Phew! I just got back to the East End from a winter in the increasingly whacked out state of Florida. Things are crazy in Tallahassee. It’s riddled with an infectious insanity that’s spreading across the country faster than an omicron variant.
What’s going on?
It’s a question being asked by a variety of pundits and intellectuals. Some, like New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, speculate that the world has been tilted off its axis, suffering an acute case of social “anomie” — widespread unhappiness. It’s led to rampant scapegoating in which Jews, once again, are getting blamed for a general malaise. Antisemitic incidents in the U.S. hit record-breaking levels in 2021.
Jews aren’t the only ones being locked in as blame-worthy targets for America’s emerging-from-COVID blahs. It seems that the LGBTQ community, of which I’m a member, is the current group being picked for societal slaughter.
The arguably legitimate concern of exposing tender-aged children to discussions of sexuality — which Florida claimed to address with its clumsily written “Don’t Say Gay” law — has rapidly morphed into the slur of “grooming.”
Grooming had been a term limited to a sexual abuser who selects an underage child to prey upon by gaining the child’s confidence in order to engage in the ultimate assault. That’s a real and frightening thing — one that tore my own extended family apart.
In olden times — like, 10 to 20 years ago — the threat of allegations of pedophilia got baselessly projected onto gay men and women. It was used to shame and therefore control us, to keep us from legitimately living out our lives.
As columnist Frank Bruni recently pointed out, gay men like him — and me — internalized this shame to the point that we were perpetually concerned about touching kids, even tousling a nephew’s hair, for fear of triggering an accusation.
But in just the past few weeks, “groomer” has appeared as the new epithet being hurled not only at the LGBTQ community but also at straight, white, suburban, Christian mothers like Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow, simply for being open-minded and supportive.
There’s a new, bigoted orthodoxy leaping across the land. Okay, it’s not so new, its “-isms” and phobias have long existed: racism, sexism, antisemitism, xenophobia, homophobia. But we were taking tentative steps beyond them. Now, like Carrie’s hand thrusting out of the grave, the new orthodoxy is threatening to drag us back in.
As a gay man who’s Hispanic, I get that battle of the -isms. I’ve fought them. I’ve made movies about them. I understand that winning the war will be a constant series of skirmishes that are ongoing. To quote another favorite pundit, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” I also get that in a pluralist, liberal democracy like ours, the “win” is likely a compromise.
What I don’t get is that it’s no longer just us, the marginalized, who are being attacked. Now, it’s America itself that’s under siege — by its own citizens. It’s freedom-loving Americans who believe in the fundamental values of free speech and respect for individual rights (tempered by the responsibility they bring) who are being scapegoated and assaulted.
It’s our public servants — librarians, election workers, flight attendants, teachers, fellow PTA members, nurses, doctors, county clerks — who are getting clobbered. It’s they who form the solid backbone of our small-town democracies and our care-giving communities. It’s the people who help us conduct our lives in the public square who are getting mugged by the new nuttiness.
I mean, didn’t we all read “Fahrenheit 451,” “Animal Farm” and “Brave New World” thinking they were irrelevant science fiction, because lessons about totalitarianism couldn’t possibly apply to a post-McCarthy America?
But now we’re acting out that literary hyperbole. We’re banning books left and right. At least one Tennessee legislator is threatening to burn them. We’re codifying people to snitch on teachers and putting bounties on those helping women exercise their constitutional right to choose. Everyone is being criminalized, from immigrants to librarians.
In the name of protective parenting, we’re severing kids from our history of slavery and Jim Crow and how this legacy continues to impact us as a country. We’re depriving our children of learning how to see things critically and as a whole, not just as some saccharine Disney version — oh, sorry, even Disney has tried to step into the thinking world of nuance and gotten whacked. We’re teaching our children it’s okay to be mean.
America’s public school children are being besieged by the threat of dumbing down in the name of orthodoxy. We’re stifling them from thinking as innovative Americans, the very thing that has kept us ahead in an increasingly competitive world.
Another one of my favorite pundits, political essayist Heather Cox Richardson, recently had an epiphany in trying to find a unifying explanation as to what’s going on. For her, it’s not Trumpian family autocracy nor reformulated states’ rights being asserted by Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Instead, it’s illiberal democracy, or “soft fascism,” the kind that’s being promoted by Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
Cox Richardson sees illiberalism as a new phenomenon infecting an increasingly radicalized wing of the Republican Party, whose thought leaders will be meeting next month in Hungary when the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) convenes there.
She sees Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as its standard bearer with his scorched-earth, lead-by-intimidation assault on liberalism (banning math books, censoring corporations, gerrymandering out Black congressional districts, creating election marshals, prohibiting diversity training, restricting abortions, limiting university tenure based on speech … and that’s just in the last two months).
In other words, the new right in America is really a reimagining of the old-old right that espoused the other -isms: Nazism, fascism, authoritarianism and Stalinism.
Think about it: The newly radical right — especially that leading light of truth and courage, Tucker Carlson — has been struggling with condemning the world’s primo autocrat, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Donald Trump initially thought Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was “genius.” And do you remember how, after a closed meeting with Putin at the 2018 Helsinki Summit, Trump skulked to the podium like a whipped puppy while Putin preened?
To me, that looks like grooming, and the prey is us, the US of A.
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