Say there’s a white kid who lives in a nice home, goes to an all-white school, and is pretty much having everything handed to him on a platter – for him to pick up a rap tape is incredible to me, because what that’s saying is that he’s living a fantasy life of rebellion. -Eminem
[This is all about rebellion so I am doing a Qotd post without even a token advance nod to Qotd Czar Arahant.]
I had intended to go with my favorite line in The Wild One (1953). When biker gang leader Johnny (Marlon Brando) is asked “What are you rebelling against?” He replies “Whadda you got?” But the absence of an ideological baby blanket for Brando’s gang of the sort that Antifa types cling to makes the movie and its iconic line kind of a period piece, a purer pursuit of nihilism knowing that the quest will fail. There is a certain tragic hero quality that is not to be found in Antifa/BLM.
There is instead something deeply pathetic about kids in their all-black mall-ninja outfits, their phones out at all times filming their whole adventure while spouting bumper sticker-sized positions gleaned from Tweets based on misreadings of the Cliff Notes on the Communist Manifesto.
With respect to the rebellion in our cities, it is hard for me not to despise Antifa without reservation but I am going to try, for a few paragraphs anyway.
I recall a fascinating guest lecture a long time ago by a psychiatrist who did family counseling. He said that the first rule in his practice is that the one who is acting out may not be the one that’s crazy. In other words, where there is a serious lie or false front enforced by a family ethos, the one who rebels may be the only sane one.
I do not argue that Antifa is sane but we do need to inquire about the sources of their anger and general hopelessness at a time when there has never been greater wealth, no military draft for an unpopular war, no de jure racial segregation, unparalleled opportunities for women, and better access to information, entertainment and life-changing technology than ever before. To stretch the metaphor, could there be anything in our national family ethos that is making some of us act out?
Antifa was once Occupy Wall Street, an inchoate protest against capitalism in general by people who did not seem to know much about economics, finance, history, law, governance, or personal hygiene. For conservatives, the issue as OWS framed it seemed like a no-brainer: Economic freedom and markets versus the heavy hand of poverty-inducing government.
But the larger question about whether boardroom decisions have too much effect on our lives is not addressed in that formulation. A relatively small group of self-dealing people did in fact tank the national economy in 2008. Conservatives, to our horror, are now watching corporations with considerable media and financial power impose political correctness on sports and schools. Corporations are aggressively moving to restrict what we are permitted to say on social media even as they mandate Marxist race indoctrination classes for their employees. Conservative commentators are criticizing amoral consumerism and the seeming indifference to job loss and stagnant wage growth from ‘globalist’ capitalism. None of these adverse aspects of large corporate activity is the result of legislation passed by Obama, Pelosi, and Schumer nor the result of federal departmental mandates.
Was there too great a lie about the value of a college education? Horrific debt for so-so job opportunities? And is the experience of American education itself injurious or soul-crushing? From the left, Christopher Lasch once opined about universal education:
It has neither improved popular understanding of modern society, raised the quality of popular culture, nor reduced the gap between wealth and poverty, which remains as wide as ever. On the other hand, it has contributed to the decline of critical thought and the erosion of intellectual standards, forcing us to consider the possibility that mass education, as conservatives have argued all along, is intrinsically incompatible with the maintenance of educational standards.
Leaving aside the gratuitous swipe at conservatives, Lasch paints a believable picture of soul-crushing, possibly self-aware mediocrity. The certainty of having spent much of one’s youth in cramped little desks just to be bored and intellectually deformed and to be educated just barely enough to kinda know that is what happened, then is it all that surprising that the “trained Marxist” dim bulbs at BLM, the author of the 1619 Project and Antifa laughingly reject appeals to reason and actual scholarship?
And did Boomer self-indulgence forever wreck the promise and desirability of marital fidelity and commitment? Did America let something vital leak out of the institutions of religion, family, education, opportunity, and patriotism, until there is not enough of any of it left to motivate, animate, and measure the value of life?
The small hordes of unhappy (mostly white) kids who need to believe that their country is irredeemably racist and otherwise malignant in order to find meaning in their own lives tell us that there is a sickness out there—and it ain’t systemic racism. It would be nice if it were merely a political issue and could be solved with an election and legislation, but it is not.
Like some unhealthy family drama, the Antifa tantrum-throwers expressly hate the idea that they will not be taken seriously, that they have no real power to disrupt. The six-year-old who knows she has the power to disrupt the entire restaurant does not want to have her power dissipated when she is carried outside to be made to calm down. Worse, to be granted unqualified forgiveness by smiling grandparents when she is returned to the table indicates she has no real power at all. The strategic absurdity of blocking police cars and burning random storefronts is a demand that we pretend the tantrum-thrower has real power. That there is no serious agenda or goal beyond the tantrum itself is also diagnostic. Something important is missing from the minds, hearts, and lives of a lot of young people. What the hell happened?
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