“Heck no”? Really?
This is a puzzler. I’m seeing people laughing at a column by Virginia Heffernan for its clueless entitled snobbery crossed with self-righteous “liberalism,” which sounded odd to me because when I first encountered her writing she was a libertarian with some modest leanings in a more leftish direction. Also, she was sharp, and the writing in this piece is very dim – so the piece must be a parody, right? Surely? Poe’s law?
Let’s see…
Oh, heck no. The Trumpites next door to our pandemic getaway, who seem as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans, just plowed our driveway without being asked and did a great job.
How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?
Of course, on some level, I realize I owe them thanks — and, man, it really looks like the guy back-dragged the driveway like a pro — but how much thanks?
Surely that’s parody-naïve not real naïve …isn’t it?
These neighbors are staunch partisans of blue lives, and there aren’t a lot of anything other than white lives in neighborhood.
This is also kind of weird. Back in the city, people don’t sweep other people’s walkways for nothing.
Yeeeaaah I don’t think this can be real Heffernan talking in her own voice.
On the other hand if it is parody I’m not sure what her point is.
It certainly reads like parody to me.
Ok, so it seems I must have deleted half my comment before I posted.
I think that the parody makes the following serious stuff stand out more. What do we do to or with people who are very nice to us, but utter shits to other people? How do we react to ‘aggressive niceness’ without becoming utter shits ourselves? Human societies only work with politeness; how can we persuade people who are discriminatory in their kindness to spread it around more fairly? These are largely unanswered (and possibly unanswerable) questions in societies which have become so much larger than we evolved to cope with.
That.
The mockery I saw was about the supposed political fanaticism, but I don’t think that’s her point at all, I think it’s about the conflict between kindness and the utter malevolence of Trump. As I’ve said a million times, I’d hate him just as much and even more if his policies and party were Dem, because I hate his sadism and bullying and self-obsession. It’s the man more than the politics. The two are intertwined, obviously, but the howling desert of his character is what we have to fear and reject above all.
And another important point is the fact that nice people (i.e. our neighbors) can be assholes, too. It is possible to be both at the same time. Not all assholes come with automatic markers of their assholery. We have too bad a habit of thinking all jerks will be like Ebenezer Scrooge, and have no friends and no social contacts, that they are continually angry and grouchy and no one can stand being around them, that they don’t marry and have kids and grandkids that they love and treat with love.
The problem is, most horrible people are nice at least some of the time, and to some of the people. I don’t like Ted Cruz at all, but there are people who find him quite likeable. And some of the people I think are truly nice people on a social or global scale can be damned hard to get along with one-to-one (I come to mind).
I struggle sometimes to see some of the people I work with who are truly pleasant people as the sort of jerks that vote for Trump, but they are. Some of the people I work with show their true colors constantly, but only to me (i.e., sexism); others have not had anything but pleasant relationships with them, and find it difficult to believe they have said the things to me that they have said.
So this constant “be nice to each other” crap is simplistic and perhaps even dangerous. Sure, be nice. But, then, be nice. If you’re a grouchy sort with a liberal bent toward social justice, well, maybe you can’t be nice in the one sense, but you can in the other. If you can be nice in every way, so much the better. But one of the nicest people I know to be around has some awful political views, and it took my breath away the first time I heard him express them. It was unexpected.
It’s the same mechanism behind “I’m not a misogynist, I love my wife and daughters”, and “I’m not a racist, I have black/Asian friends”, “Joe couldn’t beat his wife, he’s always so nice to customers” etc.
Niceness won’t get it done, and neither will kindness. And even niceness can be done mean – see bitchiness, mean girls, neighbourliness can put further demands on the already stretched-to-the-limit and I’m told that in the South “bless your heart” can be intended as, and read as, an insult. Stonewall’s slogan is “acceptance without exception” but still manages to shit all over women, and lesbians especially, and of course gay men too.
We have to talk about policies and structures and yes, bias. What the system does and doesn’t do. What it tends to, overservices, or ignores. Who is expected to do what, when, why, how and for how much.
I can affirm that it often is in Oklahoma, which isn’t quite the south, but has a lot of “southiness” to it…when I was a kid, you’d never see a sign of a Confederate flag there, and the teachers did everything they could to emphasize the role of the tribes that refused to fight for the Confederacy, but these days the south is written all over Oklahoma. So, yeah, I’m buying this. In fact, I’ve used it that way myself.
Bless your hearts (ha), but I’m not seeing any parody in the article at all. The article goes through multiple examples of people who do evil things being nice on a personal level and how one should deal with that. I think she legitimately doesn’t know how to handle MAGA people giving her unsolicited help.
The right is having a field day with this piece, especially since she fled blue areas to safely wait out COVID-19 in a red area and now apparently despises her neighbors.
Honestly I don’t think there’s a clear answer. It all depends on how bad you think supporting Trump is. Obviously you wouldn’t thank actual Nazis that run the ovens in a concentration camp for plowing your driveway. And just as obviously you would thank someone who had a minor political difference with you. Then there’s a big middle ground. If these are diehard MAGA heads that couldn’t wait to get rid of the Mexicans and are sorry January 6 didn’t pull off the coup, then that’s one thing. If they’re right-leaning people that don’t follow politics that well but thought Trump was an exciting agent of change, someone who would drain the swamps, then maybe you’d cut them some slack and hope they wised up. Or not.
What causes me to think it smells of parody is more the style than the content – the style is rather crude, not to say dumbed-down. I don’t know, maybe I’m imagining it.
O. @3 This is it for me exactly. He’s an abusive, sadistic shitbag, politics notwithstanding.
It’s not a parody, and it’s not–on my reading–clueless, entitled, snobbish or self-righteous. I don’t find the writing sub-standard, although I’ve read nothing else of hers, so I’ve nothing to compare it to.
She is reacting to one of the core dynamics of human society. We take care of our own (family, friends, neighbors, village, country) and we ignore/disparage/exclude/attack/kill the outsiders/foreigners/enemies. Liberals and conservatives both behave this way. The difference between liberals and conservatives is the size of the in-group. For liberals, this group tends to be larger; for conservatives, smaller. Heffernan cites multiple concrete examples of the in-group behavior: her neighbor plowing her driveway, Hezbollah, her French hosts. And the column itself revolves around one dreadful example of the out-group behavior: Trumpists.
The hook for the column is the cognitive dissonance of having people in her own out-group (Trumpists) include her in their in-group (as demonstrated e.g. by plowing her driveway). Her conclusion is that if someone accepts us into their in-group, we can respond graciously, but we must still hold them accountable for their actions. I think that is the correct conclusion.
The only thing the column lacks is the kind of meta-analysis that I’ve offered here.