The Snake Pit

What am I supposed to do with all this hatred I feel for MAGA Republicans?

Today I settled in at a red light behind a Chevy truck (property of a U.S. Army vet and Trump supporter, assuming the bumper credible) who posed me this baffler: ARE YOU AN AMERICAN, OR A DEMOCRAT?

The voltage of the wrath I’ve been containing since then! The sheer living voltage of it!

Is a vivid imagination a blessing or a curse in these situations? Does the concocting of scenarios of spiraling road rage conflagrations devolving to murder and incarceration and scandal militate against their likelihood of occurring? Is it a harmless pressure-release valve refined over 200 millenniums of troll-handling? Or does the caustic formula of that make-believe cut grooves in the daydreamer’s psyche, rendering him bit by bit less pleasant to be around?

What I wouldn’t give to be…not indifferent…but bigger than these absurd provocations, this bratty highway discourse indistinguishable from being farted on by strangers. To be able to see and read and give a sage laugh, wry, untouched, maybe pitying. I feel diminished as a character in my own life to be so predictably, inescapably rousable.

I was completely in thrall to an audiobook at the moment of interruption: Dissident Gardens, by Jonathan Lethem (read by the exquisite Mark Bramhall). We are in a college classroom somewhere in Massachusetts. Cicero Lookins has just inadvertently flattened the 19-year old brains in his seminar with an exhilarating challenge inspired by his reading of the British psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas’s concept of the unthought known: Say something right now about your mother that you have always known but never thought.

Pretty good, yeah? Don’t you want to know what happens next? So do I! I was in love with this chapter today! I was back in school again, under the spell of a professor who’d hijacked his own lesson plan! I was speared!

Then I was rolling down my window and up my middle finger: “Thanks for your service, you ignorant piece of shit!” Furious swerving. Mad Max. Screech of tires. Out of my car on the shoulder. Giddy alphaing (“You want some? C’mon, you want some of this?”). Gunned down of course (who brings a Prius to a Dually fight?). Bleeding out onto summered macadam. My last thought: Oops…oops…

Over and over I rewound the same thirty-second loop of Dissident Gardens, insistent on hearing what Professor Lookins had to say, again and again knocked back down into the festering pit of my reptile brain.

Here’s some magical advice Arthur Brooks gave me once:

If you are on social media, on a college campus or in any place other than a cave by yourself, you will be treated with contempt very soon. This is a chance to change at least one heart — yours. Respond with warmheartedness and good humor. You are guaranteed to be happier.

I managed this trick once several years ago in the midst of a gnarly sort of accidental peer-review situation in which everything was wrong and it wasn’t supposed to be peer-reviewed and they weren’t my peers anyway and and and and—

I took a breath, said warmth and good humor and felt, no joke, a cascade of loosening throughout my chest. I became buoyant with a fine high-humored lightness of mind. I was as if cleansed of an instant of all taint of acrimony and malignity. It felt miraculous, and it all stemmed from the mental acknowledgment of a few bundled ideas:

1. All of us suck on occasion,

2. none of us mean to, and

3. isn’t that funny?

The technique really will do wonders for your blood pressure. I can’t recommend it enough. But the snake pit just waits for its window.

Even now, steeping in this paean to largeness of soul, I am three-fourths demolishing that jerk in the Chevy. I am considering the seriousness with which his kind should be opposed (fascists, I mean), weighing whether sensible opposition does more harm than good, becoming distracted now thinking about that other truck-driving Colossus of Rhetoric turning into Home Depot the other day whose bumper farted onto me this gem: If you believe guns kill people you must also think pencils miss spell words and forks make people fat and… and there was one more insipid example I can’t remember because the operative thing was that it unironically misspelled “misspell”. And now I am four-fourths distracted, grieving over the irreplaceable quantities of my finite life and mentation I have sunk into these tacky heartless short-sighted unimaginative unAmerican unAmerican unAmerican pricks!

The next day, this is true, I noticed a man at the self-checkout at the grocery store wearing a hat that said FUCK YOUR FEELINGS. Having had some time—too much—to think about what my reaction should’ve been, I’ve decided I should’ve had my own hat to don at him in that moment. It would’ve said: YOU’RE A HIDEOUS SLOB. I would’ve worn it at him, waited for our hats to acknowledge each other, taken it off, put it back in my pocket, and walked out into the parking lot to wait for my bullet.

I’m a worse person for having imagined this. But this is also true: the fuck-your-feelings guy isn’t sucking accidentally; he’s doing it on purpose.

Any consolation or high note here would be just temporary scaffolding erected over a pit that isn’t going anywhere, that’s merely biding its time, so I’m going to skip it.

It’s conceivable that age and its reservoir of seeping hours, will result, finally, in that wry laugher. But it seems unlikely I can persuade my own snake pit away. Nor does it feel useful or responsible to downplay the threat these guys pose.

The mass of ordinary republican voters, who in 2016 elevated to the presidency the least qualified person ever named his party’s candidate over one of the most qualified candidates in history, and who reaped the whirlwind that ensued, appear poised to do so again, never mind that it is plainly (or intentionally) a vote against the rule of law, against checks and balances, against the peaceful transfer of power, against a sane response to the most serious problem humanity’s ever faced, against reason and calm and neighborliness and smarts in favor of sentiment and grasping and greed and line-cutting and shamelessness in all its technicolor vapidity, never mind that it is a vote for the shallow amnesiac dopamine rush of the flat screen over the frustrating depths of entanglement with the stubborn world.

I repeatedly struck-through the imprecation above to cutely represent the wormy liberal handwringing I can’t help but engage in when compelled to fling such dusty and loaded epithets about, but there’s blood in that bit: the MAGA ethos is unAmerican.

I remember an op-ed Leonard Pitts wrote about lefty vacillating right after 9/11. The thrust of it was: the proper response to an act like this is rage. I’ve often wondered since then how Pitts looks on that piece now. Rage carried us out the door over the ocean into Iraq; rage squandered whatever treasure of global goodwill we’d stored up and spent our Rome-moment like that; rage gave the first worst president of the 21st century the only one of six popular vote majorities the GOP’s enjoyed this millennium.

But that was a rage directed at an enemy foreign, not domestic. The fuck-your-feelings crowd didn’t have to duck the FBI to get here and work their barbarities on our system. They’re in the self-checkout line. They’re idling, waiting for the light to turn green.

And they must be defeated.

*Vex the gods: Befriend your enemies.*