[869] I Walk The Line

 I have so much work to do, but the topic is hot and my mind is making so many parallels, I have to trap them.

As I get older, it's becoming clearer why chasms open up between people and we generally orient ourselves into quasi-isolated “safe” spaces. Right now, I'm in a conversation about J.K. Rowling and her alleged anti-trans position. I can't tell you how many times I've had this conversation, but it having nothing to do with the subject matter.

I have a whole habit and strategy at this point that starts with asking people to quote. If you can't quote, I can't be sure you're reading instead of “motivated reading.” When a child is frustrated in doing their homework and claims it is too hard, you don't take them at their word, you tell them to sound out the word, break down the math, and train them to understand that process as the problems grow more complex.

When you're arguing with someone who is ideologically possessed, you can't take it for granted that they know 1+1=2 if they never learned math, are dyslexic (selectively or otherwise), or have some unrecognized or underlying ethic that finds the whole exercise of doing math as fruitless or “impossible with someone like you.”

Now, words aren't math. So you get essentially infinite leeway to interpret them to your heart's content. That's, to borrow a phrase, problematic.

I'll take a quote from the exchange between me and my friend,”just because someone can explain their thoughts doesnt [sic] mean they are in the right.”

This is a true statement. Unfortunately, it's being used to argue that J.K. Rowling said a list of things she did not in fact say. As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time getting exacting in his language, I've been at the other end of someone who can see all of my words, but quote none of them, and finds an immense amount of satisfaction in judging me, arguing, or condemning, again, literally nothing I actually said or position I hold. I don't think that just because I write the blog I'm correct. I think I'm demonstrating something that lends itself to being more truthful and accurate, which is by definition a threat to whatever motivates the vitriol.

I used to take it personally. It would make me exceedingly angry and I'd be so confused why it was so hard to just read the words on the page, and start there. Something about J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter has made an important detail clear. I'm not trans, the person I'm talking to isn't either. The person who liked her comment isn't either. What's going on? J.K. Rowling represents significantly more than an opinion on trans issues.

My claim to argumentative fame is through religion. I knew details back and forth. I could go bible quote for bible quote. I knew the logical fallacies by their technical names. I knew significantly more science facts than were ever relevant to your “believer on the street” who would claim their faith or to know what they were talking about. I was talking to people who said they would kill their own child if God told them to. The depth of the “insanity” knew no end.

With Harry Potter, that's about as close to a modern burgeoning adult's religion as you're going to get lol. Their sense of wonder and being in the world is under threat. Of course it makes sense to not be willing to entertain subtlety. I read Harry Potter to my class in 5th grade, saw the movies, but was never gripped by it like the force that turned it into a theme park.

As such, I'm ambivalent, in a sense, to J.K. Rowling's opinions and art. I'm not anti-Harry or her, and if she tells me she's got a foundation to protect women and children threatened by misguided legislation that would obscure medical differences between the sexes, I don't find it hard to understand why she'd want a more exacting discussion. She cites people studying trans issues. She cites statistics. This is all we get, people. This is the best. If you're unwilling to engage with the numbers and experts, you have your opinion and the rope you can weave to hang yourself with it.

Especially as you get older and life feels more fragile, you want to protect how you've oriented yourself so far. I habitually seem to “attack.” I'm reflexively regarded as “negative.” Why? Well, I don't just have a habit, I make a practice of doing this. I sacrifice as many sacred cows as I can find. I turn my weapon on myself. I learned how to treat discomfort and open questions as opportunities for patient exploration, not a threat to where I sit or how I understand myself.

This, as I'm often reminded, isn't human. The sense of “professional detachment” I try to maintain by writing, is not an anchored side-taking. It won’t matter how much I say I'm only practicing this habit, I'll be understood as someone who's impossible to talk to, unable to be persuaded, blind to his own enjoyment in sniffing his own farts yada yada. I'll never be quoted, that's for sure.

The comparisons and contrasts are most striking to me when you consider fascism and Donald Trump. How many times can you hear from his camp that “he didn't really mean it?” Liberals believe the negative and crazy shit he says, fascists don't. Liberals don't believe the reasonable and parsed thoughts of someone who seems to have betrayed their idealism. What's the metric of discerning truth here but tribalism? What does 1+1=2 look like to these people but middle fingers combining forces to shout, “Fuck you!?”

It's a thought worthy of suicide to contemplate all of the things that render you as pointless, inconsequential, and utterly meaningless. This is relevant, because it means as self-conscious biological beings, we have good reason to avoid thought patterns that take us to that place. We need to propagate in spite of climate change. We need to get along with “manageable fascist behavior.” But I want to zero in on the word “meaning.” Yesterday, when I tried to drill down on what “meaning” meant to me, it was just whether or not something prompted me to act. Things certainly have an infinite array of meanings and interpretations, the vast majority of which do not register as something I need to act or speak in service to. This is a less damming way of saying, “I don't give a fuck.”

As such, I don't know J.K. Rowling, so by definition I don't find her opinion on a topic I know a small amount about meaningful. I don't see her attacking trans people. I don't see her coordinating with groups who deny the different experiences of trans activists. I don't see her using the term “TERF” to describe herself anymore than the people I routinely call Nazis call themselves Nazis.

Why do I insist on calling people Nazis? Isn't that a 1:1 analogy for people calling her a TERF? I look at the policy they support that functionally renders one race subject to the oppression of another. J.K. Rowling doesn't support anti-trans policy, to my knowledge, and when I ask for how I could be wrong, no one floods the comments with politicians she's buying to push legislation. I look at dog-whistle comments. J.K. Rowling is accused, in my exchange with this friend, of writing a “bingo-card” of transphobic terminology. What are those terms? This friend has yet to quote them. If they ring like, “Jews will not replace us” and “We're gonna keep the 'thugs' out of your neighborhood,” I'll submit she has a point. Nazis reject the ideas of equality, class conflict, and internationalism (i.e. they're taking our jobs! The rich deserve their wealth! Religious ideas different than mine equal suicide bombs!) J.K. Rowling isn't weighed down with the history of trade agreements, religious strife, or tenuous economic principles in advocating for a comprehensive look at mental health.

Ultimately, you don't matter, I don't matter, you can destroy all of your friendships over exceptionally petty things and die smug and self-satisfied that you had the last word, riddled with the disease carried in a cocktail of deadly sins. Proud you maintained your conception as a “defender” of something. Greedily holding back vulnerability. Quietly jealous someone seems more comfortable or pronounced than you. Lusting after a means to reassert yourself against an easier target. Gorging yourself on the drama of it all, and being so unbelievably lazy in not merely choosing to act a little bit better and see a little bit clearer by starting with the words on the page or the rules that govern the numbers. You start humbled and open, or you don't start at all.

This is that “accommodating” or “political” game people think I'm incapable of playing. They don't want to believe they'll be sacrificed when I don't capitulate to the nonsense. They don't think it matters to me to have real conversations with real people willing to share the same page, sometimes literally, before they bring the fire to burn everything down. If it's not human to quote each other, I'm still comfortable being a robot and think I want to be more than human in how I exercise my agency and reason. To succumb to the group-think is certainly “natural” and anticipated, but it doesn't make it worthy of respect. That is, I respect how it works and its consequences, but I see no personal “meaning” in it besides to pick it apart. I'm not going to bend to the implicit threat of disassociation when you exercise it.

I never really expect to be understood, so I remain anxious about the means I utilize to get what I want in the world. You'd think I'd have created a perfect rationality for using my awareness of these pits people trap themselves in to conjure endearing feelings, trick and undermine, or otherwise play with the rampant emotions of a shrieking ape just trying to get by. I don't take it personally until I choose to take a chance on you in regarding your agency and friendship. I pick people to fuck with because they exhibit the traits and habits I respect and need to thrive in my own life. I'm not nervously balancing emotional leverage in order to exact some plan I have for their resources, nor looking to protect myself from criticism in surrounding myself with sycophants. What are you doing?