by Mark Harvey
In fiction, there is one story that never gets old: the good man or good woman who is imprisoned or abused, but through strength of character and the force of justice retakes their rightful place in the world. It can be the story of a woman violated by a man or degraded by her envious sisters, a giant of a man lashed down by Lilliputians, a patriot wrongly accused of a crime he didn’t commit or an entire town poisoned by the effluence of a shameless company.
What we love about these stories is the painful sense of injustice followed by a courageous walk to redemption. The dirtier the crime against our hero, the more delicious his or her comeback.
America is deep in the midst of this story. What we love about this country—its possibility to reinvent itself, its original aspiring words about freedom and equality, its grand universities, its thousands of life-changing inventions, its artists and scientists—is in the midst of being degraded and defiled by a bunch of craven, shrill, fake patriots. They’re called MAGATS.
Like many Americans, I tried hard to understand their complaints about the world after Donald Trump got elected in 2016. I read books and articles about how America’s rural states were ignored, about how the flyover states were being left behind, and about how the coastal elites were conspiring to create socialism under a deep state. I’m a bit of an empath so I really tried to walk in the MAGAT moccasins.
I took consideration of the fact that it’s really hard, if not impossible, to lead the old American life of raising a family on one income. I took consideration of the increasing disparities of income between the bottom quintile and the top one percent. Some of the complaints are legitimate, but MAGAT politicians show little interest in alleviating those things and mostly bring forth legislation that makes things worse.
But empath that I am, I spent far too many years trying to “get it” and understand why millions of Americans would go to Trump rallies to worship a philandering, narcissistic cheat one day, and then on Sunday go to Church to worship a person who is framed as his polar opposite in the form of Jesus Christ. It was mental torture to try to reconcile the MAGATS’ devotion to a man caked in makeup and falsity, a man who is the incarnation of Manon and selfishness, with their Sunday devotion to a man who was said to be good, merciful, kind, and just.
Modern Buddhists have a beautiful term for what I and millions of Americans were trying to do with our efforts at understanding: it’s called idiot compassion. Idiot compassion is when you allow someone you care about (or even someone you don’t care about) to behave with reckless abandon and destroy things you cherish. Idiot compassion is when you buy your alcoholic friend a bottle of Scotch because you know he loves Scotch. Idiot compassion is letting your aged mother keep driving even when you know she will likely kill herself or someone else on the highway because of her flagging skills. Idiot compassion is not telling your sister to stop dating a known psychopath and hobbyist serial killer.
The writer Lori Gottlieb puts it well writing, “In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people’s feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty.”
And idiot compassion is abandoning a country you love to a bunch of intellectually lazy, cultish, selfish, bullying mobs. For we’ve nearly lost this country and once we lose it for good, we won’t get it back. Ever.
I’m not sure what flipped the switch in my brain from my soft-boiled and, in retrospect, embarrassing effort at understanding, to finally saying, no more! But I think it was a number of things large and small that piled up in my consciousness and maybe even in the collective consciousness.
It was an inane conversation with a woman who insisted the earth was only 6,000 years old. When I challenged the MAGAT’s claim and said that the earth’s billions of years of history was proven through radiometric dating and the analysis of isotopes, her response was, “How do you know? Were you there to see how many isotopes were there originally?” (I suspect it was the first time she had ever uttered the word “isotope.”)
When we discussed climate change she said that C02 is not dangerous and that the more we have in the atmosphere the greener our planet will be and the more crops we can grow. Plus, she reminded me, there’s very little C02 in the atmosphere anyway.
It was living with my representative, Lauren Boebert, and her utter hypocrisy as a faux Christian and preacher of “family values” when her own family was burned to the ground by the same arrogance and mean spiritedness she has embodied her whole life. It was watching her vote against bill after bill supporting veterans but delivering cloying tweets supporting our troops on Veterans Day.
It was the thundering MAGAT politicians whining about our national finances when their tax cuts to the wealthy added some seven trillion dollars to the national debt. It was the MAGATS going on about Biden destroying the economy when in actual fact, 14 million new jobs have been added to the American economy since Biden took office, there have been three straight years of economic growth, the S & P is up 28%, and 790,000 new manufacturing jobs have been added as well.
It was a conversation with a man claiming that COVID vaccines caused heart failure, infertility, and dementia because one of his relatives had had a heart attack after getting the COVID vaccine and other friends had made claims about the infertility and the dementia. When I suggested that his data was anecdotal and couldn’t stand up to broad statistics, he clung to his claims and kept mentioning how many cousins he had.
Let’s get something straight: these so-called Christians supporting Trump have nothing to do with the idealized Christianity at its best. Donald Trump is a prevaricating bully who trashes the disabled, has no respect for women—or men, zero loyalty, and has no feeling for Emma Lazuras’s poem inscribed on The Statue of Liberty saying, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” He is a cheap orange creamsicle of a man who has never read the Bible and certainly never lived any of its precepts (unless you dig into the ghoulish tenants of The Old Testament).
America aint perfect, no she aint. But it’s still the country that invents and discovers and produces at an insane pace. It’s the country that comes up with the best medicine (even when our health care is backward), it’s the country that has the best ways to reduce carbon emissions (even when we’re in the top two carbon emitters), it’s the country that invented the First Amendment (even when the miscreants in Florida are banning books and scared of the rainbow).
And this country with a massive statue planted in the New York Harbor representing freedom and inscribed with “Give me your tired and your poor” is being gaslit and violated by a bunch of lazy, thoughtless jerks. The very same who bask in America’s military might and wave giant flags, have conveniently forgotten that much of our military might comes from the fruit of the hard sciences developed in the universities they despise. Left to their rejection of science and rigorous intellectual work, our country would be defending itself with refurbished catapults and hickory slingshots.
The irony of what I’m about to say is that what I’m about to say is anecdotal. But from what I read in both articles and even more so in the subsequent comment sections is that the majority of Americans are plum sick and tired of MAGATS. There’s a spirit akin to a football coach finally kicking the lazy senior off the team because he’s lazy and infecting the rest of the team with his attitude. Or the army general court martialing the coward who was derelict in his duty or faked an injury.
Empathy is a great trait. It’s what leads to the best charities, legislation protecting the disabled, school programs, and scholarships that get the poor into great universities, animal shelters, and animal adoptions. It’s what makes us caring, hardworking human beings. But empathy carried to the extreme and without some critical reflection leads to idiot compassion. And with idiot compassion, we have the thinking, shoulder-to-the-wheel Americans coddling the cultish, happily ignorant Americans.
This idiotic cult doesn’t deserve our compassion.