Page 71 - Time Magazine-November 05, 2018

THE ENDURING EMPTINESS make a political point.” The game, one suspects, is
OF OUR PUBLIC RAGE
BY PHIL KLAY
Recently a fRiend asked me, with what i
thought was a hint of suspicion in his voice, why
my writing was so “apolitical.” It’s not the first
time it’s happened, but it always surprises me. I’ve
written about military policy under both President
Obama and President Trump. I’ve questioned what
we’re doing and tried to write about what flawed
policy looks and feels like to those tasked with car-
rying it out. To me, this is inescapably and obvi-
ously engaged political speech.
But to my friend, a smart guy who neverthe-
less spends a surprising amount of his time online
coming up with inventive ways to crassly insult
his political enemies, there was something lacking.
Something to do with my inclination to be “unfail-
ingly polite,” as he called it. I try to avoid making
personal attacks, or casting my arguments in the
typical good/evil binary of partisan politics. My
friend is a veteran of a tough deployment to Af-
ghanistan. He’s acutely conscious of how thin our
public discussion of the wars has been. And, more
than anything, he’s acutely conscious of the ways
our collective failure as a society to demand seri-
ous oversight of the wars has direct, physical, vio-
lent impact on people we know and care about.
If you look back on the human waste of the past
17 years and are not filled with rage, is there not
something wrong with you? And if you want to be
honest in public debate, if you don’t want to engage
in the kind of lies and obfuscations and double-
speak proliferating across our body politic, don’t
you have to let that rage slip into your speech?
It’s a fair point. Rage seems like a perfectly
natural and justified response to our broader po-
litical dysfunction. From health care to tax policy
to climate change, we are failing to meaningfully
address issues whose impact can be measured in
human lives. And invitations to civil debate can
sometimes be nothing more than a con carried
out by malign actors within the system. The con-
servative entertainer Ann Coulter used to play a
game where she’d say something horrible and then,
when questioned about it, shift to a thinly con-
nected but defensible argument, like when she
claimed on the Today show that she’d written that
a group of politically active 9/11 widows were “en-
joying their husbands’ deaths” only to call atten-
tion to how they were “using their grief in order to
less about sparking debate than indulging in a kind
of performative contempt. So why play that game,
when the simple extension of a middle finger is
both easier and more honest? It will, at the very
least, be more fun.
But performative rage is fun for both sides. A
few months ago, I did a reading in Brooklyn with
an author who’d written a harrowing indictment
of our border policy. But because the author was
once a Border Patrol agent, a group of young peo-
ple showed up to protest. Rather than a thought-
ful discussion in which an insider explained how
the U.S. brings its power to bear on the vulnerable,
the audience sat through an often comic display
of self-righteous slogan chanting. At one point, an
audience member began cursing the protesters out
in Spanish, ending his rant with, “Are white people
always like this?” I could feel the audience’s poli-
tics ticking slightly rightward. I doubt any immi-
grants were helped by the spectacle.
That kind of engagement in the public sphere
takes the hard pragmatic choices of governance, in
which we must make decisions about a set of com-
plex issues for which we have imperfect informa-
tion and no perfect solutions, and substitutes one
simple question: Is my political adversary repel-
lent? Or, even more to the point: Am I better than
them? And the answer we want to give ourselves to
that question is almost always yes.
Rage is a dangeRous emotion, not simply be-
cause it can be destructive but because it can be so
easily satisfied with cheap targets. Like my friend
who picks fights online, I’m a veteran. I know people
who have been injured or killed overseas. I’ve seen
the damage bombs wreak on the bodies of innocent
civilians. And, yes, it fills me with rage. But if that
rage is to mean anything, it means I cannot distract
myself with the illusion of adjudicating past wrongs
with artfully phrased put-downs. In a world where
we are still at war, the most important question is,
What do we do now? There the moral certainty of
my rage must be met with humility about the limits
of my knowledge.
I’ll never forget the journalist Nir Rosen, who’d
become something of a darling of the antiwar left
for his well-informed criticisms of U.S. Middle
East policy, delivering a blistering attack in front
of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations two
months after I returned from Iraq. Everything we
had done during the 13 months I’d spent overseas,
it seemed, was morally corrupt, counterproductive
and dangerous. But when then Senator Joe Biden
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