I was an angry teenager too, but I kept my anger pretty well hidden, because I grew up in a family of conservative Republicans who were all about manners and what they called "decency." But even in the 1960s, it was clear to teenager me that their "manners" covered up a lot of racism, misogyny, and violence, or tolerance of violence in their names. (I turned 13 in 1967.) My mother repeatedly said that I was a kind of barbarian with only a "thin veneer of civilization," if that. Eventually, I wanted to burn it all down too, and with good reason. Other young people, in their 20s by that time, WERE burning it all down.
Now I am back in Tennessee where I grew up, but not in a "nice" middle-class neighborhood with "decent" conservative Christians. Rather, now I live in a more working-class, rural neighborhood with "decent," gun-worshipping, drag-queen-hating conservative Christians. Some of these people are actually pretty decent in their daily lives; some are absolutely terrifying. And eighty percent of the voters in our county will, as usual, vote for all the Republicans on the ticket, including Trump. They don't care that he's a felon who likes to grab pussies and was even convicted of it. (They just don't want ME to say the word "pussy." Ever, for any reason, in any context, despite the fact that I am the owner/operator of one. I almost got fired from my community college for trying to reclaim that word in the context of lecturing about a famous performance art piece. Maybe I made a mistake, but you can see why I tried to take that word back from the Pussy Grabber in Chief.)
Pussy-grabbing is not just academic here. My neighborhood suffered through an epidemic of sexual harassment from a gang of old men. It went on from 2008 to 2012. In retrospect it might have had something to do with the fact that a black man was President. I am sort of afraid of what will happen here if KOM-ala wins. And it's not just pussy-grabbing that could get worse; it's the guns.
I really don't know how I feel about some of these people whom I've known for decades. I still think of them as friends. But in the eight years since 2016, I've started to realize that there's a very dark side to a lot of "nice" people, just as there was in 1967. It's just that now they don't try as hard to hide it. God is a Republican; they are sure of that. He probably has an AR-15. He definitely hates drag queens and women who need abortions.
To get a sense of how things have changed in Tennessee, you can check out Season 19 of a great podcast, Embedded. In that season, the reporters followed some Republican women who tried to get some common sense gun laws passed in our state after a deranged person shot and killed six people at their children's conservative Christian school. I drove past the school on Sunday. It's in a very nice, "decent," upscale suburban neighborhood. I'm sure these mothers thought that their children were safe from something as uncivilized as mass murder in an elementary school. They were wrong.
Then they made another mistake: they thought that because they were nice, white, Christian, suburban, attractive moms that their representatives in the state legislature would listen to their concerns and pass some common sense gun laws. They were completely ignored. They got nowhere. And it's not just the decent, civilized women that have this problem: decent men in the Republican party in our state have also been marginalized. In Episode 3, the reporters interview some of those guys. Those guys are leaving politics; they can't fit in with the new, openly barbarian form of the Republican party that thinks pride flags, but not guns, are a threat to children.
Really, we have never been as decent and civilized as we like to think. The dark underbelly of barbarism has been there all along, from the time Europeans landed on this continent.
I was an angry teenager too, but I kept my anger pretty well hidden, because I grew up in a family of conservative Republicans who were all about manners and what they called "decency." But even in the 1960s, it was clear to teenager me that their "manners" covered up a lot of racism, misogyny, and violence, or tolerance of violence in their names. (I turned 13 in 1967.) My mother repeatedly said that I was a kind of barbarian with only a "thin veneer of civilization," if that. Eventually, I wanted to burn it all down too, and with good reason. Other young people, in their 20s by that time, WERE burning it all down.
Now I am back in Tennessee where I grew up, but not in a "nice" middle-class neighborhood with "decent" conservative Christians. Rather, now I live in a more working-class, rural neighborhood with "decent," gun-worshipping, drag-queen-hating conservative Christians. Some of these people are actually pretty decent in their daily lives; some are absolutely terrifying. And eighty percent of the voters in our county will, as usual, vote for all the Republicans on the ticket, including Trump. They don't care that he's a felon who likes to grab pussies and was even convicted of it. (They just don't want ME to say the word "pussy." Ever, for any reason, in any context, despite the fact that I am the owner/operator of one. I almost got fired from my community college for trying to reclaim that word in the context of lecturing about a famous performance art piece. Maybe I made a mistake, but you can see why I tried to take that word back from the Pussy Grabber in Chief.)
Pussy-grabbing is not just academic here. My neighborhood suffered through an epidemic of sexual harassment from a gang of old men. It went on from 2008 to 2012. In retrospect it might have had something to do with the fact that a black man was President. I am sort of afraid of what will happen here if KOM-ala wins. And it's not just pussy-grabbing that could get worse; it's the guns.
I really don't know how I feel about some of these people whom I've known for decades. I still think of them as friends. But in the eight years since 2016, I've started to realize that there's a very dark side to a lot of "nice" people, just as there was in 1967. It's just that now they don't try as hard to hide it. God is a Republican; they are sure of that. He probably has an AR-15. He definitely hates drag queens and women who need abortions.
To get a sense of how things have changed in Tennessee, you can check out Season 19 of a great podcast, Embedded. In that season, the reporters followed some Republican women who tried to get some common sense gun laws passed in our state after a deranged person shot and killed six people at their children's conservative Christian school. I drove past the school on Sunday. It's in a very nice, "decent," upscale suburban neighborhood. I'm sure these mothers thought that their children were safe from something as uncivilized as mass murder in an elementary school. They were wrong.
Then they made another mistake: they thought that because they were nice, white, Christian, suburban, attractive moms that their representatives in the state legislature would listen to their concerns and pass some common sense gun laws. They were completely ignored. They got nowhere. And it's not just the decent, civilized women that have this problem: decent men in the Republican party in our state have also been marginalized. In Episode 3, the reporters interview some of those guys. Those guys are leaving politics; they can't fit in with the new, openly barbarian form of the Republican party that thinks pride flags, but not guns, are a threat to children.
Really, we have never been as decent and civilized as we like to think. The dark underbelly of barbarism has been there all along, from the time Europeans landed on this continent.