And he said: “Son, this world is rough
Shel Silverstein – “A Boy Named Sue”
And if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough
And I knew I wouldn’t be there to help ya along
So I give ya that name and I said goodbye
I knew you’d have to get tough or die
And it’s the name that helped to make you strong
Donald Trump — the obese, pampered, bad-boy heir, unindicted co-conspirator — uttered strongly so many times that someone eventually will count them. The American right’s obsession with strength/weakness and with guns as a form of male enhancement is so palpable as to be comic if it were not so deadly.
It is why “A Boy Named Sue” has been the unofficial anthem of the conservative movement since Johnny Cash first played it to a roomful of convicts. It celebrates violence as the appropriate response to insecurity and physical strength as the definition of manhood.
And it’s the name that helped to make you strong. Not a good man. Not a good husband, or a good father, or a good citizen. But strongly, huh?
The song struck a chord with the guests at San Quentin, as did Donald Trump with conservatives across the country. Their obsessions with him and with guns and with suppressing the votes of non-white neighbors broadcast their insecurities to the world. Like that dream about showing up at work or school without pants. Where would you carry your gun?
More than twice as many Americans have already died from gun violence in 2021 than servicemembers died in Afghanistan in nearly twenty years.
Turning freedom into a worship word is another revelatory obsession.
“The ‘liberty’ promised by the Declaration of Independence is interfering with the ‘life’ and the ‘pursuit of happiness’ in ways the Founding Fathers could never have imagined,” writes Zachary B. Wolf for CNN. “Given the choice, with help from conservative courts and Second Amendment true believers, the country is choosing personal freedom over public safety, giving some of its people a feeling of liberty, but also causing many people to die in the process.”
But strongly, huh?
There have been 45 mass shootings in the US in the past month. But most gun deaths won’t be in mass shootings. More have died this year by suicide, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive. More than twice as many Americans have already died from gun violence in 2021 than servicemembers died in Afghanistan in nearly twenty years.
The war over guns is a domestic one, Wolf writes, one in which the insecure demand neighbors “who didn’t volunteer for duty” make themselves human sacrifices.
Democracy itself is on the altar now, dressed, trussed, and prepared for ritual burning by people threatened by their perceived loss of power. They tried to light the fire once already on Jan. 6.
As Colbert I. King sees it:
It is an existential threat to an essential right of U.S. citizenship — the freedom to vote in open elections.
Staring us in the face are 361 restrictive bills by mostly Republican state legislatures across the country that, at bottom, aim to curb voter participation. The supposed rationale for the open assault on voting rights is the baseless charge of voter fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election leveled by the defeated president, Donald Trump, and echoed by his flock of followers.
Threatened, Republicans are, at having to share power, and at having lost Georgia’s 2020 electoral votes and two Senate seats to the strength of Black voter turnout.
As the Rev. Jesse Jackson put it back in 1981 when confronted with resistance to court-ordered busing, “It ain’t the bus, it’s us.”
Republicans see voter suppression (and more guns) as the appropriate response to their gnawing insecurities.
And in fealty to Trump, their improbable embodiment of strongly, the insecure conservative makes neighbors “who didn’t volunteer for duty” human sacrifices to COVID-19.
Greg Sargent writes that 45 percent of Republicans do not plan to get vaccinated. Because freedom:
But what’s surprising is how easily this “populism” melded with a much more conventional and ideologically rigid anti-statism, congealing in college-dorm-level notions of individual liberty and the mass shunning of collective action in response to a major public health crisis, contributing to extraordinarily terrible consequences.
As Will Wilkinson aptly puts it, this ideology has devolved to the point where “tens of millions of Republicans feel entitled to behave as if there were no pandemic,” something that has hardened into a “foundational principle.”
And for untold numbers of voters, it’s backslid to little more than a marker of tribal loyalty to the disgraced failure who did so much to make it all possible. We can only hope the damage will be limited going forward. But as Watts suggests in his lament, it’s hard to be optimistic.
Not a good person. Not a good spouse, or a good parent, or a good citizen. But strongly.
This devolution of a major U.S. political party into a personality cult for the insecure threatens to pull down the temple of democracy in supplication to an earthly deity, much the way Jeff Sharlet found in The Family’s philosophy of “Jesus plus nothing”:
“A covenant,” Doug answered. The congressman half-smiled, as if caught between confessing his ignorance and pretending he knew what Doug was talking about. “Like the Mafia,” Doug clarified. “Look at the strength of their bonds.” He made a fist and held it before Tiahrt’s face. Tiahrt nodded, squinting. “See, for them it’s honor,” Doug said. “For us, it’s Jesus.”
Coe listed other men who had changed the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their “brothers”: “Look at Hitler,” he said. “Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Bin Laden.” The Family, of course, possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the “total Jesus” of a brotherhood in Christ.
“That’s what you get with a covenant,” said Coe. “Jesus plus nothing.”
Trump has stepped in, plus nothing, for the strongmen The Family admires.