The Only Thing Worse than the Rittenhouse Verdict is the “Debate” About the Rittenhouse Verdict

Now that the galling (but wholly expected) verdict is in, there is an even worse outrage that any decent person with a functioning moral compass has to tolerate for the next week, before the notion that militarized white men can roam wherever they please metastasizes a bit more into the fabric of our consciousness.

That outrage is the idea that there are two legitimate views on the verdict. We’re actually expected to pretend that headlines like this aren’t indicative of a mental defect:

“Republican celebrations and Democratic anger reveal a widening political divide”

Right…it’s just a “divide.” It’s just a difference of opinion, just a reflection of there being two sides to every coin.

Yes, there are two sides to this particular coin. One of them happens to be stupid and pointless, and it’s a symptom of how awful we are that we have to nod our heads and indulge the crazy people who will argue that the implications are anything but ruinous.

For all the talk of “cancel culture,” we can’t shut down nonsense like this. At ease, angry white people — your awful views are an entrenched part of the mainstream.

“Why is it a problem for a court of law to reaffirm a right to carry arms and defend yourself?” sounds like this to me:

• Why shouldn’t we be allowed to spit in strangers’ faces when we walk down the street?
• Why shouldn’t concerned citizens be allowed to slap someone’s screaming child?
• Who are you to tell me I can’t shit in an elevator?

The conventional wisdom dictates that there are two camps in American society. You know: “liberals” and “conservatives.” This construct isn’t useful, because it’s part of the distortion that lets the superstitions and anxieties of the most primitive subsection of American society maintain legitimacy. The center shifted with Bill Clinton, and there have been no liberals since before his reign.

What, exactly, distinguished Clinton from a Republican? Strict law and order- check. Fiscal conservatism and low tax rates — check. Militarism — check. Unchecked corporate greed and obeisance to stock prices — check. If I had to identify one watershed moment in the culture wars, this was it. He made it okay for liberals to make bank, and that was the final capitulation of any concept of a greater good.

No wonder conservatives sneer at so-called “virtue signaling.” They know it’s our last empty resistance against the triumph of the idea that people are merely instruments of value, the unit of victory in white man’s commercialist system of belief.

The two actual camps we’re left with today are moderate rightists on the one hand and on the other…authoritarian ethno-fascists who are deeply uncomfortable with women unless they’re bumping and grinding next to a gridiron. The latter just keep hanging on to embarrassing discomforts, no matter the year on the calendar. You would think we’d be past their various stupidities by now, but they’ve only grown stronger in recent years. The complexes of old have found new strength and new use, and it shows in the gun “debate.”

It is still a relatively young phenomenon, even if to most of us it feels like it has been with us since the dawn of time. It was the late 70’s that the NRA became radicalized. Prior to that, the sportsmen (let’s be honest — it was mostly men, not “people”) who organized under its auspices weren’t that opposed to regulation of gun ownership. Conservatives decided to whip people into a frenzy of fear. “They” are coming for your guns! Once they take your guns, “they” will storm your suburb and rape your wife (who is just another possession).

It plays into a certain person’s worst fears (ironically, the kind they may very well spend their private hours gratifying themselves to — just ask Jerry Falwell, Jr.). White men are driven by fear. Fear doesn’t make you weak — it makes you dangerous. The more afraid you are, the quicker you are to violence, and we can be honest here (if nowhere else): white men are violent. They do an okay job of hiding it within the confines of the polite society they’ve created to provide a thin veneer to domination, but it’s still there. The violence is sublimated. It is never far from the surface, which is why it’s easy for a Rittenhouse or a McMichael to take up arms and defend…nothing.

Rittenhouse had some vision of law and order that involved the sanctity of car dealerships. McMichael was ready to run down a black jogger in order to create a world where construction sites might be safe from unlawful loitering. When you’ve been whipped into a frenzy for so many years, the flimsiest of pretense will do.

That dictates the debate we’re asked to have now. Should it be okay for self-appointed officers of the peace to defend themselves from situations created by their own incompetent decisions to enforce their perverted view of law and order? Did I say “asked to have?” I meant “forced to have.” We can’t avoid it, much as we might like to.

The general mass of white conservatives in this country are like Rittenhouse, writ large: provocateurs. They have inserted an unreasonable point of view into the midst of other people’s attempts to ask better questions. Lost at the moment are the questions that seemed so pressing just last year. Questions like:

• Why is it so easy for the police to exercise disproportionate force against people of color?
• How can any of us be assured of what we perceive as constitutional freedoms, if we live in a society that is a thinly veiled ethno-authoritarian state?

The answer to that second question is clear. We don’t live in a truly free society. We all live within a certain narrow set of rules, and if you break them, our judgment is swift and severe. Just ask the two million people in prison in this country right now — mass incarceration is another one of those things we just accept. Somehow, we all rationalize it. We know deep down that we’re living in a police state, but we go about our lives pretending we’re living in some shining example of human progress.

We’re incredibly resilient. We can feel the oppressive presence in our minds, but we keep up the masquerade of industrious happiness, even if we all know the rules of the game, which are unforgiving. Individual freedom is acceptable only in certain forms and intended only for a certain type of individual. You have the right to produce profit. You have the right to be violent. You have the right to be white.

Just how much profit, just how violent, just how white — that’s the debate we’re being forced to legitimize with every specious headline, instead of the real debate we should be having at moments like this: just how soon should we re-write our laws on self-defense to end our tacit endorsement of white vigilantism? Not white vigilantes — as irritating as arrogant little shits like Rittenhouse might be, the individual expression isn’t the larger concern here — but the endemic assumption that white men represent the order of things in our society.

That’s a debate worth having, but it is lost and forgotten in the noise of the “two sides” we’re stuck with instead.