As I write this, the country is reeling with the news that a right-wing maniac, armed with a shotgun and bearing a grudge, burst into the offices of a small newspaper in Maryland and murdered five people in cold blood. Normally, this sort of mass killing would barely raise an eyebrow; a mere five deaths in gun-drunk America doesn’t even register anymore. But it comes against the backdrop of neo-Nazi provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos stating in an interview that he couldn’t wait for vigilante mobs to start gunning down journalists, and more importantly, of the president of the United States making frequent and repeated comments about how the press are purveyors of lies and enemies of the nation.
You don’t have to be a weatherman to know how much this blows. But to give it an even tangier flavor, it also follows on the heels of two events by no means unrelated: the unexpected and highly welcome development of ordinary citizens, welling with repulsion at the immoral and brutal behavior of their government, noisily shaming that government’s representatives and making them unwelcome in public places; and the reaction of the bourgeoise centrist professional class in uniformly condemning this extremely admirable behavior as ‘uncivil’ and unbecoming of the kind of nation they erroneously believe America to be.
That this is utter hogwash, I hope, needs little explanation. For one thing, it is the height of moral fatuousness to condemn the reaction to the misdeeds of the gaggle of criminals, hustlers, and white supremacists who constitute our current administration, while reacting with a disappointed shrug to the misdeeds themselves — misdeeds which include, at this point, looting the public wealth, instituting racist policies of exclusion, and imprisoning children in for-profit concentration camps, and are only going to get worse with the passage of time. No one with any sense of proportion would object in the least to the perpetrators of these blights being continually pelted with garbage every time they leave their homes for the remainder of their wasted lives.
For another, it evinces in their character a sort of besotted noblesse oblige, a solidarity to the class they think they belong to that the targets of this finger-wagging incivility wouldn’t reciprocate if their lives depended on it. Many of the people doing the tsk-tsking over how dreadfully rude we’re all being to the human smallpox scars of the Trump Administration are themselves journalists, a profession the President, his allies, and his authoritarian cop-loving fans hold in an esteem slightly lower than a sewer rat. Today’s events should make it painfully clear that if they thought they could get away with it, the Trump Administration would gladly stand by gurning funny faces while every journalist in the country who wasn’t a complete toady for their side was pushed off the side of a cliff. They’re chasing a phantom propriety that was never meant to be returned and never will be; it’s the same mistake the Democrats have made repeatedly over the last 30 years, playing by rules the other side has no intention of respecting.
An argument can certainly be made — I’ll make it, though not here — that if anything, the people tossing Sarah Huckabee Sanders out of their restaurant, heckling Kirstjen Nielsen in a bar, browbeating Elaine Chao as she tries to get in her SUV, are doing too little. None of these people, these murderous plutocrats who conspire to starve us through indifference and malevolence, should be able to show their faces in public for fear of a public thrashing at the very least. They have made it painfully clear that they don’t care if we die, and extending them any more than the same courtesy is suicidal.
But more importantly, it should be made clear that the reason that the little people are choosing this manner of protest, rude though it may be to the comfortable elites who make money tutting about it, is because all other alternatives have been taken away. Voting has become a sick joke, utterly neutralized by decades of voter suppression by Republicans, criminal collaboration by Democrats, and gerrymandering by both parties. The vast resources and immense power of the military has made armed rebellion impossible, and the increased militarization and radicalization of local police departments, combined with the pervasiveness of our corporatized security state, has made peaceful protest toothless and ineffectual. Our very Constitution conspires to make real political change almost unthinkable, and the selling of the rights to the legislative system to the highest bidder silences the voice of all but the biggest spenders. The vast power and wealth possessed by our oligarchs keeps them in a bubble of utter safety and utter detachment, and the gutlessness of their purported opposition means that even a change in government will not result in even a tiny amount of punishment. They will, all of them, spend their entire lives in complete comfort and leisure, entirely insulated from any consequence of their heinous behavior.
Any consequence, save one: these people must, on rare occasions, go out into the world, into the spaces where their every desires are satiated by servants. But some of those servants know who they are, and a precious few of them have the courage and the conscience to make their lives miserable, even for a few fleeting moments. They know that this is the only door open to them. Is it civil? The hell it is; we have gone way past the point of civility. Is it effective? You’re goddamn right it is; if making people’s waking moments of leisure fraught with peril, fear, and uncertainty wasn’t effective, the ruling class wouldn’t do it to us every day of our lives. Is it acceptable to the people who themselves are insulated by wealth and position from the worst wounds inflicted by the policies of the people we’re aiming our dreadful incivility at? No, and it never will be. But that’s okay. These little acts of rebellion, of remonstrance, of precious beautiful rudeness are how we start building a movement, and how we start learning how to use power. They can join us, or they can be next.