f I were the CEO of Anheuser-Busch, our company's motto would be: “To
get every man, woman, and child in the country drunk and to keep them that
way as long as possible!” If they hire me to be their CEO, changing
the motto will be my first action.
Yesterday I was behind some guy at the grocery store who had packed his cart full of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Miller Lite, and Diet Pepsi. Diet Coke is still regarded with suspicion, and the taste for revenge is sweeter than whatever this aqueous solution called Bud Lite tastes like.
Few would have cared about one beer can—at billions of dollars so far, maybe the most expensive beer can in history—if not for the examples of big corporations trying to appease one political side while denigrating the other. Who could ever have predicted that sending millions of jobs to cheaper countries and firing unknown numbers of people for thinking the wrong thing would make an entire generation of customers thirsty not for your supposed beverage, but for revenge?
Roger Kimball, writing about the “Mexicanization of American politics,” says that it is in politics that this 'intolerant gnosticism' is most vicious. But it only appears so because politics is more out in the open and easy to document. The embers of hatred smolder everywhere, under the cover of insincere academic courtesy, behind the anodyne bureaucratese of our corporations, and in the hearts of the barely-literate self-righteous on the Internet.
Dusty plastic bottles of Diet Coke found in the back of my pantry. I don't have any pictures of Bud Lite. Use your imagination
They are in the water, if I may mix a metaphor, in academia. The ivy-covered Peyton Place is like the movie The Exorcist, which was set at leafy Georgetown University, where everyone is urbane and courteous in public, while behind the walls people's heads are spinning around and green bile is spraying from their mouths.
The most vicious are the bureaucrats, who use their role as gatekeepers to terrorize everyone else. Their vengefulness ranges from canceling grants of people they dislike to demanding loyalty oaths for employment to threatening staff with dismissal for not putting property tags on a new machine fast enough.
As for academics, the higher they are in the food chain, the worse they become. At one school, the assistant dean would write defamatory letters to funding agencies to block his competitors from receiving funding. Others would write “anonymous” letters to journals claiming that their competitors had falsified their data and demanding that their publications be retracted. Unfortunately, it sometimes happened that the poison pen letters were forwarded to the author, who discovered that they were not really anonymous and was then obligated to seek revenge on his or her own.
Let's not forget our students, who scour the past Internet history of anyone foolish enough to tell a joke in class or give a low grade. Their revenge is to invent phony stories in attempts to get their teacher fired. The bureaucrats are only too happy to oblige. Nowadays any claim of racism, sexism, or homophobia made by a student can be assumed to be a lie unless proven otherwise. But no one in academia has the courage to say so.
As in politics, revenge is the underlying motivation: revenge for thinking the wrong thing; revenge for being more successful; revenge for speaking the truth inartfully, inviting deliberate misinterpretation. As poor old tongue-tied Todd Akin discovered, revenge is as swift as former allies are scarce.
So has it been with former President Trump, who can now boast of getting greater impeachment and more falsehoods told about him than anyone ever, maybe the biggest miscarriage of justice ever, as his opponents were driven to insanity over his ill-advised name-calling and his incendiary and divisive Tweeting.
As scientists tell us, humans are programmed to seek revenge for any injustice. Game theory tells us that tit-for-tat, a tooth for a tooth, and spleen for a spleen are effective strategies. So revenge grows from the appearance of injustice. There is injustice everywhere, but creating the appearance of injustice, it so happens, is also the business model of the news media. Now Trump's fans are thirsting for revenge of their own.
This could be one of those strange times in history when the fate of our nation depends on the ability of one man to learn how and when to keep his mouth shut.
On an unrelated note: It feels like the calm before the storm, just as it did before Covid hit. The universe seems to be paused, holding its breath. Maybe we better stock up on toilet paper again, just in case.
apr 30 2023, 8:25 am
