3:20 p.m. - 2008-10-21
Do They Know We Use ARABIC Numbers?!?!?!?!?!
Since I'm an incredibly shallow person, appearances are very important to me. Sure, sure, integrity and character are "important", but they won't get you on the cover of People magazine. But you know what will? Sexy hotness! Super-hunkery! Being among the hottest faces in America! With the hot bod! And the fashion! And the hot spouses and children! And, you know, being, looking and feeling HOT! Only celebrities can meet the highest standards of hottery, what with having unlimited access to the apparatus of hotness: the personal trainers, surgeons, make-up people and others who follow them everywhere, forming a vast hotness-support network. Perhaps most important, celebrities have people like you and me, everyday, non-hot people who provide a stark contrast to the effervescent superiority of the hot celebrity hot model hot.
I was reflecting on this the other day while watching some of the clips on the internets of the crowds at the McCain/Palin rallies. Like anyone with the powers of hearing and sight, I noticed the crowds' ignorance, bigotry, witlessness, blind rage, overwhelming whiteness, bellicosity, hatefulness, apparent confusion, eagerness to lap up all the most trivial or misleading right-wing talking points, shrillness, fear and stupidity. But then I was struck by something else, the thing that perhaps provides the key to all these other traits: they were, to a person, physically unattractive. Some were only marginally unattractive, with attractive facial features that had been simply put together wrong. Others resembled sociopathic cavemen still wrestling with the challenges of walking upright and wearing clothes that don't consist of half an animal carcass. Many were hatchet-faced. Some of the women sported cheap, ill-applied make-up.
Like I said, I'm extremely shallow. But even given that, I don't tend to look at a group of people and judge them by how they look, dress, speak, etc. I'm not even a stickler for grammar, as may be obvious by my sentence construction or lack thereof. I don't really care that much how you look or dress or talk or even what your deepest beliefs are, provided you're a person who treats others with the respect that every human being deserves. However, when you can't manage even that much basic human decency, I feel that every crag, line and blemish on your reddened, rage-twisted mug is fair game.
So, I'm looking at the internet images of these people and wondering: HOW did their faces become so twisted with rage? There's a chicken-or-the-egg aspect to this question. Were they born kind of ugly and that shaped their development in such a way that they were forced to become angry and right-wing, or did they start off more average looking and gradually, after years of listening to Rush on the radio and becoming enraged by whatever he told them to become enraged about, their faces froze into a hideous mask of hate and depravity? And what do they look like to each other? Normal? But they must read People magazine like the rest of us, UNLESS it's outlawed in REAL America where they apparently live.
Now I realize it seems like I'm just being a flippant asshole (and by the way, welcome to the internet!) but I was seriously pondering these questions. When you see a bunch of people acting like a big, looney, potentially violent mob and you wonder what motivates them you can't rule anything out. Remember, Hitler was a failed artist. Maybe these sad, angry, unattractive people on the YouTubes have long histories of romantic failure. Maybe some of them have felt mistreated due to their various deformities. Then the way they deal with it is by lashing out at someone, if not someone they know then maybe a public figure or group who some other, IRRESPONSIBLE public figure has instructed them to be afraid of.
Ultimately, what I saw in these video clips was a group of (horribly unattractive) people acting out of fear. This certainly hasn't been an uncommon thing around here these last couple of years. And really, who could say their fear, any non-rich person's fear really, is unjustified? Justified or not, the way the blue-collar/right-wing/gun-enthusiast/whatever-the-fuck-else crowd are dealing with personal fear, ie by projecting it onto the public sphere and directing it at anything even vaguely Arab-ey, is pretty unprecedented in my lifetime and quite alarming. More alarming is the degree to which they're being ENCOURAGED to think and act in this manner, again by a few IRRESPONSIBLE public figures who shouldn't be trusted to run the fucking salad bar at Perkin's, much less a country.
I'd like to wind up with a grandiloquent FDR quote, but I don't really think fear itself is the only thing we have to fear. But it's pretty high on the list. But what's REALLY important is how we RESPOND to our fear. Fear can wake you up to the possibility that something is wrong so that you can proceed in a productive, rational and most importantly HUMANE manner. Or it can lead to hysteria, violence and a new Dark Ages.
On the bright side, if we went with the Dark Ages, we could all wear those cool midaeval monk robe things with the big hood. At least then there wouldn't be so many fugly-ass faces on display.
