As the virtual lights come on everywhere in this Attention Age, the old tried-and-true routines for pitting people against each other in order to rob them all blind no longer work. After four years in control of the US government, that famous American bigotry has been well and truly outed, and repudiated. But that doesn't matter cause it's a fact, and facts don't matter anymore, spectacle has all the power now. There's no going back.
Apparently some people just have to oppress somebody or they can't feel normal. Hence this pivot we're hearing about recently, to attacking Asians. But that's not enough for some of these hardened hate-mongers in high offices of public trust. They need something to differentiate themselves, to really stand out from the crowd, and dog-whistles are not that nuanced.
I call them hate-mongers because they don't hate themselves, I don't mean they don't hate themselves, I mean they are not really capable of any passions at all. You have to have feelings to hate. A psychopath doesn't hate, or love, for that matter. So they use other people, who do. They needed a vehicle, something that would scale up, a kind of distributed app, a cookie-cutter stink-bomb that could be ignited anywhere. Fear is low-hanging strange-fruit. There's plenty of that around, and it morphs to hate at the merest suggestion.
State laws they've flung at the wall probably won't stick, but a multi-state legislative shotgun-blast of legalistic viciousness, combined with spectacular public expressions of contempt for people they think can't retaliate, might blow a hole in that wall big enough to drive a campaign through in the midterm elections. The idea is to take the floodlights off themselves, and put a laser-spotlight directly on themselves, if you see what I mean: obscure the information with overwhelming media attention. The way to do that is to become an icon. A "brand." A brand is a scar seared into flesh with a red-hot iron, denoting ownership. In this case, a mental scar, seared into the public mind with red-hot media attention. Today, fame and infamy are as different as kerosene and jet-fuel where power is concerned. Idolatry or revulsion, it's all attraction. People will bring their own meaning once you grab them by the, um, eyeballs. That's all an icon or a brand is.
The former president is the ultimate example. He had no strategy, no policy, no programs, no guiding philosophy or moral compass. There was nothing in this hollow man but an extreme pathological compulsion to be the center of all attention, every moment. This addiction alone is sufficient to explain everything that happened. Everything. His followers and backers described him in a thousand mutually incompatible ways, pieced together from their own fantasies. The guy shook hands by jerking judges and heads of state off their feet for the cameras. Nothing he said or did, boasting of assaulting women, inciting violence at rallies, denying the germ theory in the pandemic, nothing dissuaded them from their idol-worship. He was that kid in elementary school, the one that always took things farther than anybody else dared. (He didn't go farther; he took everybody else where they feared to tread.)
This tactic gets all the free coverage a candidate could ever want. Which would be all of it. The catch is that media stunts are short-lived, and the people that pull them are as ephemeral as may-flies. The lawn-chair balloon guy. And that's a worry, as we've just learned over four years. Each outrage must be topped, and at the precise pace of the News Cycle, with more and worser spectacular violations of perfectly sensible cultural norms like sharing, and caring, all that stuff bonobos do in the wild. But now he's gone, supposedly, and fools rush in. It's as if this cancerous stupidity has found its way into America's lymph system, and gone metastatic, breaking out in 47 state legislatures all at once.
Now these clotpolls want to throw our own children under the bus.
Children who can be easily identified and stereotyped and targeted are now being identified and stereotyped and targeted by new laws cracking down on "certain children." Denying them critical medical care, permitting healthcare providers to deny treatment based on "medical conscientious objection," and requiring birth-gender documentation to play school sports. This is far beyond that earlier public bathroom shaming, which was already beyond the pale of simple decency. That was just a practice run. We can only guess the focus-groups have encouraged them to really go for it now.
You can't start a fire without tinder, so shame on the rest of us. Sorry, but that's the way all con-games work. They snatch us by our own dishonesty. Taking advantage of that sad fact, bullies always accuse their intended victims of the very crimes they are in the act of perpetrating. And the same trick works in reverse when they name a law, like "Religious Freedom Restoration Act." Missouri's version of that one prohibits requiring gender-neutral public bathrooms (which would have been the cost-effective solution). The Show Me State is protecting its bathrooms, and no mistake! And it's guns, too, right in the next sentence. That law would be honestly titled, "Freedom to Shame Children and Stockpile Firearms Act," but the official title is "Fundamental Freedom from Government Act." No kidding.
If they were named for their clear intent, laws like "To Create The Fairness In Women's Sports Act" would read "Keeping Transgender Athletes Out Act." But I had to check that out. So I read a stack of them. Just the good parts. (Disclaimer: I am no lawyer, but I can read as well as anybody.) Most are so similar as to have been cloned. They try to make a case for keeping transgender students out of participation in sports, or allowing EMTs to refuse treatment to anybody whose religion or whatever they don't approve, without ever actually saying so. None of the 47 or more laws I looked up say so, except where it's pretty hard to tiptoe around what they mean. Like the ones that list surgeries.
But the intention of the sudden interstate flood of legal language is clear. So far, it appears that four or five of these bills have been passed and signed by their governors, but dozens of these copy-cat bills came up very recently, and most seem to be very actively in process. Somebody should track the money. There are hundreds of these cut-and-paste laws being floated. Here's just a tiny sample, because most of them are too boring (to obscure their intent):
There are:
Four titled: "Save Women's Sports Act" (GA, NC, OH, and SC).
Three named: "To Create The Fairness In Women's Sports Act" (AR, KS, and NJ).
The names grow ominous when it comes to medical care:
"The Arkansas Save Adolescents From Experimentation (safe) Act."
"South Carolina Minor Child Compassion and Protection Act."
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