Like most women, over my lifetime I’d encountered unwanted “approaches” from men, ranging from boorish behaviors to significantly worse, and I certainly saw the manifest unfairness of dismissing assaults by blaming the victim– asking what she was wearing or other questions suggesting that the woman was somehow “asking for it.” Holding predators rather than their victims responsible was long overdue.

Sending a message that unwanted touching and worse are not amusing, not a male prerogative, and not to be tolerated was also long overdue.

That said, there is a significant difference between boorishness and assault. Inappropriate behaviors occur on a continuum, and responses should be calibrated to the severity of the behavior. (Calling Al Franken…). Fundamental fairness requires rejecting essentialism— all men are not dogs, and all women are not saints. Taking women seriously is not the same thing as uncritically believing anything and everything any woman says. An accusation of impropriety or assault should be considered a rebuttable presumption–true, until and unless there is probative evidence to the contrary.

The fact that one high-profile woman was unable to convince a jury that her accusations were truthful tells us exactly nothing about another woman’s version of a different set of circumstances. Women who think otherwise are reading and believing the wrong “analysts.”

There is a reason we hold trials to determine the truth of disputed matters (and a reason lawyers hate to litigate conflicts that boil down to he said/she said). The trial system is based upon the importance of evidence: evidence corroborating one party’s version of the facts, and evidence of actual harm suffered. The judge or jury acting as the “trier of fact” must determine the credibility of testimony and evidence offered in support of both liability and degree of harm done.

In the court of public opinion, popularity can trump evidence, which is why public reactions to trials–especially trials involving high-profile figures–are so often at odds with the conclusions reached by jurors who actually heard and considered the evidence. But even when the public seems to approve of an outcome, the tendency to draw wildly exaggerated conclusions from a fact-sensitive conflict can be enormously misleading.

To insist that the results of this one unseemly battle between two privileged, self-absorbed and extremely unpleasant individuals teaches us some broader lessons about the #MeToo movement (or anything else) is simply stupid, and the amount of attention paid by the media to this episode of “poo throwing” is (at best) a distraction from news about far more serious matters.

Matters to which I will now return. I regret the interruption.

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OK, Let’s Talk About Mental Health

It’s so predictable. And maddening. After each horrific mass shooting, Republicans pandering to the NRA insist that the problem isn’t guns–it’s mental health.

The most obvious response is equally predictable (albeit far more intellectually honest):  these attacks are vanishingly rare in countries where there are similar proportions of  mentally ill citizens but far fewer guns.

Mental health professionals will also point out that the great majority of people diagnosed with a mental health problem are not violent, so pointing to an undifferentiated “mental health” crisis is simply an effort to distract from the role played by virtually unrestricted gun ownership.

I personally agree with a New Republic headline:“The Main Mental Health Issue in This Country Is in the Republican Party.”

That said, I also agree that, overall, America does a very poor job of diagnosing and treating mental illness. So if we were to ignore the immense hypocrisy of the Republicans who only respond to these massacres by advocating an increase in resources devoted to mental health, we might welcome their sudden attention to that scarcity and their apparently heartfelt efforts to address it. (Snark alert: If you believe those efforts are really heartfelt, I have some swampland in Florida to sell you…)

The linked article from the New Republic looked at the existing patchwork of state funding for mental health diagnosis and treatment.

Before you click, just hazard a guess: Of the top 10 states, how many are red? Likewise, how many of the bottom 10 are red? And where do you imagine Texas ranks?

If you don’t feel like floating down that rabbit hole, I’ll save you the trouble. The top 10 states are: Maine, Pennsylvania, Arizona, New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Montana, Vermont, California, Maryland. One red state in the bunch (yes, Arizona is borderline, but it went Democratic in 2020). The bottom 10, from forty-first to fiftieth, are: Florida, Wyoming, North Dakota, Delaware, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Idaho, West Virginia, Arkansas. One blue state.

And Texas—where that lying death cultist of a governor vows to attack the scourge of mental illness with a zeal unmatched since Wayne LaPierre took his last trip to Zegna—just misses the bottom 10, in fortieth place. I doubt I even need to point out (although for the record I will) that Greg Abbott and the state’s Republicans have been cutting mental health funding, by more than $200 million over the last two years.

The article noted that there has been one –and only one–major expansion of mental health spending and insurance coverage in recent American history–and it was part of the Affordable Care Act., aka Obamacare. According to a Commonwealth Fund report, the ACA’s impact on the country’s mental health has been salutary, particularly in states that accepted Medicaid funding.

And we all know how the GOP has reacted to that particular expansion of access to healthcare, including mental healthcare.

The GOP then spent years trying to repeal and “replace” it. Trump also wanted it repealed. So the sole major expansion of mental health coverage in this century was contained in a bill whose passage every Republican in Washington opposed and on which most Republican governors have refused to participate in the state-level implementation. Come to think of it, probably the sole reason the red state of Montana ranks in the top 10 on mental health spending is that the state took the Medicaid expansion money under former Democratic Governor Steve Bullock.

Republicans are not going to expand mental health funding. Mental health care is for sissies and liberals. The only thing they’re going to expand is access to guns. We know this because recent history tells us so. Last week in Vox, Zack Beauchamp posted a shocking but not surprising report on academic studies of legislative responses at the state level to mass shootings. The finding? The norm in this country has been that mass shootings have been used by state legislatures and governors as an excuse to loosen gun laws, not tighten them. This is our country.

We have a mental health problem, all right– but it’s primarily among Republican legislators.

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Disinformation Kills

Propaganda takes all sorts of different forms, and serves a variety of interests. Does the latest scientific knowledge undercut your fundamentalist religious or political beliefs? Does the upcoming election pit your preferred candidate against one who is espousing more popular measures? Are you frantic because “those people” are asserting their entitlement to rights equal to your own, or because those you consider “real Americans” are losing their privileged  social or cultural positions?

Lie. Target those lies to an audience likely to be unsure or unaware of the facts and thus receptive to your preferred version of reality. Examples emerge daily. Allow me to share a few.

From Axios, we learn:

In March 2020, when everything changed, roughly nine in 10 Americans, regardless of their preferred media outlet, said they trusted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Within weeks, though, that trust was plunging among Americans who mostly watch Fox News or other conservative outlets, as well as those who cited no source.
By the end of last month, just 16% of those who said they get most of their news from Fox or other conservative outlets still said they trust the CDC, compared to 77% of those who favor network news and major national newspapers and 87% of those who primarily watch CNN or MSNBC.

People who primarily got their news from Fox or other conservative media outlets were also more likely to be unvaccinated, and to report that they had tested positive for COVID-19 at some point during the pandemic.

An essay from the New York Times pointed out the under-appreciated damage being done by those despicable Rightwing “groomer” accusations.

As we head into the 2022 midterm elections, calling someone a “groomer” or a “child abuser” has become the conservative attack du jour. What once felt like language reserved for the followers of QAnon, a fringe community united by a central conspiracy theory that America is run by an elite ring of pedophiles, has seeped into the mainstream. The use of these terms has even sparked the anti-gay slur “OK, groomer,” a play on the phrase “OK, boomer,” which is often used by young people to disregard or mock retrograde arguments made by baby boomers…

If the politicians making those accusations were actually concerned about ending child abuse, the kinds of institutions they would be challenging would include religious organizations, youth sports and even the nuclear family — systems that exert control over children and their bodies. These are the venues where child sexual abuse commonly occurs. The misuse of these words is not about stopping abuse, but rather a reassertion of homophobia, gender hierarchy and political control.

The author of the essay, a survivor of actual childhood sexual abuse, points out that in the real world, this indiscriminate and dishonest accusation is “dangerous and corrosive to the very real and devastating experience of sexual abuse. To use these words in this way voids them of their real meaning and desensitizes civil society to bodily harms.”

It isn’t only America’s frantic culture warriors. Russia is fighting back against growing global ostracism by concocting a wholly-invented threat posed by Ukrainian “bio-labs.” That claim, according to NBC, has been eagerly seized on by the American Right.

Russia’s early struggles to push disinformation and propaganda about Ukraine have picked up momentum in recent days, thanks to a variety of debunked conspiracy theories about biological research labs in Ukraine. Much of the false information is flourishing in Russian social media, far-right online spaces and U.S. conservative media, including Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News…

 Most of the conspiracy theories claim that the U.S. was developing and plotting to release a bioweapon or potentially another coronavirus from “biolabs”’ throughout Ukraine and that Russia invaded to take over the labs. Many of the theories implicate people who are often the targets of far-right conspiracy thinking — including Dr. Anthony Fauci and President Joe Biden — as being behind creating the weaponized diseases in the biolabs.

We don’t know how many people died as a direct result of COVID disinformation, or how much real damage has been done by ludicrous “grooming” charges. We cannot calculate the percentage of wartime deaths in the Ukraine that can be attributed to the fact that several GOP Senators adopted the biolab fantasy and delayed the sending of critically-needed aid.

But there is one death from persistent disinformation that we can easily see: the death of civic discourse and Americans’ ability to govern ourselves.

I used to tell my students that if I say a piece of furniture is a chair and you say it’s a table, we will never be able to agree on its use. If you prefer fantasy A to uncomfortable but demonstrable fact B, or “alternative facts” to reality, that preference is deadly to the democratic enterprise. 

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We Need Genuine Christians

Wednesday’s post went into some detail about the competing American cultures identified by David Brooks. Brooks concluded (among other things) that an “autonomy culture” has prevailed over the traditional belief in obedience to an established external authority (aka God). He did acknowledge several of the negative aspects of the latter culture, but the more I’ve thought about his critique, the more I recognized the significant problems he failed to identify.

One obvious problem is that honest religious adherents cannot claim to know with confidence what their particular deity requires. (There’s a popular Facebook meme saying something along the lines of: isn’t it interesting that your God hates the same people you do?)

How many wars have been fought by men trying to prove that their God is bigger and better and more correct than someone else’s?

The bigger problem with Brooks’ description of what is really a culture of subservience is, ironically, theological. My clergy friends– who all exhibit what I consider appropriate moral humility– point out that authentic religious belief requires the freedom to choose.

Forced piety/obedience is inauthentic by definition.

What got me thinking about all this was a recent column by Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post. Rubin was pointing to Americans’ disinclination to “tell it like it really is.”

It’s not the plague of “polarization” or “distrust,” some sort of floating miasma, that has darkened our society. Bluntly put, we are in deep trouble because a major party rationalizes both intense selfishness — the refusal to undertake even minor inconveniences such as mask-wearing or gun background checks for others’ protection — and deprivation of others’ rights (to vote, to make intimate decisions about reproduction, to be treated with respect.)

What Rubin dubs the “White-grievance industry,” composed of right-wing media, politicians, pundits and think tanks, is enraged over the loss of a society where “far fewer women competed with men in the workplace, White power was largely unchallenged, and diversity was less pronounced.”

Encouraging that rage has required the (mis)use of religion.

Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, wrote recently in Time about the MAGA formula, ascendant after the United States’ election of its first Black president: “the stoking of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-Black sentiment while making nativist appeals to the Christian right.

”The nostalgic appeal of ‘again,’” Jones observes, “harkens back to a 1950s America, when white Christian churches were full and white Christians comprised a supermajority of the U.S. population; a period when we added ‘under God’ to the pledge of allegiance and ‘In God We Trust’ to our currency.”

Our future as a tolerant, decent society ultimately may depend on White Christian communities’ recovering their moral equilibrium and support for American democracy, and rejecting the movement to turn churches into platforms for QAnon and white nationalism. But we cannot wait for an evangelical reformation.

Rubin and Jones are hardly the first to point out that people purporting to be “bible believing Christians” have perverted the previously understood teachings of that religion to serve political ends. But in the following paragraph, she contrasts that faux Christianity with the behaviors of people who take philosophical and religious teachings and the “norms of civilized societies” seriously:

MAGA voters think everyone else is the problem. As perpetual victims, they feel entitled to ignore the demands of civilized society — e.g., self-restraint, care for actually vulnerable people, pluralism, acceptance of political defeat. Their irritation with mask-wearing gets elevated over the lives of those most susceptible to a deadly pandemic. Their demands to display an armory of weapons mean schoolchildren become targets for acts of mass gun violence. Their religious zealotry, fed by the myth that Christianity is under attack, means poor women cannot have access to safe, legal abortions.

My friends and family members follow a wide variety of religious traditions and none. Virtually all of them– devout and nonbeliever alike–have come to their beliefs via the exercise of personal autonomy–choice. They have examined the teachings of their their own and other religions, adopted those they’ve found persuasive and rejected others.

Several are people I regard as real Christians. They follow a very different Jesus than the John Wayne clone manufactured by political Evangelicals. (For one thing, their Jesus isn’t an ahistorical White guy with blue eyes.) They attend–and in a couple of cases, lead–churches that avoid the moral absolutism buttressed by cherry-picking  bibles that have been translated from their original languages over the years. They respect people who are racially and religiously different, and they understand why authentic religious belief requires separation of Church from State.

They’re the ones I consider “kosher”  Christians, and the ones I know are really, really tired of the White Supremicists who have appropriated –and continue to disgrace–the name.

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And Furthermore…

I am convinced that the biggest problem America faces– the reason we can’t solve or even address the other multiple problems that grow worse each day they are ignored–is the GOP. 

Permit me to share some observations that support that thesis.

Paul Krugman–Nobel winning economist and opinion writer for the New York Times —took on the “reliably awful” Ted Cruz and his anti-gun-legislation GOP cohort, including Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, whose “solution” involved locking school doors rather than controlling firearms. (Patrick has obviously never talked to a Fire Marshall..) As Krugman and literally hundreds of others remind us,

Mass shootings are very rare outside the United States. Why are they so common here? Not, according to the U.S. right, because we’re a nation where a disturbed 18-year-old can easily buy military-grade weapons and body armor. No, says Patrick, it’s because “We’re a coarse society.”

I know it’s a hopeless effort to say this, but imagine the reaction if a prominent liberal politician were to declare that the reason the United States has a severe social problem that doesn’t exist elsewhere is that Americans are bad people. We’d never hear the end of it. But when a Republican says it, it barely makes a ripple….

What distinguishes us is that it’s so easy for people who aren’t nice to arm themselves to the teeth.

What also distinguishes us are outmoded rules of governance that allow representatives of a minority of citizens to block action supported by the majority. (Recent polling by Pew and others tells us that ninety percent of Americans want stricter gun regulations, especially more stringent background checks.)

It isn’t just gun safety. Republican senators routinely object to pretty much anything proposed by the majority or by the Biden Administration. I get absolutely livid when people complain that “Biden isn’t doing anything.” These are people who clearly have no idea how easy it is for Republicans to block administrative measures. One recent example, reported by Daily Kos:

When Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) came to the floor Wednesday afternoon to ask for unanimous consent to approve Dr. Shereef Elnahal to serve as the Veterans Affairs deputy secretary for health and Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) objected, Tester blew, telling Scott: “You want to talk about why the American people think the United States Senate is dysfunctional? The senator from Florida could look in the mirror.”

Elnahal had impeccable credentials–he’s currently the chief executive officer of University Hospital in Newark. Furthermore, he’d had a hearing in the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and been approved unanimously.  As Tester pointed out, the need to have the position filled is urgent. “The VA is continuing to battle the impact of COVID-19 pandemic with veterans cases, hospitalizations, and death on the rise again, and VA staff are dealing with burnout and increasing turnover in our VA system.” The job hasn’t had a Senate-confirmed person in it since January 2017.

And what was Scott’s objection? Well, we don’t know, because he refused to say. (Of course, Elnahal is brown…) But under Senate rules, and thanks to the Memorial Day recess,  his objection will delay a vote until sometime in late June.

And don’t get me started on the filibuster…..

As Jamelle Bouie recently wrote in the New York Times,

I am thinking about the ways that narrow, destructive factions can capture the counter-majoritarian institutions of the American system for their own ends. I am thinking of how they can then use the levers of government to impose their vision of society and civil life against the will of the majority. And I am thinking of this in the context of guns, gun violence and the successful movement, thus far, to make the United States an armed society.

Two weeks ago, a gunman killed 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo. Three days ago, a gunman killed 21 people, including 19 children, at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

Although there has been, in the wake of both atrocities, the requisite call for new gun control laws, no one believes that Congress will actually do much of anything to address gun violence or reduce the odds of gun massacres. The reason is that the Republican Party does not want to. And with the legislative filibuster still in place (preserved, as it has been for the past year, by at least two Democratic senators), Senate Republicans have all the votes they need to stop a bill — any bill — from passing.

I am old enough to remember when Republicans and Democrats had good-faith, substantive disagreements about the proper way to address national problems. Those days are long gone–and so is the time when currently-obsolete Senate rules and procedures served any legitimate legislative purpose.

Go re-read Pastor Pavlovitz’ warning. And help get out the vote.

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