Giving the people what they want
On why there will always be a market for evil, craven opportunism (and where that leaves us)
Top note: You just got a White Pages late last week, so this may be a “too much, Garrett!” moment in terms of frequency, but this was one of those moments where I couldn’t get a particular current event out of my mind. Thanks for giving me a space to write when those moments strike. Thanks even more for sharing your thoughts too. And for those of you who support this space financially, well, that’s pretty amazing.
Consider, if you will, the DeSantis.
Or don’t. You’ve already had far more than your FDA-recommended daily intake of this guy, but you’re going to get more. The dumb cruel stunts will continue regardless of your ability to point out their stupidity and cruelty. I’m writing about him right now not to dwell on last week’s news, but because some day soon last week’s news will become breaking news again.
Last week’s stunt, by the way, was human trafficking. A very bad stunt. Pretty evil, actually, what with the lying to migrants part and the generalized “get a load of THESE huddled masses! Gross, right? And their yearning? Too bad that nobody wants them on their teaming shore” vibes. For the record: that nonsense? I’m against it, on account of it being bad.
We talked about that stunt quite a bit last week, those of us who comment on U.S. political goings-on. We debated which political party will “win” or “lose” the aftermath of human trafficking, which is a very cool and humane debate to have. We debated whether the central casting Liberal Elitists of Martha’s Vineyard were satisfactorily hospitable to the migrants to disprove DeSantis, or whether the migrants’ eventual removal (to a military base!) meant that DeSantis proved his point.
An aside: Inside every extremely wealthy liberal lies two wolves- the wolf that feeds migrants and lets them borrow their “Notorious RBG” shirt1 and is much kinder than many would accuse them of being, and the wolf that eventually explains “well of course we had to move the migrants; they wouldn’t want to be here anywhere, because this place is an economic and meteorological disaster nine months out of the year and nobody should live here non-seasonally, which means you are probably now wondering how we justify the service industry that does exist here and the actual human beings who are employed in that service industry and whether this is all part of a larger shell-game of haves and have nots that isn’t getting talked about but damnit the wolf will not be taking further questions at this time.”
Nothing in that paragraph is about political optics, by the way. The Martha’s Vineyard residents did seem legitimately kind. And I agree that none of the migrants likely wanted to stay there. I’m just saying, any reminder of the existence of a place like Martha’s Vineyard can’t help but call into question… well… the existence of a place like Martha’s Vineyard.
In the meantime, here we are, still begrudgingly considering the DeSantis. There isn’t much to consider, as it turns out. His deal is that he is one of those dudes who emerged from the womb convinced that they should be President and who subsequently scripted every major decision in their life to propel them towards that crown. You know those dudes. They are not the sole domain of either party. They are the kind of dudes who go to an Ivy League college and/or an Ivy League law school, who at some point engage in a perfunctory version of military service and then publish a book with a random-word-generated title like The Choice of Our Future, The Courage of Our Heritage: This American Moment. The only interesting thing about DeSantis- in this subgenre of striving dudes- is that at some point in his meticulously crafted checklist-to-the-Presidency, Trumpism took over the world and so he had to hurriedly add new items like “Be yell-y and aggrieved all the time” and “Start standing like a weirdo” to his repertoire.
Last week, while we were tracking DeSantis’ evil Punk’d reboot along that classically American criterium of “yes, it’s unnecessarily cruel, but will it poll well?” one of the more popular retorts from the left was that This Is A Thing That Racists Did In The Past. And I think that’s a fine argument, especially because it’s very accurate, but also: of course it’s the exact thing that racists have done in the past! Racism isn't actually a super innovative, cutting edge field! There are only so many moves! And the one where you point out that there exists a class of people who are rich and elite and are looking down on you but who themselves are also bigoted and closed-minded is a very popular one. DeSantis wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t a tried-and-true reactionary move. Tried-and-true reactionary moves are his ticket to the big time.
Earlier this year, Jacksonville native Ron DeSantis was gifted with a tribute song by two other Jacksonville boys, Donnie and Johnny Van Zant. The song, which is called Sweet Florida, is not good (sample lyric: “You can take it to the bank he don't care what Brandon thinks at the White House”). That’s what you get when your tribute song is written and performed by the two Van Zant brothers who aren’t deceased rock genius/former Lynyrd Skynyrd frontman Ronnie Van Zant.
That other Van Zant wrote a song about a Southern governor once, the one with the line about how “In Birmingham they love the Governor (boo, boo, boo).” It’s a complicated song. There’s a lot of debate about how critical or forgiving it is of George Wallace and Southern racism in general- not just from critics and the public, but from its own co-writers. There are detractors and apologists and just about everybody makes a convincing point. The part everybody can agree on is the one that comes immediately after the Wallace stuff, the one about how a whole bunch of Northerners supported Richard Nixon, and how Nixon was also a jerk. There’s no non-ugly way to say “well, maybe me and my people are pretty racist but we hate it when we’re judged for it” but that other part, where you get to sneer “does your conscience bother you?” at somebody who lives far away from you, somebody who has been looking down at you… well that part comes pretty easy.
One of the least convincing articles I read about the parallels between the “Reverse Great Migration” stunts in the ‘60s and DeSantis’ current move was a Politico piece entitled “A Lesson from the Past For Ron Desantis”. The gist of the piece is, “don’t worry liberals, that stuff didn’t work for the Citizens Councils, so it won’t work for DeSantis either.” And yes, I guess, the Citizen Councils themselves weren’t elected President immediately after transporting Black families across state lines. But as the article itself acknowledges, if the point of this whole dumb game is always to prove that Northern liberals are racist too, the Reverse Freedom Rides only “failed” because their point had already been proven too many times over.
The irony, of course, was that the White Citizens’ Council didn’t really need to pull a cheap stunt. The North already had a large Black population, one that had been growing in leaps and bounds since the start of World War II. To be sure, in the North, Black people could vote and build political power. But a complex thicket of discrimination in housing, jobs, credit, banking and policing — and in the provision of public services such as education and infrastructure — rendered Black people second-class citizens in most Northern localities. By the mid-1960s, urban unrest and contests over school and housing desegregation would lay bare these inequalities.
The stunts are bad, but of course they were going to be dusted off again. Of course they’ll continue.
They’ll continue because DeSantis and at least a few other overly-ambitious post-Trump crown-graspers want to be President so badly that they’ll do anything to win a few news cycles. They’ll continue because the human psyche can’t actually metastasize our own racism and hatred. As Frantz Fanon pointed out, it’s impossible for your brain to function when presented with overwhelming evidence that you’re one of the bad guys. You need something to relieve that itch. You need a foil, a deflection, a sin-eater. And just as rednecky Southern racists are educated White liberals’ favorite foil, so is the inverse true. One side gets its replays of particularly loathsome Trump speeches. The other gets reminders that Martha’s Vineyard exist, that Hollywood exists, that $70,000 a year liberal arts colleges exist. Neither of us ever have to change. We’re the snake eating each other’s tail, except we’ve figured out how to do so while still thrashing around and making a mess for everybody else.
None of this is novel, of course. The fact that Northern liberal enclaves are exclusionary and racist was already common knowledge in the ‘60s, when King was getting attacked by White mobs in Chicago. The fact that craven politicians will put human lives at risk for their own advancement isn’t news either. All this will continue. And unlike a lot of armchair political strategists, I don’t pretend to have the perfect piece of advice to make it disappear, to best DeSantis at his own game.
What I do know, though, is that publicity stunts are one way to transfix the nation’s attention, but they’re not the only way. Great organizers know how to get attention. So too do fed-up neighbors who can’t help but express their pain and rage. And while these days we’re quick to bemoan how the energy of summer 2020 fizzled out, we’d be foolish to forget the true miracle that summer was. For a few months, the world wasn’t talking about this or that politician’s craven stunts. We were talking about people in the streets talking about liberation. We weren’t talking about Northern racism as a deflection from Southern racism, but because a summer of protests was kicked off in Minneapolis, Minnesota- as Northern a city as you can find- by victims and repentant perpetuators of Northern racism alike.
The thing is, you don’t have to consider DeSantis at all. He will continue with the cruelty. He will argue that there is cruelty in your corner of the world as well. He will tell us that we are all monsters. He won’t have us beat, though, if we spend our own precious lifetime working to lessen that cruelty wherever we live, to imagine something better, to care more attention to our neighbors than we do to a callous striver’s evil nonsense. That’s true for all you down in Florida, all you up in Martha’s Vineyard, and everywhere else where hate and division still speaks its name in a distinct local accent.
End notes:
This week’s song:
“Don’t Let Me Die in Florida” by Patty Griffin. Oh, and also: I got a request last week for a playlist of my songs of the week, and that sounded like a delightful way to tell myself I was working while getting to play around on streaming services… so here you go! I made one each on Apple Music and Spotify. Maybe there will be other streaming services later? Enjoy!
This week’s White Pages discussion:
As promised, we did talk about pet peeves last week and it was fun as hell. I laughed out loud a bunch. As for this week’s? I’m still debating- potentially one about our school memories, potentially one about which part of our daily routine is secretly the thing that makes the biggest difference in our quality of life. Or maybe we’ll talk about our relationships to our phones (I’ve been thinking about this a lot because of Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s real heartbreak of an essay about her teen son getting his first phone, though sadly I can’t figure out how to link to it). I mean, if you have an opinion about what I should choose (perhaps none of the above!) let me know. Otherwise, subscribe and be surprised, I guess!
[And if you want or need a comped subscription, just email me at garrett@barnraisersproject.org; no questions asked]
I didn’t just add in that detail as an easy joke. One of the images I can’t get out of my head from this whole affair is one of a migrant eating breakfast, dressed in a pink “Notorious RBG” shirt. I’m not sharing a link to that image because, as you may have noticed I’m not sharing any pictures of the migrants because they didn’t ask to have their lives displayed like this, but still… it was quite an image.
I would be SO curious about the daily routines one, and I have a banger of an answer.