‘Make the world pay’: Inside America’s worst addiction

Intelligencer writer Sam Adler-Bell admits that pointing out MAGA hypocrisy “is a chump’s game,” as is looking for “consistency” or “integrity.”

Recently, House Speaker Mike Johnson took a question about a MAGA-minded January 6 Trump parolee who was caught conspiring to kill a Democrat. Rather than address the issue directly, he tried to blame Democrats for the Trump supporter’s attempted violence by saying: “They call every Republican a fascist now.”

“For sanity’s sake, I will state the plain facts: A man pardoned by the sitting president after engaging in a riot on his behalf was apprehended a second time, for allegedly threatening to kill a leading Democrat — and this, according to the Speaker of the House, is the fault of leftists,” said Adler-Bell.

“Amid a syncopated cascade of assaults, partisans play a perverted game of hot potato: Whoever is holding the ball when the music stops is responsible,” Adler-Bell argued. “If the latest shooter is plausibly left-wing, the right is faultless, and vice versa, until the next round begins. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but everybody plays. (And sometimes, of course, you cheat. In the Moynihan case, Johnson found himself holding the ball and threw it at his opponent’s chest.)”

But that’s not the real story, Adler-Bell emphasizes. The deeper issue is that the American public remains fascinated with the idea of “fixing things through violence,” and our collective illness is poised to wreak havoc on the world.

“Today, American film and television are lousy with special-forces units, police detectives, and secret agents who use illegal and inhumane means (often including torture) to restore order and protect the innocent. Sometimes these bad but necessary men, like [John] Wayne in *Liberty Valance*, are consumed by guilt and drink and, in a last feeble gesture of moral purgation, die alone in despair,” Adler-Bell explains.

“We Americans love these stories for their psychic parsimony: They redeem the violence underpinning the social order while allowing us to remain, at once, tut-tutting bystanders to its cruelty and deliciously complicit in its excess.”

The narrative continues as Adler-Bell describes America’s persistent craving: the hope for “some new order born from the ashes of the old.”

For the right, Donald Trump is cast as “the gunslinger who has come to slay the forces of liberal chaos and break a few rules, like habeas corpus and the First and Fourth Amendments, to establish a conservative empire.”

Liberals, meanwhile, “await an avenging authority — a new kind of candidate, a sufficiently ballsy prosecutor, a judge or general to come along and clean up the neighborhood,” Adler-Bell notes. “The authoritarian chaos of the past decade demands a renewal of the liberal order in a more muscular form.”

Yet, Adler-Bell cautions, we keep hoping that violence will bring about “a new civilized order,” but violence simply isn’t how you build lasting change.

Our “perennial American delusion,” he says, quoting writer Susan Sontag, is that purgative violence can restore our blamelessness and purity.

It was one thing to affectionately jeer at American barbarism in the past, “but that was before the American empire held the planet’s ‘historical future in its King Kong paws.’”

“It is incredible that a country so idiotic and prone to neurotic excess has managed to keep the world in its meaty grasp for so long, fondling it like Lennie with his mouse,” Adler-Bell reflects. “America has made the world pay for its priggish delusions of sanity. It will surely make the world pay for its nervous breakdown.”
https://www.rawstory.com/make-the-world-pay-inside-america-s-worst-addiction/

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