Belabor Day
Monday, September 2, 2024
Belabor Day
Happy Belabor Day, and we hope everyone’s enjoying their mattress discounts.
America is a competitive place, and we are second to none when it comes to belaboring a point. We’re also good at hating—mainly of ourselves. Not our own respective tribes: not those. The visceral hatred is reserved for those fools over there, across the street, down the alley, around the corner who want all the political things that we know for sure are so obviously bad for America. They want Trump and MAGA to tear up the constitution. They want Harris/Walz to usher in a new era of Marxist/Leninist government that will run the country into the ground. It’s always those people over there. They are activists. Some of them run the government, the media, the heavy industries, sometimes even specific corporations that use the ideals of Free Speech and Free Expression as fronts to implement crazy bad ideological brainwashing on half the country. Our hatred is justified. It’s payment for theirs.
Those people are so bad that we feel inspired to get involved in political catfights to teach them a lesson. Winning an election is as much about preventing those people from having control as it is about gaining control so we can inflict pain and torment them, good ‘n’ hard.
If that were all there were in the world, it might be merely an irksome state of affairs. It might just be a commonplace in a creaking old, vibrant and cantankerous democracy. We could just muddle through as ever. Unfortunately, there are forces engaging us from the outside, seeking to pour salt and battery acid on our sore spots. There are hostile foreign governments and non-governmental actors on the world stage who understand that we’re off their backs when we’re at each others’ throats.
Does this mean we have to lay down our cats-o’-nine-tails and perform forced group hugs? That wouldn’t be realistic as expectations go. But we should be mindful of the outside influences who encourage us to fight with such vitriol. We should at least recognize that players like the Russian Federation, the People’s Republic of China, and the Islamic Republic of Iran are each in their own way waging ongoing influence campaigns against us, pretending at times to take sides in our domestic squabbles. We should be circumspect and avoid falling for it.
No one is better at hating America than other Americans, or so it often seems. It’s a lot like how the most intense fights are within families. The intensity of feelings towards the people closest to us covers the full spectrum from love to hate, from joy to blind rage. We don’t have such intense feelings for people who are comparative strangers to us. We don’t see their hostility towards us. We don’t suspect their motives, because they approach us as well intentioned friends.
Even our real friends abroad in other democracies often sound like they don’t care for us much: The ruling classes in Western European countries seem to think of Americans generally as vulgar, prone to violence, brash, and full of ourselves. During the Cold War, the Soviets frequently nurtured these feelings, encouraging such sentiments among America’s allies to drive apart alliances like NATO. The Soviets fostered feelings of contempt for America, cultivating the mood of quiet superiority.
This worked fairly well often enough. After all, who doesn’t fall for flattery at some level—even among those who are on their guard? Human psychology leads us to want to interpret good things that happen to us as deserved, as resulting from our unique combination of talents, skills, and hard work. The bad stuff is foisted upon us by the Fates—working in conjunction with our political rivals. The bad stuff is entirely undeserved: unfair and unjust.
This Belabor Day, let’s be aware of1 who it is that’s encouraging internal strife. Let’s keep our eyes open, let’s be calmer as we cut our own a bit more slack, because perhaps they want what they genuinely think will do us good. Let’s be aware that there are those who would encourage our self-destructive impulses. Let’s belabor them, perhaps laboriously.
Edited to correct a composition error after the newsletter had already been sent.
This Belabor Day, let’s be who it is that’s encouraging internal strife.
I think this sentence needs another word. Maybe "let's be aware who it is"?
Good morning. I enjoyed sleeping in until 5:45. Jake was sad about the wait for more food, even though he still had food from last night.