The Great Hatred

 I had been blaming Rush Limbaugh for alienating me from country and family, and then I discovered that our great hatred actually took form already during the 1828 presidential campaign during Andrew Jackson, the source to which all that is mean and evil in America can be traced, and John Quincy Adams, avatar of European-friendly intellectualism. Our great hatred is bigger than any of us; Rush only tapped into a hideous sewer that has been roiling for a very long time. I had already discovered the nastiness of the Jefferson campaign, but that was just the newspapers. In 1828 that vicious rhetoric became part of campaigning in general. During that election the parties turned into propaganda machines completely uninterested in spreading the truth about their own candidate and focused entirely upon destroying the other.

Why is it that even when we can all read the history we are still swayed by what people say during campaigns? The lying was there in 1828 working its magic – John Quincy Adams accused of spending tax payer money to buy a billiard table. His family produced the receipts to show that he had bought it with his own money, and they said no more about it. But that wasn’t enough – the lie continued to circulate. Adams refused to “electioneer,” get out in public and defend himself. Of course he was gobbled up by the Jackson lying machine. If you didn’t respond fast and loud you lost the narrative, you lose the narrative, you will forever lose the narrative. The truth held no interest, it holds no interest, will never hold interest. Is this comforting or horrifying? Is it comforting or horrifying that that election of 1828 was, like recent elections, interested only in brandishing fake ideologies (fake because winning is the only ideology, and winning in this context is only vile because the winners use their victory to prove their masculinity), that it was the first in a genealogy that leads eventually to Lee Atwater and Karl Rove? Is it comforting or horrifying to realize that the divisions of my own family and my own exile are not my fault but that of an ancient cesspool of implacable hatred between advocates of states’ rights and advocates of centralization? We are enemies despite ourselves, victims of a fight into which we were born.

Andrew Jackson represents everything most despicable about American politics. A military general supremely indifferent to the rule of law, racist, imperialist, folksy, illiterate, choleric – but apparently radiating that aura of being able to pee long distances and spread sperm all over the rest of us, that stupid swaggering certainty that passes for virility in the backwaters of our divided country. His type is monotonously familiar, and the dregs of society continue to rise up ready to support him and his avatars, cheering him on in the half-witted language of Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin.

I am moderate by nature. I wouldn’t read a book about Andrew Jackson and spontaneously hate him under normal circumstances. I wouldn’t care – he has been dead for almost two hundred years. But exiled as I am, separated from my country and alienated from my family by this systemic divide between Republicans and Democrats, or, I guess by a deeper difference between authoritarians and people who just really don’t care what other people do, I feel am angry. I am furious at Rush for having turned my family against me and furious at Andrew Jackson and his machine, who turns out to have been responsible for the likes of Rush.