The Bully in the Pulpit

First rerun from oldies but goodies--covering the holidays and my move back to California. Meanwhile, check out the drawing for a free book at my Web site, candidapugh.com. See info at right.

After baseball, scapegoating appears to be our favorite national pastime. Christianity, which far too many Americans imagine is our official national religion, celebrates the image of the scapegoat as martyr ("He died for our sins"). Our literature explores the process of cathartic blaming, as in Shirley Jackson's classic short story, "The Lottery", in which the citizens of one town each year ritually gather around the holder of the winning ticket and stone him or her to death. As a people, we have not infrequently experienced bullying as an ecstatic event. In Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident, a lynch mob grows increasingly jubilant as they prepare to hang three putative cattle rustlers.
Henry Fonda plays the good guy in the film version of The Ox-Bow Incident. The role suited him, not merely because Fonda seemed like a good guy in general, but because as a young man, from a window in his father's lithography shop, he had been devastated by witnessing a horrific lynching and the gleeful sadism of the mob. Nebraska Studies
Horrific lynchings litter American history, right up to the present when Muslims and Mexicans find themselves increasingly victimized by the outraged.

According to FBI statistics, the number of anti-Latino hate crimes increased by 35 percent since 2003. In California, the state with the largest Mexican and Mexican-American population, the number of hate crimes against Latinos has almost doubled. This statistic has been challenged by the anti-immigration Federation for American Immigration Reform for selecting a base year (2003) in which anti-Latino hate crimes were reported at an unusually low level and for not indexing the increase with the corresponding increase in the Hispanic population.Anti-Mexican Sentiment
Why Are Hate Crimes on the RiseHate Crimes Aganst Latinos Steadily RisingHate Crime StatsHate Crimes Against Muslims
In the 1950s, Communists filled the role currently occupied by Islamic terrorists. America then loved to hate the Reds. The face of the scapegoat, however, can be pasted on any convenient target. In 2005 Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian shot seven times while lying face down on a London tube platform, died because his dark skin identified him as a terrorist to the plainclothes cop he thought was trying to mug him. You can still hear the roar of profound British indifference to his murder.
On June 23, 1982, Vincent Chin found it was a fatal mistake to be Asian in a land where, to some, all Asians look alike:
Vincent Chin was a 27-year-old Chinese-American raised in Metro Detroit. A week before his wedding, June 19, 1982, he went to the Fancy Pants strip club in Highland Park with a few buddies for his bachelor’s party. There, they encountered two autoworkers, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, who, like many at the time, blamed the Japanese for the U.S. auto industry’s troubles. Even though Chin was not Japanese and worked in the auto industry himself as a draftsman, Ebens was heard saying, “It’s because of you little m—f—s that we’re out of work,” as well as other anti-Asian racial epithets.The men were thrown out of the bar, and the fight continued in the parking lot and into the night. Ebens and Nitz searched for Chin and his friends, and upon finding them, Nitz held Chin in a bear hug while Ebens struck Chin’s head four times with a baseball bat, cracking his skull. Vincent Chin died four days later. His wedding guests attended his funeral instead.Vincent Chin

Few among us are immune to the seductiveness of self-righteous rage. Witness the pleasure (and the success) of television judges, in particular, Judge Judy, who—unlike the folksy black judges and the other white female judge, mommy-figure Marilyn Milian—slashes and burns her way through the complexities of reality to get at "The Truth." The best paid and arguably the most popular television magistrate, Judge Judy establishes the groundwork by declaring, "I don't give a rat's behind" for any information she deems irrelevant. She claims to be a mobile lie detector, at the same time asserting you can tell when a teenager is lying because "his mouth is moving."
She doesn't shy away from telling a boy, for instance, "You're a scumbag," or a man being sued by his mother, "The [wife] standing next to you won't be there in ten years, I guarantee it." Her crystal ball never clouds up. Yet, because the litigants are so frequently breathtakingly stupid or greedy or, at the very least, disgustingly irresponsible, we cheer her for nailing them to any convenient cross. The joy of Judge Judy is the joy of, yes, feeling superior, but, more importantly, it's the joy of the lynch mob, the joy of punishing somebody for all the frustration, disappointment, and pain that goes with being human.
The popularity of radio ranter, Dr. Laura, mirrors that of Judge Judy and for the same reasons. Her misogyny and racism aside, she takes on the "whiners" (usually female) and the "losers." It's hardly a surprise, in a winner-take-all economic system, that the winners justify their success by demonizing the losers. Dr. Laura and Judge Judy are the stones we fling at our demons.
This sort of entertainment gets turned on its head when Judge Judy shouts, "Take responsibility! Stop blaming everyone else for your mistakes!" Do we, her audience, delude ourselves, in the process of shifting out of self-pity and into self-righteousness, that we "take responsibility" for our own pain?
Or is simply that old saw: "We hate most in others what we despise in ourselves"?