We’ve been hearing
that our current politics is driven by fear. I won’t dispute that
instilling fear is a much used tactic but the emotion that dominates
these uneasy times seems to be disgust rather than fear. I turned to
Google for enlightenment and came up with the following, along with a
few other helpful articles here and here.
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| Viburnum |
“The feeling when
you encounter something that you don’t want to get into contact
with in any way (neither see, hear, feel or taste it), because you
expect it is bad for you. You want it to get away from you.”
*from emotiontypology.
Disgust is similar to
contempt when related to human characteristics.
“Moral disgust and contempt can be difficult to distinguish.”
Outrage is not far away.
Among
animals which prompt disgust, snakes, spiders and other crawling
insects lead the unpopularity sweepstakes. Having worked at zoos at
both ends of my career, I remain afraid of snakes but not disgusted
by them, whereas I’ve always been disgusted by rats and other
invasive rodents, even to the point of booing Mickey Mouse cartoons
at the movies as a kid.
According
to one of the articles linked, people who feel disgust readily are
more likely to be conservative, whereas liberal people tend to feel
less disgusted morally. My
background is from
a family of faltering
Dutch Reformed faith.
The severity and the religiosity were
diluted but the Calvinist judgmental tendencies
were retained,
leaving us
to
experience
disgust and contempt much more readily than most of
our neighbors.
Curiously,
my brother and I share this trait but owing to divergent political
leanings, the objects of our contempt are usually polar opposites.
My radically conservative brother would seem to be more within the
confines of probability, in that his contempt is usually triggered by
“the other”, i.e. whatever is outside the American suburban norm
of the 50’s and 60’s, whereas mine, more often driven by
aesthetic concerns, is rooted there. We get along remarkably well by
simply avoiding the discussion of politics.
The
picture toward the top of the page is of viburnum, known locally as
sambuchelle. These plants have nice flowers and make a dense hedge.
We have many of them. Unfortunately, they stink, a characteristic
described in plant catalogs as an “intoxicating fragrance”.
Besides the Calvinist baggage, I have a strong sense of smell, not
good enough to be a paid food or wine taster but enough to render me
susceptible to disgust brought on by cigarette smoke, wet dogs and
viburnum. My vision of Hell is riding in a car of a cigarette smoker
with a dog. Indeed, my many years of smoking cigars resulted not
only from a love of the scent of cigars but as much from the need for
a counteroffensive against the ubiquitous poison gas ambiance
generated by cigarette smoke, a tactic akin to using excessive
cologne when riding the buses of Rome. As defined above, disgust
arises from all the senses and while I’m conventionally liberal
enough to oppose capital punishment, I would be tempted to make
exceptions for “graffiti artists” and other desecrators of the
visual environment. Likewise, aural stimuli, from much white pop
music of the fifties, through decades of the San Remo Festival, to
the sound tracks of the cartoons that my grandchildren watch, induce
extreme distress. At the gym which I frequent, when the screaming
military cadences of the ladies’ dancercizes subside, the aural
vacuum is filled by the sounds of Radio Subasio, an agency possibly
set up by the CIA to soften the will of terrorist prisoners held at
Abu Graib. After two hours of exposure, normal brains turn to mush
so I try to hold my workouts to an hour and a half.
In
my bachelor days, many years ago, my Siamese cat slept inside my bed
with me. This provoked some discomfort, if not outright disgust, in
a number of visitors, not so different from my own unease at seeing
people share their dishes with their pets. Our thresholds of disgust
are highly subjective and personal.
Occasionally
the disgust sweeping the world can be curiously bipartisan. In the
UK, the failure to resolve the Brexit crisis has provoked disgust
with the political establishment across the British political
spectrum, even if abroad, the disgust has been sprinkled with other
emotions ranging from disbelief through ridicule to pity.
One
of the more bizarre aspects of the times we live in is that while
President Trump has exceeded all precedents for provoking disgust,
the intense disgust that he inspires is felt mostly in people usually
considered liberal. His “conservative” base theoretically
consists largely of easily disgusted people. It’s no surprise that
they will not be upset with his treatment of poor people or of
non-white people, but one might reasonably expect that people who are
intolerant of others outside their experienced norms of appearance
and custom would be appalled by his constant flouting of social norms
of behavior that have evolved over centuries. Have actual
conservatives been supplanted by a new breed of monsters, such as
those filling his swamp cabinet, all dedicated to destroying the agencies they run? While a few collaborators have
thrown in the towel, the President’s steadfast minions, from Mitch
McConnell to William Barr, surrender whatever dignity or decency they
may have ever possessed to the campaign to destroy every significant
institution and all aspects of the natural environment, in the United
States and beyond. Their mission is to redistribute all
economic resources to their oligarch patrons. It is not a zero sum
game. They don’t really care if the pie gets smaller; they just
want all of it. Will a new James Bond emerge to save the world from
the plot by the spiritual descendents of Dr. No and Goldfinger to
establish a neo-feudal regime? Will the level of disgust rise to the
point of forcing change? We shall see.
Still,
every one of us reacts to different things emotionally and stimuli
come from all sides. While the Governor of Virginia was flubbing his
press conference to explain a proposed law legalizing third trimester
abortion and what to do with fetuses which accidentally survive the
procedure, causing the law to be scrapped, in New York State the
passage of a similar law was celebrated with the illumination of the
NYC skyline in pink, ordered by the First Girlfriend of New York. It may have been all congratulatory smiles in
the citadel of secular orthodoxy but there were more bitter pockets
of outrage in flyover country than the New York Times is ever likely
to report. We think of flyover country as places like Iowa and
Nebraska but the planes actually lift off in Newark and Queens. Not
even the Pope appeared to take umbrage but the President was quick to
jump at the chance to displace the Pope as the champion of unborn
babies, thus ingratiating himself with more angry voters of short and
narrow memory.
Another
topic which provokes psychic, not to mention physical, discomfort is
genital mutilation, a practice mostly carried out in African
countries. African issues don’t carry much weight in the US but
when some Africans get to the US and try to continue this tribal
custom, a storm of indignation erupts. Given that opposition to such
practices is so vocal and strong, it is beyond ironic that a recent
objective in “progressive” circles is the surgical and chemical
altering of pre-adolescent children to make their bodies better align
with their perceived gender identities. Barring revolutionary
medical advances, this will leave them sterile, perhaps a worthy goal
for progressives concerned with rapid population growth at a time
when the planet’s survival has come into question.
Disgust
fatigue risks our turning away from the news of the world, which
would be problematic if the major media actually reported news more
than gossip. One story that somehow slipped in quietly the other day
was about the comeback of asbestos. The formerly all purpose wonder
substance was banned several decades back when its lethal effects
became known but now the Trump Administration, in its efforts to
create jobs and stimulate the economy, has eased the restrictions on
its use. Previous sources of asbestos in Brazil and Canada have long
since suspended operations but there is a small town in Russia which
still produces asbestos and is now looking forward to a new era of
prosperity. Residents there don’t worry about dangers inherent in
the mining since they are only a few kilometers from a large,
run-down nuclear power plant and all life has risks anyway so what
the hell.
We’ve
never been much caught up in the agitation over the alleged efforts
of Putin to influence the 2016 US election since his efforts were at
least furtive, whereas the more forceful interventions of Benjamin
Netanyahu were carried out in plain sight on the floor of Congress
shortly before the election. The combined efforts of Putin,
Netanyahu, and Bill Clinton to subvert the election never added up to
anything close to those of Kris Kobach. He remains unindicted and
free despite his effective work to disenfranchise many times more
voters than were needed to prevent the surprise victory of Donald
Trump. Inasmuch as he is not a foreign agent, his work did not
constitute the intervention of a hostile foreign power but only
something more akin to treason or, at the least, as massive a civil
rights violation as we’ve seen since the days of the KKK.
Nevertheless,
those looking for more evidence of Russia’s hold over the current
administration might want to follow the asbestos trail. Could this
be a link that Mueller missed? Election help and Moscow building
permits in exchange for jobs in a struggling Russian town plus the
poisoning of the US homeland with the consequent weakening of its
population?
Finally,
as we end today’s sermon, we note that right-wing Democrats are
loudly calling for the emergence of a Democratic presidential
candidate who will not threaten the status quo. In 2016 they were
very successful but they started from pole position in that race.
(They did win the race even if the series championship eluded them.)
Can they replicate that performance while starting from behind in
2020? At the moment, their efforts appear to be concentrated on Joe
Biden, whose candidacy has only now been officially proclaimed, after
delay after delay of a declaration ceremony, mostly caused by
allegations of improper conduct towards women with him on prior
campaign trails. Some women claim to have been disgusted by his
actions in putting his arm on their shoulders or even sniffing their
hair (ucch!). Joe Biden has always struck me as a very likable
person, unusually so for a politician. Wealthy Democrats seem to
adore him. Of all the twenty or thirty potential candidates in the
race he is near the bottom of the list of whom I would want to see as
the next president, but I would be happy to have him as a friend or
neighbor. A compelling op-ed appeared in the NYT by a woman who is
deeply offended by the attitudes he represents. We can respect her
views without sharing them. I would have shared the article here but can't find it. I too have been disgusted by some of Joe
Biden’s actions, from his treatment of Anita Hill at the Clarence
Thomas confirmation hearings to his advocacy of the criminally insane
invasion of Iraq.
We
risk drowning in a sea of disgust. It’s a constant companion, much
like hypocrisy. An excess of hypocrisy leads to cynicism, as in
Italy where universal cynicism has led to political paralysis.
Similarly, the daily tidal wave of disgusting events in the USA
appears to have rendered the population numb to the most grotesque
outrages but sometimes hypersensitive to mini affronts. I would
modestly suggest that we all take a deep breath and put this emotion
under control and focus it where it matters. Asbestos could be a
start. Climate science denial, or all science denial for that
matter, would be better yet.
For
my part, I pledge to resist kicking overly friendly, drooling dogs and
to refrain from derogatory comments in the presence of cigarette
smokers. I will even hold back from dropping a barbell on the hi-fi
system at the gym. As an occasional political cartoonist, I can’t
step back from disgust completely or I’d have nothing to draw, but
should Joe Biden stop by the Circolo of Acqualoreto on a long
campaign tour, or even on a post-withdrawal Umbrian vacation,
speaking for the membership, I can assert that he will be welcomed
with open arms, friendly hugs and all, by the assembled members, with
the possible exception of my wife, but even she wouldn’t denounce
him in the press. The presence of Kristen Gillibrand might prove
more problematic since there is a lot of casual hugging and kissing
at our Happy Hours and we wouldn’t want to risk being reported to
the authorities.
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