Friday
For all the upbeat news about Kamala Harris’s surge, I’ve been hearing one note of caution: Trump this time is poised to pick up votes of many young men who, in 2020, elected for Joe Biden. There’s something about Trump’s performance of dominance masculinity that ropes in a distressing large number of these people.
A columnist for The Bulwark, a publication run by former Republicans who have fled their party, describes the thinking as follows:
Facts and evidence don’t matter. A decent respect for our fellow citizens doesn’t matter. The nativism is the point. The prejudice is the point. The bigotry is the point. The cruelty is the point. The slander is the point.
Thom Hartmann, who runs the Substack column The Hartmann Report, says that America at the moment has been overtaken by an epidemic of bullying, set off and exploited by Donald Trump. For the first time in American history, Hartmann writes,
we’re learning what other countries that suffered under authoritarian bullies know: the damage runs deep, tears communities and families apart, and spawns its own mini-industry of strutting militia-type bullies intent on emulating dear leader.
Harmann mentions “Brownshirts, Blackshirts, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, you name it.” The groups, he says are “mostly made up of men deeply insecure about their own masculinity or role in the world who find safety and meaning by joining the über-bully’s gang.”
The effect of such bullying, he goes on to lament, is that it has “drained many of us of our hope and optimism, much as it did in the 1950s when Joe McCarthy last led a national bullying campaign.” Ten years of Trumpian bullying, he contends, causes people “to check out of the political process, to essentially give up like an abused spouse, or to retreat into sports, music, and hours of binge-watched TV dramas.”
I get insights into the thrill bullies feel when I read Thomas Love Peacock’s “The War-song of Dinas Vawr.” The poem once seemed so over-the-top to me that I found it funny, what with its outrageous female rhymes (where the rhyme falls on the next to last syllable) and casual, unapologetic sadism. I get that it’s meant to be a comic parody of warrior culture.
I don’t find it so funny now that I see people actually imagining their own updated versions of this conquest fantasy. While “owning the libs” and taking down the elites may seem like entertainment tv, there will be horrific real-life consequences if Trump is reelected.
But who cares as long as you’re feasting and singing?
The War-song of Dinas Vawr
By Thomas Love Peacock
The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meter
To carry off the latter.
We made an expedition;
We met a host, and quelled it;
We forced a strong position,
And killed the men who held it.
On Dyfed’s richest valley,
Where herds of kine were browsing,
We made a mighty sally,
To furnish our carousing.
Fierce warriors rushed to meet us;
We met them, and o’erthrew them:
They struggled hard to beat us;
But we conquered them, and slew them.
As we drove our prize at leisure,
The king marched forth to catch us:
His rage surpassed all measure,
But his people could not match us.
He fled to his hall-pillars;
And, ere our force we led off,
Some sacked his house and cellars,
While others cut his head off.
We there, in strife bewild’ring,
Spilt blood enough to swim in:
We orphaned many children,
And widowed many women.
The eagles and the ravens
We glutted with our foemen;
The heroes and the cravens,
The spearmen and the bowmen.
We brought away from battle,
And much their land bemoaned them,
Two thousand head of cattle,
And the head of him who owned them:
Ednyfed, king of Dyfed,
His head was borne before us;
His wine and beasts supplied our feasts,
And his overthrow, our chorus.
Peacock meant the poem as a joke, and it is. That is, until it isn’t.
