For every ugly or threatening thing Trump has ever said about press, he’s gotten back ten-fold from reporters. If this is war, it’s surely been an asymmetrical one, with Trump tossing stones as the press lofts cruise missiles. Carl Bernstein, the New Republic’s Jamil Smith, and Robert Kagan have called him a fascist. David Remnick, Jill Abramson and Andrew Sullivan have likened him to a demagogue. Dana Milbank, BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith and the Huffington Post have labeled him a racist....In Iraq we used to say that "Violence is a form of negotiation." That was to remind us that actual violence, like rockets being shot in our laps or bombs being placed outside our gates or a machinegunning in the night, shouldn't be taken as a commitment to war-to-the-knife. Much more often in that tribal environment, it was an expression of displeasure at something we'd done or were expected to do. With the right negotiating tactics -- which could also include some violence -- we could restore a working relationship.
It sounds alarming enough, but the anthropologist in me views the Trump-press contretemps as the endemic and persistent warfare associated with the stylized combat sometimes observed between tribes in the Papua New Guinea Highlands: The two sides pair off, shouting insults and derision at one another, claiming the other side started it. Much noise and many insults are traded, grudges are captured and preserved. Skirmishes break out here and there, followed by temporary truces until the cycle begins anew.
A lot of people pay attention. Only rarely does anybody die.
The metaphor here isn't to war like in Iraq, which was already better than war like in Stalingrad. It's to a stylized form of war in which the consequences have almost completely been replaced by demonstrations. And this is less violent than that: it's a metaphor of what is already just a metaphor of war.
Similar things happened in 1830. It's a ramp up to war, which becomes inevitable when people look at mob violence and dismiss it as something inferior to war. Often times, as in the French Revolution, mob violence is just a symptom of a larger problem.
ReplyDeleteIt's a ramp up to war...
ReplyDeleteIf you mean the Civil War, that was thirty years later. You're packing a lot of 'historical inevitability' into an analysis tying together events that far apart.
1830 was where early reports of lynchings by slave lord paid activists could be recorded. It's not as if this was a phenomenon limited to the 30s or due to Andrew Jackson's admin. After he was no longer President or leader of the Democrats, if he ever was such, the slave lords continued to harass abolitionists and successfully silenced them. As the Left silenced the Tea Party. But that doesn't prevent a war, if anything, it makes one inevitable.
ReplyDeleteYou might as well tally up the mob violence in 1840. Or 1850. Or 1855. Or the Caning of Charles Summer. The data was always available for those with the eyes to see them. Just as they are available even now. The fact that people refuse to see, is their problem and mistake.
What makes things inevitable isn't history. It's human pride and mistakes and vice. After all Grim, you write about them 70% of the time on your own blog, yet you refuse to recognize it for what it is and what it will lead to. Or perhaps you just don't like the way I word it as inevitable.
ReplyDeleteBut make no mistake, the fate of humans is inevitable because humans are humans. Try not to blame it on historical whatevers. History didn't make your choices for you.