Degeneracy – “the state of being degenerate”

Degenerate itself has several definitions, of which this seems the most appropriate to this article:

“having sunk to a lower and usually corrupt and vicious state”

People have always complained about how their societies have degenerated, going back to at least to Socrates:

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

Still, it’s more of a problem when those in middle and late age are the ones that start showing signs of descending into a corrupt and violent state of mind.

Only a few months into President Trump’s second term I’ve yet to see many examples of public, personal attacks on his supporters that was seen in his first term. You still see such abuse hurled from protestors but it’s not personalised on to a single target. There are likely several reasons for that, starting with the recognition that there’s a lot of them about so they can’t be isolated and destroyed.

Then there’s the fact that it caused a counter-reaction so huge that the Orange Monster was elected President again; no matter how satisfying such an attack might be, if it only results in producing what you loathe you re going to stop doing it. It could also be that they have become cringe-inducing, like this White Woman attack. Or perhaps are just exhausted after everything they threw at Trump – impeachments, general lawfare, 95% negative coverage in the MSM, and a couple of assassination attempts – failed to stop him.

In any case, I haven’t seen stories like these ones from his first term, although it’s still early days – and the degeneracy within the culture, and the body politic, is still there, waiting to erupt again.

Let’s say that you’re someone like the guy pictured below: an older gentlemen just sitting in a Starbucks cafe. You’re wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, and not just for kicks like some high school kid, but because you’re actually a Trump supporter.

In California! And not just somewhere like the Central Valley or the North of the state, where men in cowboy hats still drive their pickups to honky tonk bars, just two hours drive north of San Francisco. No, you’re sitting in Palo Alto, but even so, in a normal society this should mean nothing.

And then, out of nowhere, a complete stranger comes up to  you and starts screaming at you about how you’re a “racist” and a “Nazi” and how you “hate brown people.”  This creature is a woman and she’s very, very angry at you. She starts telling the other customers and staff that they need to rise up against you. When you retreat outside, she follows you to the parking lot, yelling at you that she will leave you with “nowhere to hide“. And it turns out that she means it, later posting pictures she took of you on Facebook, describing all the above, vowing to find out where you live and work:

“I am going to organize protests where he works and make him feel as unsafe as he made every brown person he met today.”

Because you’re wearing a hat she really does not like.

I’m not a psychologist but if you’re triggered into a towering, screaming ragefest by a hat with an innocuous political slogan on it, then I don’t think the hat is the problem. Spending some time in a nice, quiet, padded room containing no sharp objects and lots of pictures of puppies and kittens might work. Perhaps even a brief stay in a psychiatric clinic with some good drugs? Although since she lives in California that’s probably redundant.

Turns out that putting all this on her Facebook and Twitter accounts was not the brightest thing to do. Several days later, she was fired from her accounting job at Gryphon Stringed Instruments, after they ran into a shitstorm of bad Yelp reviews based on her posting. Gryphon manager Matt Lynch:

“What she said in no way reflects Gryphon or how the company feels,  It’s a big shock to us.”

Richard Johnston owns Gryphon and said that he decided to fire Mankey – a friend since early school days – not because of the firestorm, but because her bullying actions were

“not indicative of how we conduct ourselves at the shop.” 

Why you could take all those words straight out of the mouth of the Australian Rugby Union CEO! Except that this woman went to a level that Folau never has.

“Punching Back Twice As Hard” – as some famous US President once said.

The woman’s name is Rebecca Parker Mankey, she’s a 46 year old lifetime resident of Palo Alto, and this is her FB picture:

But is this “punching back” really going to lead anywhere good? On the one hand it’s nice to see a Leftist thug face some real consequences of precisely the type that she was so eager to dish out. On the other hand, was what she was doing also free speech? What if she’d said the same stuff in a quiet manner and similarly on her FB and Twitter accounts?

As for the man, it turns out that he’s a 74 year old Jew who gave only his first name, Victor, to KTVU when they interviewed him. During that interview he still had the hat but was wearing his kippah. He had some interesting comments as he confirmed Mankey’s story:

It’s called Trump derangement syndrome: people acting crazy. If you can’t tell the difference between a hat that says ‘Make America Great Again’ and a Nazi helmet or a Ku Klux Klan hat, I’d say you’re deranged. What’s happened around here is that people get the idea that if you’re for Trump you are an evil person. There is no intelligent dialogue. People watch right-wing websites and left-wing websites, There’s no intelligent discussion at all. There used to be some sense of two political parties.

And this is not an uncommon event. There was the guy in Texas who stole a MAGA hat off a kid’s head in a restaurant and threw a drink in his face. There was the woman who got pepper-sprayed by some Antifa loser because she was wearing a “Make Bitcoin Great Again” hat. A woman in Boston who assaulted a MAGA hat wearing guy. The last case had some juicy, delicious irony as it turned out that she was a Brazilian national who’d been living in the US illegally for 25 years, so got handed to ICE for deportation. And then there’s this full-on shitstorm in a Post Office, recorded by Paloma Zuniga, a dual US-Mexican citizen who happens to be a Trump supporter and was wearing a MAGA hat. It must have given the short-haired, shorts-and-sock wearing white woman in the video great pleasure to call a Mexican a racist. 

On one level it’s all minor shit, but I don’t recall similar stuff during Obama’s two terms, or even during Bush’s Presidency, despite the hatred unloaded on both men in the Internet world. With Trump though such incidents have appeared and have steadily ramped up – and these ones are just the incidents recorded or that led to arrests, meaning there are many more. It’s no longer happening at protests but in private life, and it’s indicative of larger things afoot in the USA that don’t lead anywhere good.

It looks like the New Left phrase of the late 1960’s, “the personal is political“, has morphed from a rationale for defending the source of politics into a rationale for violent attack.

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Sunday afternoon Philosophising: III – Forgetting how to be a Modern Civilisation
Sunday afternoon Philosophising: I – How We Got Here intellectually.