Thursday
A column by NeverTrumper Tom Nichols helps me understand better many of those who joined the Trump cult and invaded the Capitol last week. We have been witnessing a mixture of boredom and sadism, a dynamic I first became aware of in Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel Clarissa.
I’ve written about Trumpism’s sadistic streak in the past (a shoutout to John Stoehr of Editorial Board). Nichols adds the boredom dimension. Writing about those who invaded the Capitol, the Michigan State House, Charlottesville, and other venues, Nichols says,
These are people – … especially the men – trapped in the eternal drama of adolescence. They are creatures of a leisure society, bored by the ordinariness of life, angry that the world is not more interesting and that others refuse to pay them their heroic due.
Nichols credits Eric Hoffer’s 1951 book The True Believer for the idea:
As Eric Hoffer noted this is the fetid breeding ground of extremism: “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves…Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless.”
Even in 1951, Hoffer knew the danger of society of bored children: “There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom.” This, not rights or freedom, was what the past years of Trumpism are about
There is no seriousness here, no sense of injustice, no actual injury to rights. Merely the aggrieved boredom of men (and some women) who never learned that life is not ceaselessly interesting and dramatic. That life, even the best life, is boring and repetitive on most days.
Nichols has a simple message for those who have rioted and threatened violence: Grow up!
This is why the legal and social response should be swift and clear. To remind people that life is not a TV show. It is not Twitter dunks and Facebook memes. To show that hurting other people out of boredom and childish narcissism has real consequences.
Real adulthood, Nichols goes on to say, involves “showing up and doing your best no matter what the job is.” Life is most heroic when it is not dramatic, given that it calls for
[t]aking care of your loved ones, looking after a sick friend, letting someone go ahead of you at a stop sign, holding the door for someone at a store. Adults know this. Stunted, selfish, undisciplined, stupid adolescents do not.
And further on:
I am exhausted by turning on the news and realizing that the blessings of life in a liberal democracy have also produced a stubborn knot of bored children who think guns and flags and dumb slogans will give their lives meaning.
All I can do is suggest to other people in this society to treat these brutal, overgrown adolescents with as much distance as possible. To show them, by example, what stoicism and seriousness look like. To be the adults. I know it’s hard. I’m not consistent about it myself.
But amidst all the calls for unity, it’s important to remember that unity and understanding can only happen between adults who agree to live peaceably. The people who defended sedition – and especially those who instigated it – are not those people. Those are armed toddlers.
Clarissa is the story of a beautiful young woman who, after being pressured by her family to marry an old and awful man with money, is tricked into running away with a rake. He, in turn, holds her captive and, after she repeatedly resists his overtures, drugs her with opium and rapes her. The rest of the novel involves her attempts to escape and the efforts of friends (but not family) to see that justice is done.
The novel has multiple depictions of sadism but the one I have in mind occurs within her family, For page after page we see her parents and siblings taking sadistic delight in tormenting her, which ultimately drive her into the rake’s trap. To give you a taste, here’s her brother writing to her:
By command of your father and mother I write expressly to forbid you to come into their presence, or into the garden when they are there: nor when they are not there, but with Betty Banes to attend you; except by particular license or command…
You are not to enter into the presence of either of your uncles, without their leave first obtained. It is a mercy to you, after such a behavior to your mother, that your father refuses to see you.
You are not to be seen in any apartment of the house you so lately governed as you pleased, unless you are commanded down.
In short, you are strictly to confine yourself to your chamber, except now and then, in Betty Barnes’s sight (as aforesaid) you take a morning or evening turn in the garden: and then you are to go directly, and without stopping at any apartment in the way, up or down the back stairs, that the sight of so perverse a young creature may not add to the pain you have given every body.
The hourly threatenings of your fine fellow, as well as your own unheard-of obstinacy, will account to you for all this. What a hand has the best and most indulgent of mothers had with you, who so long pleaded for you, and undertook for you; even when others, from the manner of your setting out, despaired of moving you!—What must your perverseness have been, that such a mother can give you up! She thinks it right so to do: nor will take you to favor, unless you make the first steps, by a compliance with your duty.
As for myself, whom perhaps you think hardly of [in very good company, if you do, that is my sole consolation]; I have advised, that you may be permitted to pursue your own inclinations, (some people need no greater punishment than such a permission,) and not to have the house encumbered by one who must give them the more pain for the necessity she has laid them under of avoiding the sight of her, although in it.
That boredom explains such behavior I owe to Frederick Karl’s Adversary Literature: The English Novel in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Genre. Viewing the gentry class as Nichols views pampered Americans, Karl notes the salacious buzz that Clarissa’s family gets from desecrating her purity. After all, he asks, what else is so salacious for members of this pampered gentry class than desecrating Clarissa’s purity. The novel inspired the Marquis de Sade’s Justine: The Misfortunes of Virtue, and although Sade goes to extremes that Richardson would never dream of, the underlying dynamics are the same.
For four years, the world has witnessed a sadistic reality television show, all the more delicious because people actually got hurt in this one. One’s dark gratification could be tickled by stories of children torn away from their parents (a common staple of Sade’s novels) and people of color injured or killed by police. To join this show, one simply had to grab an easily obtainable AK-47 and parade around in military fatigues.
Storming the Capitol while Congress was certifying the election was the season finale, something far more gripping than anything see on Survivor or Jersey Shore. One woman (now under arrest) even flew to Washington in a private plane to take part. And if upright citizens recoiled in horror at the show, well, that just added an extra zing, something comparable to having your parents wave their fingers at you. “Owning the liberals” has been a big part of the fun.
Thinking of the Trump years as a reality television show, however, leads me to another theory of popular entertainment that may provide some hope. In his important book on Film Genre, Rick Altman says that the transgressive thrill we get from watching genre movies is ultimately countered by an intense desire to return to conventional values. For much of the movie, we enjoy watching gangsters commit crimes, monsters cause mayhem, and lovers challenge sexual restrictions.
Then, however, the transgression goes too far and we find ourselves longing for normalcy. We want the gangsters shot or at least locked up, the monsters defeated, the lovers married. What once gave us a rebellious thrill now causes painful anxiety.
History provides many examples of retreats from rebellion. The daring Restoration sexual comedies were followed by the far more conservative theatre of the 18th century; Byron’s Satanic heroes by novels hewing to Victorian morality; the wild energies of early 1930’s Hollywood (Mae West, Universal’s monster movies and Warner Brothers’ gangster films) by the Hayes Code.
I’m hoping that Trumpism’s transgressive energies will be followed by a revulsion that causes America to embrace adult maturity once again. I want troublemakers to be either locked up (when they commit crimes) or laughed out of the arena. I want wannabe Trumps to be socially ostracized. I want the country to go about seriously addressing the issues that matter.
These, of course, include a pandemic that has killed 400,000 Americans and cratered the economy and the climate change that is causing out-of-control wildfires and increasingly destructive hurricanes.
Many conservatives have had their sadistic pleasure centers tickled for four years. Let the good resolutions that follow a hangover begin now.
