Pop 89: Drop the Rope
By Madonna Hamel
There is an expression in recovery that refers to the moment when an addict hits bottom. When all the ploys, games and lies stop working for you and, there are no more tricks up your sleeve. When you have nowhere else to go, no one left to fool, not even that person you counted on to slip the pillow under your head just before you hit the floor. The expression for this state is: The Gift of Desperation.
America seems desperate. On the brink of some kind of civil war or breakdown. The assassination attempt of Trump may have elicited a few tweets asking for an end to violent rhetoric, but it also turned a man famous for violent language - with such disturbing pronouncements as: “if I don’t get elected, it will be a bloodbath” and “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters” - into a hero.
Verbal violence has shouted down civic conversation in the public sphere. Any desire to de-escalate tension in conversation, the board room, the town hall or the street does not make the news. The aim of many politicians seems to be to whip your followers into a fearful frenzy. Make them mad and desperate for “retribution.” Talk trash. Even joke about violence as a means of normalizing it, as in when Donald Trump, in criticizing Nancy Pelosi, dealt a low blow by joking about the assault on her husband, an 82-year-old whose head was bashed in with a hammer by an intruder in their home. “She’s against building a wall at our border even though she has a wall around her house,” Trump said. Then added, “which obviously didn’t do a very good job.” He smirked, waiting for his laugh as if he were a comedian in a club, not a man running for the leadership of his country. And the laughs came.
Violence provides a hit as intoxicating as drugs and alcohol, and it permeates most forms of American entertainment. I challenge you to look at the latest movie posters of films coming out of Hollywood. How many of them picture the “hero” pointing a gun? That gun is not just an object, it is potential energy locked into a powder keg, ready to blow. Do we ask who will be at the receiving end of that bullet? Or are we just so taken with the buff angry-looking dude holding the weapon?
And, thanks to certain interpretations of feminism and one of the the worst examples of DEI, women too can point guns in movie posters. The gun is a symbol of power, often sexual power. Those warnings at the bottom of the movie poster that alert us to “scenes of sex and violence” are actually promises. We promise Mrs. Sex and Mr. Violence will co-mingle. And the baby they birth is America today. Jacked up, looking for an outlet. Desperate, at the end of its rope, needing tending to. But with no ability or desire to develop intelligent, mature, articulate, attentive conversations that could lead to conflict resolution.
Trump has set a tone for what gets said in America. But he also reflects a tone already present. He knows what many people think and he says it for them. In fact, he calls himself their “retribution. He holds the tone when he promises to “exterminate vermin” - words used against Jews in Hitler’s Germany. And that tone continued at the Republican convention, and was carried by Ted Cruz of Arizona. On “Make America Safe Again” Tuesday, following Make America Wealthy Again” Monday, the senator of Arizona stooped to the occasion to blame all immigrants for crime in America. He called them “rapists” and “murderers,” of “our sisters and daughters”. The comment echoed segregationists talk about black citizens in the sixties. It also overlooked the fact that all of America’s worse mass shootings were committed by Americans.
Watching the convention made me squirm. I didn’t want to start ranting against the ranters. So, before getting hooked into listening to more vituperative from the podium-pulpit-lecturn-open mic of the convention, I turned off my computer and headed out into the Grasslands to witness the sunset. Alone in the great wide open, I walked along a ridge looking across the valley at the setting sun. Below me was a lone grandfather bison grazing. I watched him for a long time. Then I continued my walk, hoping to shake the sick feeling I got from watching the convention.
Eventually, I stopped to remove the spear grass, jabbing my ankles. I sat down on a boulder, making sure I wasn’t bothering a snake beforehand, and began pulling the minute spears from my socks. These grasses are tough and resilient - the ends are sharp enough to sting like needle jabs, and their stalks look like several super-thin wires braided together. Both the immense bison and the skinny hair-like grasses reminded me that nature will continue doing what it does, surviving quietly, despite who gets elected. Then, the sunset did its magic. No amount of rhetoric, fireworks, song-and-dance can assuage a sense of despair like daily witness to the miracles of the rising and setting of the sun.
When I got home, I watched Russell Moore’s interview with the man who coined the term “culture wars,” James Davison Hunter, a professor of religion and social theory. A while ago, he wrote “Before the Shooting Starts,” a book that warns “that all shooting wars are preceded by culture wars.” He also said: “We need to imagine how to extract ourselves from this tug of war that knows no end.” He affirmed my instinct to turn off the computer and go stand under the stars, to become a speck under the endless prairie sky. All we have to do to end this tug-of-war is: drop the rope.