Like most middle-class Americans I have lived a sheltered life. My needs and many of my wants have been satisfied. I was in a few fist fights as a kid but was seldom a bully or bullied. I don’t know if I’m a physical coward. I don’t know how I would react in combat. Every boy imagines himself a hero but that’s fantasy and probably will remain untested.
The most frightened I have ever been came on May
4, 1971, the first anniversary of the killings at Kent State University. I was
at the center of a crowd-cum-mob in Bowling Green, Ohio, a freshman at the
university. Students were protesting the war, President Nixon, the National
Guard killings at Kent State, Mommy and Daddy, and nothing in particular. I
went along mostly out of curiosity and, I’m ashamed to say, because I didn’t want
to be judged a reactionary party-pooper by some of my friends. I’ve never liked
crowds.
Elias Canetti writes in Crowds and Power (trans.
Carol Stewart, 1962): “In the crowd the individual feels that he is
transcending the limits of his own power. He has a sense of relief . . .” I
have never felt that way. Rallies and rock concerts always left me feeling
exhausted with anxiety. My vision of hell is an angry, single-minded crowd.
The mood of the mob as we marched downtown from
campus was at first festive. It was a beautiful spring day. As the chanting
grew louder and the bullhorns shrieked, the crowd turned surly. I remember two
guys trying to tear down a stop sign. Girls were screaming and people started
throwing bottles and anything else they could grab at the police, who seemed
frightened and confused. I was witnessing for the first time the herd-mind in
action. Individuals who on their own were polite and civilized surrendered their
will and good judgment to the mob. It gave them license to behave badly. A
writer in the nineteenth century describes the phenomenon like this:
“[T]here is, even now, something of ill-omen,
amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country;
the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of
the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive
ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and
that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would
be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny. Accounts
of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of the times.”
Abraham Lincoln is speaking to the Young Man’s
Lyceum in Springfield, Ill., on January 27, 1838. He is a twenty-eight-year-old
lawyer. The Civil War is still twenty-three years away. Lincoln continues:
“They have pervaded the country, from New England
to Louisiana;--they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former,
nor the burning suns of the latter;--they are not the creature of climate--
neither are they confined to the slave-holding, or the non-slave- holding
States. Alike, they spring up among the pleasure hunting masters of Southern
slaves, and the order loving citizens of the land of steady habits.--Whatever,
then, their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.”
6 comments:
When you have a narcissistic, sociopathic, tyrannical president who seeks to impose his will on the American people, circumventing the rule of law and sending goon squads into American cities ( I was born in Minnesota) this is what you get. Mikhail Iossel, whose book, Sentence, you mentioned in a recent post, thinks the president should be locked up in a psychiatric hospital.
One needs to remember that sometimes mobs wear uniforms.
I would be more sanguine about mobs if I had ever heard of a single instance of a mob being merciful, or pausing to weigh evidence, or modifying an erroneous judgment.
Les Murray wrote, in his poem "Demo," this line -- "Nothing a mob does is clean."
Here is what poet and translator Boris Dralyuk, former editor of the L.A. Review of Books, has to say about ICE immigration raids in Los Angeles: " Most of the people in the streets were going about their difficult or pleasant days. And I saw flags of all nations, this cosmopolitan metropolis's glory and pride. My impressions stand in stark, disorienting contrast to the images broadcast from a very small section of LA's downtown, near the Federal Building and in even starker, more disorienting contrast to the venomous lies spewed forth by members of the Trump Administration. The threat posed by the protestors to anyone near the scene was fleetingly small; the threat posed by the words and actions of certain federal authorities to the whole fabric of Angeleno society is incalculably large. An attack on LA's immigrant community is an attack on the city as a whole, which not only prides itself on its ethnic diversity and its status as a sanctuary for refugees, but also relies heavily on the contribution of immigrants in ways both visible and invisible. The fear ICE raids strike into the heart of a single undocumented person reverberates throughout that person's family and throughout the social and economic networks in which that family is enmeshed. The aim seems to be to demonize, humiliate, and undermine Los Angeles itself, to undermine all cities like it. I say, good luck...." (From an interview in "Asymptote" by Sarah Gear)
As silly as it sounds within a minute’s reflection, I just realized I still held some belief that their was a rationality in common between lovers of literature, or at least those with similar taste to my own. Patrick, you are reflecting on the a moment in a crowd the year after four young lives were snuffed out by indiscriminate shots. The guards kneeled and fired into a crowd like they were exterminating space aliens in a sci-fi picture.
The intention of this post is clear. As a state enacts the tyranny you consistently declaimed for decades here, you reflect. And this reflection sadly shows how little that has always mattered. When it came to it you can’t sum up the courage to reflect on yourself,—only a nameless, scapegoated crowd
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