THE RIGHT TO VIOLENCE
Suddenly a wailing, screaming flurry broke out almost underfoot. It was a cat fight. Ringo, someone else’s big black tomcat with a white ring at the end of his black tail, had snuck in again and Gillespie, the much smaller gray-striped yearling tom who lives here, had been assaulted though he had made a run for safety under my computer table. Of course I joined the screaming and was helped by Tuxie, the assistant mother and enforcer of the house. This is what’s called “caterwauling.” In the past I’ve landed blows and kicks on Ringo and once even grabbed him with the result that my hands streamed blood.
This true story illustrates violence as a mammalian survival struggle that is unconscious, instinctual, not in the least political in the human sense. There is no reasoning with Ringo, nor is Gillespie’s intimidation something therapy will cure. I must chase Ringo back home to find out where he lives and offer to pay to alter the situation organically. That is, de-ball Ringo.
I suspect the owner will be startled and possibly unsympathetic. The Valier town board has ruled that cats without collars can be captured and destroyed, which includes both Ringo and Gillespie, but the general sentiment — which includes me — is that collars are a hazard for outside cats. Many people think of cats as vermin and cat diseases are common. Cat fights seem inevitable. The loss of a cat is unimportant. They have claws and stink.
This is a violent place, not Mayberry RFD or even Avonlea PEI. We are accustomed to big dangerous machines and animals, grizzlies follow the irrigation canals through our streets and fields, and our icy highways are traveled by huge trucks that travel fast. In households behavior-altering substances and poverty-ignited blowups are common.
On the national and world scenes we are divided, raging just short of war except in the Middle East, and living in sharply different mental paradigms, some of which assert that the only safety is in domination. I call on my new vocabulary that helps me break up the unconscious mammalian impulse I call “arousal.” It goes with the other new terms like attachment.
Arousal cannot be suppressed, but it can be managed. It can be positive or negative — think of how it hits both extremes in the context of sex. On the one hand it means the rape and murder of women, children, men and the “Other” however that is seen. But it is also the ecstasy of fucking. When it takes over someone’s motives and actions, it obliterates the pre-frontal brain lobe that makes us human and lets the inner storm become realized against others. Euro-northeners used to call it “berzerk.” “Criminal Minds” attributes it to violent child raising and other deep damage to a person. Sometimes violence has been taught in war and can’t be stopped in peace. Sometimes it is “thrashing” when trapped, resorting to extremes of action all at once in hopes of tearing out of a trap.
“Dissociation” is when the brain forms an alternative frame for reality, sometimes because of extreme danger and terror, but also when provided by vivid and consistent stories on media, either real or fictional, that reinforce attachment — ATTACHMENT — to a person or movement that seems to justify violence. It’s a kind of alternative brain. When that dissociated world, that bubble, is defined by ways of dressing, things to own, flags of identification, it can become more real than the actual mainstream world.
A person like Trump, raised in a mafia world that was already a bubble, has had no moral sense that curbed undependability in business, that justified cheating, stealing, extortion and blackmail, was simply but evidently invisibly carried into the White House where he believed the rest of us had nothing to say, no rights at all.
The attraction of seeming power in an apparently dominant group attracts losers when it promises them they are understood and would be rewarded. Our media glamorized, normalized, criminals as winners, evaders of injustice with “Godfather” tales. To be honest, Jesus was speaking to losers in the face of Roman Empire power. It was Paul and Constantine who invented Christianity as a power group, an empire.
Literature about the Right to Violence is growing. (I’m creating a bibiliography though I depend on YouTube lectures more than books.) The kernel premise is that violence is justified in the face of threat, like a home-invader or someone threatening to shoot you or to set a fire that will kill people. This has been extended and delegated to officers — normally permitted, trained but constrained — to use protective force, even to a deadly degree. Officers have abused this, which means that those who are likely to be unjustly killed by tomcats in camo, are justified in fighting back to the same level. Me, I’m the Rule of Law that is greater than the Rule of Violence. I kick tomcats.
I’m completely compliant to police officers acting for the greater good as defined by law, but not to private militias or agency enforcers acting without justification. Having been a specialized deputy, an animal control officer, I’ve been in terrifying situations when my body was aroused and ready for violence. Twice someone leveled guns at me. Twice I’ve been strangled, once by a gang of kids on lunch break and once by a drunk on the street. Twice I’ve been shot at, once by a hunter with a scope who didn’t see me and once by kids hunting gophers who didn’t realize how far a .22 can carry. I’ve driven so much and so far and in such bad weather that my life was repeatedly in the balance.
And I’ve watched the development of political bad behavior that’s taking people to court across the continent after being bused in to make trouble at the Capitol. It starts in small towns, “dog court”, churches and school districts. But the force that cuts down-to-size the people who live here is the weather. Even Tester is a victim of the ultimate force of climate change. He is not able to dissociate like the more childishly geriatric members of Congress.
We need a big idea, something to rally around that includes everyone, bubbled or not. We had thought democracy was it, or maybe Christianity — and believe me, I went to grad school to justify the idea that what our far right calls Christianity is not any such thing. It’s actually 19th century Old Testament thought trying to take it away from the Jewish people so they can own it exclusively. It’s a dissociation, an attempt to reinstate the Right to Violence from a time when weapons were chariots that left whole valleys strewn with bones. Today weapons produce little green dots on satellite screens, ashes and pink mist. We sit at a distance before a console in Indiana. Morality — what morality?
When Bob and I were selling Western bronzes in the Sixties, one kind of customer was someone too-rich-to-be-known who used economic violence justifying wealth as survival. This is the underlying justification of nations overrunning indigenous people. We need new thought, in this anti-intellectual, anti-idealist time, to assert the Right to Ideas that include Everyone. We need an Emergence. It will come, maybe from indigenous people. In the meantime, to some politicians we are about as important as stray cats.
