The new Puritanism of our “cancel culture” of the Right and of the Left has not only rendered certain words and behaviors unutterable. Since those words and actions were not as rigorously sanctioned in the past, the past itself has come to seem unbearably obscure and evil. The past is an unthinkable darkness. An unintended but inevitable consequence is that the present and we who inhabit it have come to seem (at least to ourselves!) unbelievably pure and righteous by comparison. The same dialectic operates synchronously when we think about contemporary societies that do not share our purity: the darker we paint them, the brighter we gleam in contrast.
I have little nostalgia for the Fifties and early Sixties when I was growing up in a small midwestern town. But at the same time, I cannot resist the impression that the chiaroscuro hues that distort our notion of lived history make us appear too bright in comparison with those Dark Ages. We cling to our sense of moral superiority by indicting and condemning any present or past infraction of our purity. Nathaniel Hawthorn among others offers a fictional paradigm for how this sanctimony works in practice. On the one hand, we pin digital scarlet letters on all miscreants. On the other, Look out! The guardians of righteousness are likely to be dancing with the devil under cover of darkness.
The reality is that the past was constituted as a differently layered and assorted confabulation of truth and falsehood, hypocrisy and straightforwardness. Violence and oppression against Black people and against the populations of subaltern societies such as Guatemala or Iran raised few questions or objections for the great mass of average citizens. Yet the citizenry of even my typical rural conservative town knew little of the strutting gun worship of today. Certainly, people owned guns, and they used them for hunting or security. But our preposterous gun-worshiping machismo had yet to be fomented by the NRA and affiliated lobbies and broadcast voices. I am convinced that the recent right-to-carry extension of our toxic gun mania would have appeared nearly as grotesque as a man who strapped an upward-pointing handgun to protrude from his fly, its handle simulating testicles and the shaft of his big hard manhood. Isn’t that after all what the gun fanatics unwittingly but not unintentionally project? I don’t want to glorify those decades, but frankly, I’m convinced that a school shooting would not have been taken so lightly, not like today where a dozen dead children are an acceptable price to pay for a reassured manhood. Violence exercised by the state seems to have satisfied the appetite for cruelty. With CIA interventions, the electric chair, and racist laws, there was no need for gun-toting phantasies fed by adolescent spectacles culminating in our school shootings.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 