Monsters in Charlottesville

At the end of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, the embattled heroine Nancy, who has lost everyone she loves to the murderous revenant Freddy Krueger, confronts the killer in her bedroom. Throughout the film, Nancy has done everything possible, offensively and defensively, to defeat the homicidal maniac, and seems to have finally obliterated him. But wise Nancy is no horror-movie dupe. She stands over the empty bed, host to so many terrible nightmares, and begins to speak.

Nancy: I know you're there, Krueger.
Freddy: (emerging from the bed) You think you was gonna get away from me?
Nancy: I know you too well now, Freddy.
Freddy: And now you die.
Nancy: It's too late, Krueger. I know the secret now. This is just a dream, too. You're not alive. The whole thing is a dream. I want my mother and friends again.
Freddy: You what?
Nancy: I take back every bit of energy I ever gave you. You're nothing. You're shit.

Nancy contemptuously turns her back on him. Enraged, Freddy hurls himself at his teenage nemesis... and disintegrates, screaming, into nothingness.

The idea of robbing a monster of its power by simply ignoring it is an old one in both mythology and storytelling, and implies a peculiar sort of relationship, in which in the monster is dependent upon its victims not merely for sustenance, but for its very existence. To some degree is this what differentiates a monster, which is imaginary, from a predator, which is real; wolves do not give a damn if caribou believe in them, because what a wolf needs to live is meat, not acknowledgement. In this sense the monster, who requires you to participate in your own murder, is actually weaker than the predator, who can kill you whether you believe in him or not.

Fifteen years ago, I was living in York, Pennsylvania, working for the District Attorney's Office as an pre- sentence investigator. It so happened that my apartment, which stood across from the courthouse in which I worked, was also on the same block as the city library, and one day a fellow named Matt Hale, who ran an organization called the World Church of the Creator, booked the speaking room of that library to give an address about the beliefs of his church. Some time after he did so, it was discovered that Hale's “church” was a white supremacist organization of some sorts, and a debate arose in town about whether the library should allow him to go ahead with his plans. To me the debate was baffling. Hale was an unknown figure representing a tiny fringe group which was based in another state. It was unlikely that his lecture would be attended by more than a dozen people, and when it was over, he would get back in his car and return to Ohio, or wherever he came from, without the vast majority of York City ever having known he was there. What point was there in debating his freedom of speech, which was a natural human right enshrined in the First Amendment, and inalienable? And more importantly, what was to be gained by giving him attention? Even within the smallish and badly disorganized neo-Nazi community in America the man was a nobody, so why make him into a somebody by talking about him? The most effective weapon against the Hales of the world, I argued, was simply to ignore them, for in the absence of a large body of people who subscribed to their beliefs, the only way they could gain a sense of power was to bring attention to themselves -- to make them seem they were more important than they actually were.
And the sad fact of life is that it is much easier to get attention by evoking fear, anger and hatred than it is through demonstrations of love or logic. A burning cross will always draw a larger audience than an episode of Cosmos and never mind if three-quarters of the people surrounding the cross are only there to put it out.

My arguments did not sit very well with most people, who delighted in reminded me that Hitler had once been an obscure political figure at the head of a fringe party with no money and only a tiny following. They yawned through my counter-arguments that the Nazi movement had at its center a brilliant and dynamic leader (which Hale was not), that it had strong support within the segments of the German military, intellectual, and industrial classes (which Hale did not), that it numbered a fairish group of war heroes, scientists and other prominent citizens in its ranks (which Hale's group didn't), that it was superbly organized and empowered by political and economic conditions which were unique to Germany of the 1920s and 30s (which Hale wasn't), and – most of all – that it existed in a racially homogeneous country that spoke a single language (which America most decidedly isn't). But even if we accepted the Hitler comparison as valid on its face, we would have to admit that Hitler only achieved national prominence in Germany by using provocative tactics to garner attention: he knew that it is far more desirable for a politician to be hated than to be ignored, and indeed, his mortal enemies, the Social Democrats and Communists, both played directly into his hands in this regard. Both had private armies, and both unleashed those armies on Hitler's men. Yet the more they attacked the Nazis in the press, in the streets and in the beer halls, the more the police, press and man on the street in Germany became aware that they existed: in essence, they provided Hitler not only with free publicity, but legions of potential supporters who otherwise might never have heard of him -- including wealthy industrialists with fat checkbooks. By acting as if he and his followers were a national menace when they were merely a smallish regional party wracked by infighting and a perpetual shortage of cash, they helped make him a national menace. In effect, they helped transform a monster, who was merely frightening, into a predator, who was actually dangerous. More dangerous, as it turned out, than they were.

My secondary argument was no more successful than my first. Hale was all anyone wanted to talk about, and a number of people that I knew boasted that if he showed up, they'd march in protest outside the library, and if push came to shove, well, they'd push and they'd shove too, and possibly throw a few rocks. When I stated emphatically that this was precisely what Hale wanted -- to be taken seriously, to be viewed as a threat -- I was looked at with impatience and pity, as a teacher might regard a well- intentioned but particularly stupid pupil. Clearly I didn't get it.

As it happened my fears came true. This debate spilled into the local papers, the local TV news, the regional news, and finally, the national. Protestors bused in from all over the country to stand outside my window and shout obscenities at a man they hadn't heard of a week before. Neo-Nazi and skinhead groups, who also probably had no idea who Hale was before the news had informed them, did the same, though their obscenities were pointed in a different direction. Reporters and photographers also arrived by the seeming trainload. On top of all this, every police officer in the city, as well as every deputy in the sheriff's department and numerous troops of State Police, showed up to maintain order – so many cops, in fact, that the City of York spent its entire budget for law enforcement for a year in a single day. By the time Hale showed up to give his lecture, the streets surrounding the library were so packed with humanity you couldn't see the asphalt, and I was told I'd need a special pass, issued by the city, to cross through the police lines to get to my own apartment. In the end, about 25 people were arrested as fights broke out between the more militant of each faction, but Hale himself was neither seen by these people nor harmed by them; he came and went, like Elvis, through the library's back door. I wasn't physically present for his exit, but I'm told he was well pleased by the events of the day, and why the hell not? He had gotten precisely what he'd wanted and had zero chance of otherwise obtaining, i.e. national prominence, courtesy of a group of people who probably would have killed him if they'd had the chance.

It is sometimes said that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. In reality, sometimes the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do something stupid, like give evil a megaphone. And a great deal of knowing when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em comes from determining whether what you see before you is a dangerous predator, or a mere monster.

Since the candidacy of Donald Trump began to gather steam, there has been a wave of extremist sentiment in this country which I would not earlier have believed possible in this day and age – even though I flatter myself that I was more sensitive than most of my peers to one side of it, the "rightist" side. But the anger is hardly limited to what we loosely call the political right. It is just as violent on the left, though spurred by a different set of grievances, and that collective fury has manifested nowhere so pointedly as in what used to be called “political discourse.” It has become permissible, and even chic, for people to say things in public settings which would have been absolutely unimaginable just ten or fifteen years ago. And I don't simply mean by the collection of ill-educated and grammatically challenged fools that inhabit the internet like fleas on a junkyard dog: I mean from educated people, professional types, even politicians of high standing. Phraseology which was once banished to the “outer darkness” of political thought has re-entered the mainstream. People are waving communist banners and Nazi flags. They are openly calling for violent revolution and the assassination of political figures they dislike. They are questioning the humanity – not just the character or intelligence but the actual humanity – of people of different racial types, religions, and political affiliations. They are training themselves to see virtue only in those that agree with them completely, and villainy in anyone who demurs, even slightly. More and more we are witnessing a seeming normalization of radical thought. Scrolling through Facebook and Twitter feeds, one would think America of 2017 is America of 1775 or 1861 -- a powder keg waiting to explode into bloody violence. But is that perception reality, like wolves scratching at the door? Or is it merely a fear-induced phantom, like the The Man Under The Bed or The Thing In The Closet that terrorized us as children?

I flatter myself that I have a fairly wide circle of acquaintances who cover an enormous geographical area, and the majority of people I speak with privately, regardless of race, ethnicity, religious belief, economic stratum, or political affiliation, are manifestly not radical. They might be Tea Party conservatives or Bernie Sanders-style democratic socialists, they might be sullen Libertarians or self-righteous Greens, but at heart they are ordinary Americans who want to live ordinary American lives, free of the violence and hatred extremism brings. Yet universal, or nearly universal, among them is a sense that things have gotten out of hand, that we are heading in a direction no one wants to go, but nonetheless heading there, and even increasing the pace at which we move. The overall feeling that people seem to exude seems to be one of resignation, of helplessness. Somehow “they” (whoever “they” are) have gotten their hands on the levers of power, their fingers on the emotional and physical triggers; somehow “we” have become pawns in “their” game and lost our ability to set our own course. My decidedly unscientific but very interesting sampling of our populace leads me to conclude that it is not so much that there are more extremists in this country now than before Trump (or Obama), but merely that the extremists we have are getting louder. And part of the reason they are getting louder is that we are listening to them, and worse, reacting to them by beginning the slow but sure process of taking sides. We are, in effect, granting them power over us by believing that they are stronger and more numerous than they are – than we are.

If you are familiar with Tarot cards, you know that the “Devil” Tarot features that least popular angel holding a naked man and woman in captivity with a chain. According to the official explanation, however, “They appear to be held here, against their will, but only closer observation, the chains around their necks are loose and could be easily removed. This symbolizes that bondage to the Devil is ultimately a voluntary matter which consciousness can release.” In other words, the Devil has no power but that which we give him, and what is the Devil, anyway, but the ultimate monster?

The perception that we are drifting toward doom, that huge armies of extremists -- Antifa on one side, the Klan on the other -- are gathering like fantasy-novel armies in the wings, ready to do apocalyptic battle, is
just that -- a perception. But we feed into it when we believe it is real, and even worse than real, inevitable. Because fear creates anger, and anger creates violence, and once violent action is taken it no longer matters if the fear was justified. The monster becomes the predator, which can only be destroyed by violence. There is, however, a flip side to this coin. That which we summon into existence by our belief can sometimes be dispelled by withdrawing that belief. It is possible to restore ownership of our country's discourse to ourselves, and it is ispossible to re-marginalize the motley collection of nuts, bullies, loudmouths and psychotics who have hijacked our politics and our national discourse, and to do it without falling into the trap of fighting them physically. We've done it before. In 1925, membership of the Ku Klux Klan stood at somewhere between three and six million people, and the group had enormous political and social influence in the South and Midwest. Now it numbers around 4,500 people, or roughly about as many as Starfleet, a single Star Trek fan club. But what is crucial to understand is that the KKK was broken almost completely without violence -- without violence from its opponents, anyway. A combination of clerical denunciation, newspaper exposes, education campaigns carried out by the NAACP, and later, a tireless effort by the FBI to destabilize the organization, shattered this once-mighty predator into a cartoon monster, not much more frightening than a Frankenstein nite-lite. Had the Klan been attacked violently, by armed mobs, I daresay things would have turned out quite differently -- many who sat on the fence, sympathetic but previously unwilling to join its ranks, would have seen such attacks as mere prelude to attacks on themselves. But by occupying the moral high ground, the enemies of the Klan left it nowhere to go, no one to appeal to. And the more brutality the Klan used in retaliation, the more it was disgraced, exposed, and shown for what it was. In time even many of the worst bigots wanted nothing to do with it. The fate of the KKK was no longer viewed as a bellwether of the white race.

It may seem as if contradicting myself here, speaking on the one hand of how it is possible to dispel negativity by ignoring it, while at the same time pointing out how taking action can be effective; but again, it is important to know what action to take and when to take it, as well as the difference between a predator and a monster. One requires positive action on your part, the other may not. If you own sheep, you must guard against wolves. If you have children, you need not arm yourself against the Boogeyman. He can be destroyed through other means. The seeming powerlessness of the great masses of ordinary, moderate American people is not a physical reality: it is a perception created by specific incidents and experiences, mostly secondhand and communicated and propagated by fear-mongers in the news and social media. It can be overcome in large part simply by grasping that it is not real. In contrast, the rise of political groups which seem hostile to your interest cannot be dealt with by simply wishing they would go away. Organized activity is required. But organized does not necessarily mean violent. It is more difficult to use one's head than one's fist, but more often than not, the head gets better results.

The rise of extremism in any form is damnably tricky; we must be on guard against it, but it cannot be destroyed by attempting to destroy it violently; this only makes the monster more powerful. Just as Nancy gave power to Freddy by believing in him, so we give power to these tiny fringe movements, composed mostly of morons, voyeurs and the dubiously sane, whose sole virtue is the ability to get attention and engender feelings of fear which are totally disproportionate to the actual level of menace they represent.

I have news for you: the vast majority of people on the political right are not neo-Nazis or white nationalists or sympathetic to the Klan. Likewise, the vast majority of people on the left are not communists or anarchists or secretly beholden to the U.N. They are normal, ordinary Americans. They work for a living. They raise children. They drink coffee, watch television, scroll through their news feeds, complain about how bad their football team is. They drink beer on the Fourth of July and buy things they don't need at Christmas. They may disagree with each other on abortion, taxation, welfare, immigration, gun control and whatever else you care to name, but they don't want to use violence to impose their point of view on their neighbors. Sarcasm, maybe, but not violence, because they know that the ballot box is a better place to fight than the streets. It is only when they believe that they are being physically threatened that they begin to make threats themselves. But most of these threats are illusory. They come from a tiny fraction of the population who have no following and no real prospect of getting into power, even tangentially. The best the troublemakers can generally do is to stir up trouble on social media by provoking people into reacting to them and thus making them seem more important than they are. They are good at it, I grant you, but it takes two to tango.

The events in Charlottesville, Virginia, followed an attempted march by right-wing extremists which was met – predictably and foolishly – with an even larger counter demonstration, itself populated to some degree by extremists of the opposing side. Those events led, directly or indirectly, to three deaths and several dozen injuries: in other words, to any given Saturday in Chicago. Yet every news outlet in the country, as well as all forms of social media, are acting as if the rebels just fired on Fort Sumter. People are jabbering about a “Civil War 2.0” -- as if the preconditions for such a conflict have actually been met. Richard Spenser, a once-obscure former alt-right magazine editor, has become a national figure, rather like a mouse which runs in front of a searchlight and appears, in shadow form, to be a giant rat. Even good old David Duke has been plucked from the ash-heap of 1980s politics, dusted off, and pointed before the cameras; if I may hit you with another metaphor, rather like a rotted old muppet being manipulated by your mean old uncle with the glass eye and the taste for Jew jokes. Yet lost in all the coverage, hype, anger and fear-mongering is the fact that the total number of people involved in each march was actually pathetically small.The tally of “neo-Nazis, white nationalists and Klansmen” who made up the initial march is estimated at two or three hundred, while their opposition probably numbered a few thousand – not enough, even in combination, to fill a minor league baseball stadium. Truth be told, the number of rightists fanatical enough to brave stones, tear gas and police dogs just so they can wave a Nazi flag in public is very, very small, and the number of people angry enough to leave their homes and travel long distances to confront them, risking arrest or injury to do so, is not much larger. Just as every hockey team possesses only one or two players who can properly be called goons, even the more extreme ends of the political spectrum possess only small groups of violently active people from among their ranks. Incidents like that which took place Charlottesville are tragic mainly because they are unnecessary. Nothing that happened there had to occur; it occurred because a small group of frightened, angry people holding one point of view decided to hold a rally, and thus provoked a somewhat larger group of equally frightened, angry people holding the opposing point of view to show up in protest. The actual psychological motives for such confrontations are always interesting, and almost never what you might expect. (Where, after all, was this level of left-wing outrage when the Klan held its yearly gathering at Stone Mountain, each and every year Obama held office?) The truth is that in all those noisy, curse-laden face-offs between opponents and supporters of, for example, abortion, have you ever seen someone make an epiphany face, throw down their placard and exclaim, to the person spitting insults and threats at them, “My God! You're right! You've destroyed my argument and changed my entire point of view!” ? Of course you haven't. The purpose of political confrontation in the post-MLK era is almost never to educate or persuade, but to attack, verbally or physically, those with different beliefs. And such attacks never accomplish anything, except to harden your opponent's stance. It was for precisely this reason that Martin Luther King adopted Gandhi's tactic of "satyagraha" during his fight for black liberation; by renouncing violence and aggressive rhetoric, he occupied the moral high ground, aroused sympathy and respect, and -- perhaps most importantly of all -- turned many people around to his way of thinking. But not one person will leave Charlottesville with a different point of view than had when they arrived; they will simply feel their existing emotions of anger and hatred more deeply. They are feeding into a cycle of violence which can only escalate. They are giving the monster its power, and in so doing, tacitly agreeing to become its next victims.

The military philosopher Clausewitz once wrote that "the mistakes of a single hour, made early in a campaign, often cannot be rectified later on even by weeks of sustained effort." In other words, what you do at the beginning of a fight -- when the clay is wet, so to speak -- is often far more important than any actions taken later, when that clay has hardened. We are at that crucial time now. A few pimply monsters groan at us from the dark, trying to fool us that they have substance, and numbers, and can tear us to bits when we sleep. But it isn't true unless we we make it so.

I am not an alarmist, but neither am I clanging a cow bell and croaking "All is well!" when the city is on fire.
It's for damn sure there are predators in American political and economic life today who need to be called out for what they are, confronted, and yes, if necessary, fought (who they are and how they should be combated is a subject for another time). But it is equally important that we differentiate the predators from the mere monsters, the cartoon villains hiding in closets and lurking under beds, who have precisely as much power as we grant them and no more.