A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆THE DIE-ERS
Some years ago, when the White Christian President was still the President of the United States, he caught Covid, and he said a perfect thing.
What I mean by “a perfect thing” is that it perfectly encapsulates the supremacist worldview he represents and embodies so diligently and so well on behalf of people who deem themselves “christian” and “white,” which is what makes him the White Christian President.
The perfection makes it the thing he said that haunts me the most, even though it is by no means the most obviously disgusting or blatantly ignorant of the thousands and thousands of disgusting and/or ignorant things he has said.
It wasn’t going well for him when he said it, by the way. In fact, if he hadn’t been rushed to the hospital in a presidential helicopter and given the best of the best available treatment (treatment that wasn’t available to all, in no small part because of how expensive it is), he may have succumbed to the virus, as over a million U.S. citizens (many of whom deemed themselves “white” and “christian”) did.
The possibility of his demise was what he was considering when he said the perfect thing.
“I could be one of the diers,” he said.
One of the diers.
The diers. You know: people who die. One of *them.*
I think about this all the time.
You might be wondering what it is about this that bothers me so much.
I wonder that, too.
This is part 3 of a thing.
The previous 2 parts contemplated a dominant cultural narrative that makes sense only if you understand that it considers certain people to not be people.
Both parts discovered the assumptions behind that narrative, by tracing the currents of American fear, and examining who is licensed to feel fear, and who is only permitted to be the cause of fear.
I think the word for that dominant cultural narrative is "supremacy."
Supremacy is a belief system that rests on what I’ve called foundational lies: the lie of separation, which insists that we bear no relation to one another; the lie of scarcity, which insists that life must be earned; and the lie of redemptive violence, which insists that those who have not earned life owe a debt to those who have earned life that is best paid with violence and hard use.
When the topic is supremacy, I’ve found that it’s both easy and difficult to figure out how to start. “Easy” because it’s so prevalent, you can really start anywhere. “Difficult” for the exact same reason: where do we start?
Frequently I’ll start with a number of seemingly disconnected threads, and play each of them out before I give them all a tug, at which point hopefully a marionette that you as reader hadn’t even noticed yet starts to dance.
I think this time I’ll just cut to the dance.
I think we are dealing with a dominant cultural belief—one might say a national spirit—that believes that any people who suffer aren’t actually people, because if they aren’t people then we won’t have to take care of them—and so, if neglect makes them so desperate or unsightly that they cause us discomfort, then we can get rid of them, blaming them for causing the discomfort that resulted in our having to inconvenience ourselves with their disposal.
It’s something you can really only believe if you’ve already convinced yourself that people who suffer and die aren’t actually people.
That’s the wrinkle I want to think about today: the idea that the people who die deserve to die *because* they died. The idea that the fact of suffering is enough all by itself to prove that suffering is deserved.
It’s something it seems to me you have to believe, if you believe that you live in the greatest nation on earth, the most perfect system ever created, exceptional among all other nations throughout history, and therefore incapable of improvement, and yet your nation also has people who suffer terribly within it.
If there is suffering in a perfect system, somebody has to be to blame.
If the system is perfect, the blame must be laid on those who suffer most.
Therefore, when people suffer or die, it must be understood by supremacy not something that is happening to those who suffer and die, but something that those who suffer and die *are doing to those who do not,* as an unacceptable act of deliberate aggression.
kelleynnn@JuliusGoat This is exactly how misogynists describe their traumatized wives, and how authoritarian parents describe "problem" children. They consider themselves to be the "real" victims of their targets' suicide attempts.