Annotations on the National Mood
A Screenshot of the AP Landing Page This Morning Offers a Glimpse Into Our Psyche
Today’s AP landing page offers a glimpse into the national psyche, one in which guns, hate, and fear intersect. Five stories detailing our national fragmentation, and the ways in which priorities continue to be skewed. We privilege guns and gun owners above others. Lionize law enforcement. Aggressively dismiss the ways in which race drives so much of the desire to own firearms and to use them, the ways in which it drives our policing history and contemporary strategies. Right-wing political and media establishments fan the flames, scapegoat Blacks, Jews, Latinos migrants, Muslim, the trans community, women. These stories about gun deaths, taken together as a single narrative, as they should be, as maybe they may be coming to be, show how we devalue lives, actual living and breathing lives. We fetishize guns — as I wrote last week — and use law-and-order language, presenting whiteness as being on the order side of the law divide and others as a threat to public order, as akin to anarchy. Guns. The blue-line flag. Jan. 6. ‘Jews will not replace us.” Migrants as invaders, as infections. We want to see these shootings as independent of each other, but they are part of a larger narrative.