The performative cruelty of it

I’ve tried never to write about politics or, indeed, any hot button issues in my blog. It’s a quick way to attract readers and attention, for sure, but I dislike the sort of attention and discourse it tends to bring. I much prefer to write long boring blogs about esoteric scientific topics, until only the most dedicated and sedate of readers are still with me 3000 words later.

Nevertheless, I find myself at the present moment needing to write about politics, because I have a mouth and I must scream. I tried to get this bug out of my system earlier this month, by writing obliquely about the moral considerations of size. The point being that the current administration was, charitably speaking, behaving as if it was unaware that it was now the giant in the room, and no longer the weakling.

I wish I could still keep to that charitable interpretation. But I don’t think I can. Today, I saw the President and Vice President of the United States of America try to bully and publicly humiliate the President of Ukraine for no reason other than that his country is weak and our country is strong. They called him to the White House, demanded that he say please and thank you as they presented a deal to devour his country’s resources, and then expelled him like a misbehaving student when he objected.

This is the most performatively cruel I have ever seen the leadership of the United States behave. It’s impossible to understand as a rational action, because it puts us in league with a weak, chaotic, evil empire and against any of our former allies. It broadcasts to the world that the United States is not to be trusted: not only that any gifts we give are, in fact, loans, but that also we will make you regret taking them. It threatens the Pax Americana and pushes the whole world towards militarization, and will almost certainly result in new nuclear powers.

The only way I can understand this is as an action in which cruelty is the point. It’s a performance. They need to be cruel because cruelty causes the other side to cry out in pain, and crying out in pain shows that the other side deserved it. It’s the morality of the schoolyard bully, the torturer, the wife beater. The only real virtue is momentary strength; the only real sin is momentary weakness.

And that’s the lens that I’m starting to see this whole goddamn administration in. The chaotic, untargeted, mass firings of anybody in the federal government who’s been recently hired or promoted; the confusion of simultaneously frozen and unfrozen scientific funds; the cancellation of cheap, lifesaving aid programs; the appointment of the most untrustworthy thugs to the leadership of our institutions. It’s just all performance. It’s just all a demonstration that they are in power now, and you are not, and that the things you hold holy they can destroy.

In this view of morality, the only way the weak can temporarily redeem themselves is by groveling. You need to kiss the bully’s foot. You need to laugh at his joke insulting you. You need to tell him that he was right all along, that you are a piteous, sniveling weakling, and that you deserved everything that came to you. Then, and only then, are you redeemed. It doesn’t matter what else you’ve done: you can be an abusive pimp, a womanizing drug addicted child murderer, a lying bribe-taking Democratic mayor, even (and especially) someone who has repeatedly criticized that bully in the past.

If you pledge yourself completely to the strong, then, and only then, can you specifically be helped. But, just so you know: this offer only extends to you personally. Your village will be burnt behind you.

I hate this so, so goddamn much. I have never felt so alienated from my country’s politics as of now. Even when the US bombed Pakistani weddings, grandstanded about women’s breasts terrorizing children, celebrated riots as reparations, or tortured innocents in Guantanamo there was some veneer of moral logic to it. There was at least a pretense of a moral high ground, that whoever wields the awesome power of the United States government is at least trying to do good with it, even if they were failing or not trying very hard.

But this isn’t even those weak attempts at trying to do the right thing in a complex world. This is like solving the trolley problem by going out on the tracks, extorting the people tied to the tracks for money, and then somehow killing all of them anyway. It’s pathetic and disgusting.

And that’s pretty much all I have to say, at least until this administration does something else terrible. 1 month down, 47 left to go.