When this blog started, newspapers were still writing, “so-called Web logs, or ‘blogs’ …”
From February 23, 2017, “The IndigNation“:
Manufacturing, hoarding, and savoring indignation has long been a driving force for the American right. It is, I’ve argued, a form of addiction.
This is why American society is marked by the otherwise inexplicable phenomenon of the haves resenting the have-nots.
This is such a common feature of American life that we almost get inured to how dazzlingly weird it is. The wealthy deride the poor as “takers” — never quite able to explain why those “takers” don’t seem to have anything to show for it. Where is all this stuff they’ve “taken”? Well, it’s still in the hands of the wealthy. White folks indignantly explain how black folks have always had it so much easier, somehow managing to sound as though they’ve convinced themselves of this enough to actually feel near-constant anger about it. Men resent women. The rich resent the poor. Majorities resent minorities. The powerful resent the powerless.
It’s ass-backwards and utterly illogical.
Americans can sit there, eating strawberries in February, and manage somehow to conjure up an almost genuine-seeming sense of resentment for the (they assume) illegal takers who picked those strawberries and earned less in a day of that stoop-crop labor than the American earns just sitting there for the amount of time it takes them to gobble down their delicious-but-out-of-season treat. They manage to conjure up real-feeling emotions of resentment, anger, grievance, and petulant contempt — all directed at the unfairly uncompensated workers who are, in that very moment, actually making their own lives better and more enjoyable. It’s bonkers.
Part of this, of course, is guilt. Guilt pricks the conscience and thus can be a real prick. This is what guilt is for. That’s it’s job.
And there’s only two things we can do with guilt if we want it to stop poking at us. We can repent or we can resent. Since the first option is obviously not gonna happen, guilt winds up making us feel resentment toward those we have wronged, and even more so toward those we are currently wronging. It’s the brutish, illogical logic of the abuser: “See what you made me do?”
Indignation — voluntary, imaginary, disingenuous, misdirected — is at the heart of most of the right-wing agenda in this country. And this goes way back. All the way back.
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