{"id":28242,"date":"2017-06-24T12:27:13","date_gmt":"2017-06-24T19:27:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=28242"},"modified":"2017-06-25T19:04:58","modified_gmt":"2017-06-26T02:04:58","slug":"everyday-erinyes-80","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2017\/06\/24\/everyday-erinyes-80\/","title":{"rendered":"Everyday Erinyes #80"},"content":{"rendered":"

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage.\u00a0 These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that.\u00a0 Even though there are many more which I can’t include.\u00a0 As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone<\/span><\/strong>. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”<\/p>\n

I am running late today, and short-handed, since I really needed to ask Tisiphone<\/span><\/strong> to do a favor for a friend (who has an ex-spouse who needs to be – explained – the meaning of “restraining order.”)\u00a0 But – as I point out every week – no one knows the true total number of the Furies, and I need to ask them if any of them are children.\u00a0 Because what is really needed for the first situation this week is about 400 baby Eumenides<\/span><\/strong>, primed to comfort children who need it.<\/p>\n

We probably all cringed this week when the murderer of Philando Castile was acquitted of all charges (He is no longer a police officer, but now, what’s to prevent him from becoming one again?), and many of us re-lived that horrible night, particularly since, with the trial over, the dashcam video was now available and shocking.\u00a0 Castile’s death, happening as it did in front of his girl friend and right before the eyes of her little girl, was devastating even to those of us who follow such killings, and was covered here at Politics Plus as well in all the mainstream media.\"\"<\/p>\n

What went under the radar then, and which I only realized this week, was that Philando Castile had in life worked as the nutrition services supervisor at J.J. Hill<\/a>, “a small bastion of diversity, a Montessori school that draws from surrounding progressive neighborhoods.”<\/p>\n

It was a few weeks after his death in July 2016 when Sakki Selznick learned that her daughter had been giving imaginary high-fives to Philando Castile.<\/em><\/p>\n

Castile \u2015 or Mr. Phil, as students at J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet School would call him \u2015 often greeted students with high-fives while they waited on line to get breakfast in the cafeteria. Now that Mr. Phil was gone, Selznick\u2019s young daughter worried she\u2019d never get one of his famous high-fives again. One evening, she explained, she was thinking about it and she\u2019d started high-fiving the air, hoping Mr. Phil would respond somehow.<\/em><\/p>\n

A magical high-five didn\u2019t arrive. Through tears, Selznick explained to her daughter that she would not be getting one.\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ten-year old Miss Selznick is far from alone.\u00a0 “395 adoring students … have spent the past year mourning Castile, a loss that was felt anew last week with the news that Yanez had been acquitted of any wrongdoing.<\/em>”<\/p>\n

When the students returned to school last fall, they had been visibly changed.\u00a0 The school has been doing its best to deal with the grief head on.\u00a0 Teachers got special training, counselors had extended availabilty, visible memorials were created.\u00a0 But\u00a0 when adults cannot work through and make sense of a catastrophe. children really cannot be expected to do so.\u00a0 400 or so baby Eumenides<\/span><\/strong> probably cannot resolve this either, but it couldn’t hurt, could it?<\/p>\n

As one parent said, “It has been a hard year.\u00a0 I don’t imagine the next year will be easier<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

Grief like this is immobilizing.\u00a0 But the right is not immobilized right now.\u00a0 It is invigorated.\u00a0 And, while I would hesitate to call anyone on the right “intelligent,” you don’t gain as much power as they have without having something.\u00a0 Call it low cunning if you will.\u00a0 Shrewdness works for me.\u00a0 And I am seeing a trend.\u00a0 Some one, or some group, possibly not even organized, on the right, is is combining our grief and their projection to use against us.\u00a0 They don’t need to immobilize us forever.\u00a0 They just need to immobilize us long enough to destroy us.\u00a0 From AlterNet <\/a>–<\/p>\n

\u00a0You may have mocked claims about the existence of paid protesters as just another lie from the right. As it turns out, at least on this one issue, they\u2019re actually telling the truth. The problem is, the right neglected to mention those paid protesters are part of the right-wing apparatus….\u00a0 If it seemed incongruous that the \u201cnew right\u201d\u2014whose members have declared themselves the defenders of free speech and conservationists of Western culture\u2014claimed to be so outraged by the recent staging of a Shakespeare play, this might explain why. And when the right talks about \u201cpaid protesters,\u201d just assume they personally know whence they speak.\u00a0\"\"<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If sending out paid protestors isn’t enough, consider how the right is complaining about left-wing violence – and using that as an excuse to knock a few heads themselves.\u00a0 From Mother Jones<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cDid anybody get to bash a commie yet?\u201d [Kyle] Chapman asked, addressing a group of \u201cWestern chauvinist\u201d street brawlers known as the Proud Boys, who flashed \u201cOK\u201d hand signs as a videographer livestreamed the event for Chapman\u2019s 34,000 Facebook followers. \u201cWell, let me know when the time is right because I\u2019m not going to miss out on any fun.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Mike Cernovich, who has a lot of monty to spend on paid protesting, made it into this story too –<\/p>\n

\u201cThese [left\/right] labels are changing,\u201d insists internet troll, vlogger, and self-proclaimed \u201cnational security reporter\u201d Mike Cernovich, who is among the most prominent pro-Trump voices online and now works for Infowars. \u201cWhether the liberals agree with us or not, we view the left as being the establishment now. The counterculture, the dissident thinking is now coming from the right.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course where there are right wingers there will be money, and money pervades all of this activity.\u00a0 Chapman is now looking to publish comic books.\u00a0 Partly because:<\/p>\n

\u201cMarvel, DC have really let their readership down because they\u2019ve moved so far to the left,\u201d he told me. \u201cThey\u2019ve gone and changed white characters to black characters. They\u2019ve taken straight characters and made \u2019em gay. It\u2019s not what people wanted. They want superheroes.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

May I digress a little bit here?\u00a0 I am straight, and so white that I can’t spend more than five minutes in the sun without sunscreen.\u00a0 But I can recognize a superhero when I see one – and it mostly ain’t white guys.\u00a0 Anyone who is black or brown or gay or Muslim or any one of a thousand pther things these guys just can’t stand, IS a superhero.\u00a0 They HAVE to be super heroes just to survive.\u00a0 To not only survive but to stay positive, to stay away from hate (like the survivors at Mother Emanuel in Charleston) – these are the superest of superheroes.\u00a0 Anyone who can’t see that is blind.\u00a0 The blindness may or may not be deliberate.<\/p>\n

The Nation<\/a> also has an article on why political violence is necessarily on the right and of the right.\u00a0 The Nation has a pretty fierce paywall, and when I see something there I might want to refer to again not in the same month, I “print” it to a pdf or an xps file to save on my computer, so as not to keep spending that same “view” over and over.\u00a0 I did that with this one.<\/p>\n

In the wake of the mass shooting in suburban Virginia last week that left House majority whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) and three others wounded, conservatives have been furiously waving the bloody shirt. With LEFT-WINGHATE filling half the screen, Sean Hannity blamed Democrats, saying they \u201cdehumanize Republicans and paint them as monsters.\u201d Tucker Carlson claimed that \u201csome on the hard left\u201d support political violence because it \u201ccould lead to the dissolution of a country they despise.\u201d Others have blamed seemingly anything even vaguely identified with liberalism for inciting the violence\u2014from Madonna to MSNBC to Shakespeare in the Park.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is all a truly remarkable example of projection. In the wake of the shooting, Erick Erickson wrote a piece titled, \u201cThe Violence is Only Getting Started,\u201d as if three innocent people hadn\u2019t been brutally murdered by white supremacists in two separate incidents in just the past month.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All of these articles are strong on what the right is in fact doing.\u00a0 Unfortunately, they are weak on ideas about how to combat what the right is doing.\u00a0 Because, unfortunately, just saying “Oh, they’re projecting,” is not going to work.\u00a0 One either sees that or one doesn’t.\u00a0 And they don’t.<\/p>\n

But maybe Megaera and Alecto<\/span><\/strong> can come up with something. And, when she gets back, Tisiphone<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The Furies and I will be back.<\/p>\n

Cross posted to Care2 at http:\/\/www.care2.com\/news\/member\/101612212\/4059167<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage.\u00a0 These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that.\u00a0 Even though there […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":18437,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}