In a 10-part thread on X, the social media platform once known as Twitter, former U.S. Naval War College professor [Tom] Nichols dropped the hammer on seemingly intelligent adults who have thrown their lot in with Donald Trump and, like him, have turned into "angry, irrational toddlers" living in a constant state of rage.
Coming a day after two of the Proud Boy leaders, Joseph Biggs and Zachary Rehl, sobbed in front of U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly before being handed 17 and 15-year sentences respectively for their part in the Jan. 6 insurrection, Nichols asserted they are prime examples of Trump voters who "are mired in eternal petulant childhood."
As he wrote, "Yes, MAGA world is about resentment and ignorance and displaced anger and all that. But it's also a time that seems to me incredibly...juvenile.," before adding, "Trump hawking t-shirts with his mug shot is like some hair band selling posters of their guy getting busted for drugs or waggling his junk onstage or something.
"It's beyond unserious. It's child-like, the political version of Oppositional Defiance Disorder. And yet it'll sell."I can walk into a dozen stores near where I now sit and be amazed at the crap on the shelves, and the people there buying it. And have you ever heard of this shit? Does it show up on your TeeVee? Do you see these brand names on billboards? Do people seek it out on Amazon?
No; but it sells. But just because it sells, doesn’t mean a lot of people are buying it. Sure, someone is; but as P.T. Barnum said: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
But he didn’t say we were all suckers.
ADDING:
On his Xitter feed, Mr. Nichols responds to a post that wonders where the kindly adults of Disney movies went. Mr. Nichols opines the decline of adulthood came about because “the Greatest Generation” lived through the Depression and WWII and most served military service (the man with the hammer sees nothing but nails).
Bollocks.
They are both remembering American men from fiction: movies and TV. WWII didn’t make John Waynes of our fathers. From what I saw, it mostly convinced them war is hell, and over-convinced them it was an American duty (Korea; Vietnam). It broke no small number of them; the rest just came back to a post-war country not ravaged by war, and able to be the economic engine that restored the fortunes of Europe and Japan by making our own. Hard work, yes, but very fortunate circumstances.
The men I knew that my father knew were good people, by and large. but some were superannuated adolescents, and some were not even closet racists. And some were just fools. Like the people I know now, they were largely just trying to get in with their lives. But they liked Goldwater and considered King a troublemaker, and some I think many of them would have pulled the trigger on Malcolm X and slept soundly that night.
And they hated LBJ clean through. I don’t doubt some went to their graves convinced he cheated to defeat Goldwater. The same ones convinced Nixon was railroaded.
Is it worse now? I honestly don’t know. I saw the fierce hatred and anger of the civil rights movement’s opposition on TeeVee and in the faces of people I knew. I did not see a lot of my father’s generation acting like “the Greatest Generation.” I saw that in the Boomers pushing for equal justice under law, and racial equality, the struggle that opened the doors to the other equalities we see and still seek today.
So I’m not so sure there was a time when men were men and women were women. It’s always been like this. And it’s always been up to we, the living, to make it better for everyone. The “good old days,” simply were not.
No comments:
Post a Comment