NYT Op Ed. "The Joy of Hatred"

[NRaleighLiberal]

https://nyti.ms/2GkrsEG

Trump and “his people” reach deep into the violent history of public spectacle in America.

Jamelle Bouie
By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist


The chanting was disturbing and the anger was frightening, but what I noticed most about the president’s rally in Greenville, N.C., on Wednesday night was the pleasure of the crowd.

His voters and supporters were having fun. The “Send her back” chant directed at Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota was hateful but also exuberant, an expression of racist contempt and a celebration of shared values.

This dynamic wasn’t unique to the event. It’s been a part of Trump’s rallies since 2015. Both he and his crowds work from a template. He rants and spins hate-filled tirades; they revel in the transgressive atmosphere. The chants are their mutual release. Sometimes he basks in them.

To watch raucous crowds of (mostly) white Americans unite in frenzied hatred of a black woman — to watch them cast her as a cancer on the body politic and a threat to a racialized social order — is to see the worst of our past play out in modern form.


To be clear, the Trump rally was not a lynch mob. But watching the interplay between leader and crowd, my mind immediately went to the mass spectacles of the lynching era. There’s simply no way to understand the energy of the event — its hatred and its pleasures — without looking to our history of communal racial violence and the ways in which Americans have used racial others, whether native-born or new arrivals, as scapegoats for their lost power, low status or nonexistent prosperity. And in that period, one event stands out: an 1893 lynching in Paris, Tex., where Henry Smith, a mentally disabled black teenager, was burned alive.

The 17-year-old Smith, “generally considered a harmless, weak-minded fellow,” according to Ida B. Wells-Barnett in “The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States,” had been accused of the rape and murder of 3-year-old Myrtle Vance, thedaughter of the local sheriff. The white community of Paris believed the murder was retaliation for an earlier arrest by the sheriff, and the accusation of rape was added, in Wells-Barnett’s words, “to inflame the public mind so that nothing less than immediate and violent death would satisfy the populace.”

Snip...read the rest. Important!

[Blue_Tires]

1. "Economic anxieties" strike again...

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. Anger provides an adrenaline rush. People get addicted to it.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evolution-the-self/201811/why-you-secretly-enjoy-getting-angry

Trump stirs anger toward and consequent hatred of "the other," and, especially when people are in crowds, they get the pleasure rush from all that anger and it feeds off and amplifies the emotions of everyone else. The crowd effect makes it exponentially worse.

[zooks]

3. Brilliant. Definitely a must read. nt

[NRaleighLiberal]

4. Kicking