You can't avoid them. Every news feed, program, or streaming service has at least one showing up every day. Sometimes it's a guy, like the one seen recently frantically tugging and twisting a mask, and generally behaving like a four-year-old having a tantrum because his mommy won’t let him play in the mud. More often it's a woman*,yelling about something they like to call "freedom". The yellee is usually someone in authority, but sometimes it's just an ordinary person with the insufferable arrogance of, say, wearing a mask in public.
The substance (if you can call it that) of the yelling is that the yeller doesn't want some so-called expert to infringe their constitutional (or, for some, god-given) right to flout said expert's advice, even – or perhaps especially – when that advice is to use ordinary common sense. They're not gonna do it, because hey, it's a free country, and I can do whatever I like.
Now I'm sure you remember when we used to say things like that. We were maybe nine or ten years old, and it was a fun thing to say on the playground during recess (do schools still have recess? Or playgrounds?). Most of us grew out of it in a couple of years,but a distressingly large number of people (can you say "seventy-four million"?) seem to have stopped evolving socially after the fourth grade.They still think that the Constitution somehow absolves them of any obligation to endure a few minor inconveniences to ensure their health and safety (not to mention that of other people).
There was a time when we had a name for people like that: spoiled brats. Kids who behaved as though no one mattered except themselves. We roundly detested these kids, and avoided them whenever possible. In time, of course,they became big people,and many turned into reasonable, adult human beings. But there were always a few who didn’t grow up; they just became older spoiled brats. Some of them were filthy rich, and all were completely obnoxious. Naturally, a lot of them went into politics.
Fora long time, the sheer bulk of the Establishment kept these overgrown schoolboys (it was mostly boys) on the fringes. There was the occasional comic relief, like my old home-state senator from Nebraska, Roman “mediocre people need representation, too” Hruska, and every so often a schoolyard bully like Jesse Helms got some real power, but for the most part business carried on as usual.
But in1964, Barry Goldwater made right-wing bluster respectable, at least among Republicans (even the toplofty William F Buckley signed on), which led directly to Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. Then the Reagan administration threw the doors open to the self-righteous hypocrite and the reactionary kvetch (if you’re thinking Mitch McConnell and Newt Gingrich, I won’t argue). Civil discourse began its slow decline, accelerated by those major schoolyard bullies Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and their patsy, W, until the last remaining genuine conservative, John McCain, was saddled with the first of the new generation of unreconstructed fourth-graders, Sarah Palin. Then, while the adults were looking the other way, the army of spoiled brats took over in 2010, and the Republicans have never looked back.
We might still have escaped the worst of the flood, except that two other things developed at the same time: cable TV and “social” media. The first made the world safe for the serial ranters like Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, and all the cockamamie talking heads on Fox News. The second let every gnurr in the voodvork come oudt and vent whatever gripes they had against the world. It didn’t help that the prime platform for this stuff was run by another superannuated ten-year-old, who, whether he was or not, talks and acts like the nerdy kid who was picked on by everyone in grade school, and is determined to get his revenge.
Now here’s the paradox. Real ten-year-olds often have a healthy skepticism about things they’re told to take on faith, or because a big person says so. They’ll ask why, or they’ll insist that you prove it (something else we used to say: “put your money where your mouth is!”). Usually, they become rational adults. But many just become big people whose skepticism has got subverted into a willingness to believe anything as long as it doesn’t come from a reliable source. ”Don’t give me that ’evidence’ or ‘science’ crap. The real problem is Those Other People (you know who). Anyway, you’re all part of the Deep State Conspiracy, so forget it”.
To be fair, the fault is not entirely with the believers. For nearly three generations now, our education system has failed to provide students with the tools to detect and understand bullshit. At the same time, it has abandoned any pretense of teaching democratic principles or behavior. (Personal note: I was fortunate to be in one of the last classes to take a proper Civics course at one of the best high schools in the country, Omaha Central. A few years later, they dropped Civics for a watered-down version called “Citizenship”, apparently intended to promote patriotism in response to the Communist-in-every-pot paranoia of the Eisenhower era.)
So here we are. The Spoiled Brats have got themselves into the corridors of power. The orange popsicle may be out (though he keeps pretending he isn’t), but we still have to deal with the likes of Brett Kavanaugh, Jim Jordan, and those southern governors who seem obsessed with restoring the lost glories of the 1840s.
And if all these new voter-suppression laws are allowed to do their thing, I’m damned if I know how we’re going to get them out of there.
*This is not because women are more likely to yell, but that the media prefer to make it look that way.
---The Auld Faarte