chocolate soymilk and deermeat

segregating into homogenity is risky

Our Wednesday, 19 July webinar, open to you or your friends hungry to learn from someone who literally represented you on the ground, will be with AMB James Smith on the changing scene in Saudi Arabia. Time is 5-6 pm Eastern. The link is below. I published AMB Smith’s background in a separate column yesterday morning. Do tune in as we always leave time for your questions.

Earlier this morning, a friend sent me a reminder of David French’s ‘The Rage and Joy of MAGA America’ from The Old Gray Lady on 6 July. As you likely notice regularly, I avoid discussing the former president and MAGA unless it’s a topic I absolutely cannot avoid because I am not interested in being just one more voice pro or counter other Americans; I deemed the indictment on classified material mishandling to meet that bar so I did discuss that.

I am not interested in solely criticising our fellow Americans who support him. I do not completely agree with anyone in any position in this country and legitimate, registered voters have the right to vote. We either believe in representative politix or we don’t. It’s fully binary choice to me. I can’t criticise someone, then go right back to doing it myself. I worry about the lack of self-awareness on all sides of politix around the world on this particular behaviour.

I do draw your attention to the one of the real lessons French drew. He describes why and how we are so polarised into so many camps but that is a crucial facet: we are in now aggregated, by individual choice, into self-described associative entities. We can call them camps, sides, parties (although that is a sour note for me because little of this strikes me as festive), divisions (sadly), or some other noun denoting aggregation of folks.

I think we are largely seeing people in super-charged frats with all of the baggage that fraternities carry. I know, some of you were probably members of wonderful groups of people in college called fraternities or sororities—that is fine. I went to an urban university where there were not a handful of frats (I remember not a single sorority). I knew one single person who was a member (we had one single date and I have never touched tequila in the 47 years since but that is another column).

But, often—note I am not universalising to everyone—fraternity behaviour ranges between appalling and juvenile; sophomoric is probably too generous. Rush week, as I understand it, exerts the worst pressures to behave harshly to prove the pledge is worthy of joining the allegedly-august crowd. Since I never experienced this (we all know I am non-conventional to my core), the tales I have heard indicate one engages in a series of actions to show how one relates to the desired frat (I will use the masculine but I suppose sororities are pretty similar) members to gain their acceptance for membership. Some of those things like drinking oneself into virtual oblivion, reciting devotions to some pretty wacko ideas, and suspending belief in being an adult lead to an invitation to join or outright rejection because the existeing members deem the pledge is unacceptable. Oh, puuleeezze.

i have to assume there was a subtle (or not) self-selection metric conveyed to the potential pledge well before the Pledge Week Pain. The people pledging Ewey Eatham and Ow probably could tell that most Brothers are gray-eyed or eat raw deermeat or drink adulterated Brasilian rainwater so an albino vegetarian with five feet who prefers chocolate soy milk isn’t going to fit in well. The pledge would probably self-select to Boo Bah Boo as a frat more closely tied to albino vegetarian choco soymilkers.

Again, from the outside, it seems that once the pledge and initiation phase pass, the frat spends its time reinforcing why it is not like the other guys. Certainly there is an element of human normalcy in showing what we as people are or are not but frats seem to spend inordinate amounts of their lives explaining why they are not soymilkers or deermeaters. In the passion of the admission into the bosom of their new found friends, frat Brothers seem to focus on the bonding experience with those like themselves in opposition to any serious attempt or consideration of engaging with others.

Football games then provide the field of glory to prove these differences and to stoke the hatred of others. We did not have fraternities at my undergraduate or graduate school, although some folks at Notre Dame when I was there viewed Protestants as a single religion, rather than a bunch of sects, bent on destroying Catholics so maybe it was a hyper frat in that sense) but I have been on college campi on a football weekend where you could not pay me to go near Frat Row for fear of the drunken, outlandish playing out of this set of behaviours (At Notre Dame, it was usually Southern Cal as the hated ones, especially that band playing the fight song over and over and over and over. Being seated near the Visitors’ Endzone was the equivalent of being on Frat Row elsewhere. You can tell I was there during the Faustian Era).

Doesn’t this remind you of our election processes lately?

What French’s piece discusses and my thoughts on frats/sororities show me are the deep-seated need for many people to be part of various fraternities that we now call political movements. These are self-segregated groups on the left and right because we have disincentivised the center. These fraternities don’t seek to get to know the other side; they seek to bond to like-minded folks because of a profound fear of emptiness in their lives.

The social changes which have swept this nation over the past seventy-five years are breaktaking, no matter who you are. Education changes, from an industrial to a service economy, Civil Rights for multiple groups, women in the workforce, backlashes against social integration in many forms, rise and manifestations of Christian nationalism, new waves of immigration, income disparity improvements, income disparity deterioration, and more bewilder many in across the political and social spectrum. And they infuse politix today.

We have known for almost twenty years that people were moving into more homogeneous communities. The crushing pain of the 2008 financial crisis, a phenomenon I doubt we still fully appreciate for its radicalisation of the country, played a role in accelerating this trend because those hurt had little opportunity to live among those for whom it was a distant annoyance.

In other words, before 2017 we did not hear people admit it as we do now. The fraternity atmosphere for some groups, the disdain for people who don’t think like us, the unwillingness to validate the basics of anyone differing from us (and the left certainly has voices expressing a rejectionist doctrine as well although not to the extreme of the right), and the need to celebrate ‘our’ legitimacy versus ‘the others’ are conditions tearing us apart as a society.

The population of the United States is in for a long slog. None of us know whether the dividing road we are on will reunite further along or will it permanently divide. My plea is that we all individually recognise our language and our actions fuel reactions as we go into our frat houses in the run up to the 2024 election. Some of the reactions are minor such as irritating an old friend when we question support for a particular law. Other effects could be catastrophic as occurred in Oklahoma City on 19 April 1995 when hundreds of people lost their lives. We understand the dangers of international extremism after 9/11. We better examine at our own behaviour in the months ahead. It’s not all just fun and games among these groups as we saw in early 2021.

May we welcome more watercolour dawns and fewer hysterics about the views of others. FIN

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Lois Beckett, ‘Where you live determines everything: why segregation is growing in America’, TheGuardian.com, 28 June 2021, retrieved at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/28/us-racial-segregation-study-university-of-california-berkeley

David French, ‘The Rage and Joy of America MAGA’, nytimes.com, 6 July 2023, retrieved at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/opinion/maga-america-trump.html

Pew, ‘Americans Say They Like Diverse Communities; Election, Census Trends Suggest Otherwise’, 2 December 2008, retrieved at https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2008/12/02/americans-say-they-like-diverse-communities-election-census-trends-suggest-otherwise/

Cynthia Watson is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom webinar..

Topic: Timely Topic: AMB James Smith on Saudi Arabia

Time: Jul 19, 2023 05:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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