Nouveau rage
Rage junkies. You're kind of loud, so yeah, I can't help but hear you. How about I go next? An R-rated obloquy of strident, public dumbassery as therapy.
People ask me all of the time if I ever get writer’s block. Nope. The world is a veritable cornucopia of material for people like me-especially as long as the miscreants who file into Gate City Coffee every morning to wind me up keep on coming. If I didn't have four kids under 10 that I’m hustling to support, I’d be good for two columns a day, maybe more. It’s a target-rich environment of opportunity out there for snarksters like me. All I need is the smallest of encouragements.
This morning’s confab was the age of rage. If there’s anything upon which I think large swaths of Americans agree, it is that we are living in an age with a lot of irate people who emote more than they think and, thanks to the Interwebs, overshare. The why of this is a subject for another time, but the reality of it is nearly indisputable. One of my favorite legal writers, the estimable Jonathan Turley, covers this on a near-daily basis.
My own view of this is that nouveau rage, to coin a term, is a type of pornography involving the desire to acquire virtue from a cause (think peep shows for self-styled saints). The more intractable the problem, the greater the virtue. It turns out that the cause isn’t even particularly important. Any cause will do when the addiction to virtue becomes more important than living a peaceful, happy life in a world that actually has a lot of cool stuff in it.
The porn angle makes nouveau rage crack for social justice warriors—right down to addling their brains. When one’s two main issues, for instance, are Trump's existential threat to democracy and climate change’s existential threat to our very existence, and the solution to both is to set Teslas on fire, great decisions are not being made. It’s just like springing extra for a lap dance.
Nonetheless, always in the vanguard of what is hip and possessing, myself, a platform on the Interwebs, I have decided today to share with you, gentle readers, my very own nouveau rage. This Substack is, after all, called “Howlin at the Moon...” There exists a common theme across my nouveau rages, which I trust that anyone who’s squandered much intellectual capacity here in the past will be easily able to discern. I promise to neither disappoint nor condescend. Let’s just get into it.
#1) No adults in the room. This morning I got up to watch my life’s savings lose about 5% of their value between the time I got the last of my four kids onto three different school buses and I sat down with a cup of cold brew about 20 minutes later. It’s a really good thing that I took my kids on their dream vacation a few weeks ago, because a whole lot more than the expense of that trip was erased from my portfolio this past month over stupors and vapors. The current financial calamity isn’t happening because someone set off a nuke, or released another virus into the world, because Taylor Swift dumped Travis for Kanye, or Pee-wee Herman got selected to run the EU; it’s rank dumbassery in the form of tariffs.
I’ve never been a fan of tariffs. Neither are most conventional Republicans or free-trade conservatives. The threat of tariffs, I thought, was useful. And other countries were, in fact, responding to those threats in a manner that benefited the United States. I thought that this was pretty good negotiating on Trump’s part because he was getting some of what he wanted with just threats. Take the win and go home. You’d have to be crazy, after all, to actually enact the “reciprocal” tariffs that Trump was proposing.
Well, guess what.
Worse, the tariffs that Trump sold to MAGA world are not what he actually enacted on his day of “liberation.” These were not reciprocal tariffs. These were tariffs, some huge, on any country with which we have a trade deficit or that has any sort of non-tariff barrier, a nebulous set of circumstances that could be virtually anything from doing business with other countries that this administration doesn’t like to surly import officials to eczema, seborrhea, and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Even the formula the administration used to calculate the specific tariff for each country looks like a failed fourth-grade math test. These calculations are something that should have taken years, not days, to make any rational sense.
But the tariffs are not actually what wound me up this morning. That distinction goes to the fact that the best that the political class in this county could produce last November to lead the free world was K. Harris vs. D. Trump. That choice, more broadly, was between lies, damned lies, and the American Rescue Plan; men competing in women’s sports; the bullshitification of science; the abrogation of the First Amendment; the embrace of lawlessness and DEI along with the rejection of merit—or, on the other hand, watching my life’s savings tank because we chose the alternative, a preening idiot. That’s why I’m pissed.
#2) Solving a problem by doubling down on a problem is a terrible strategy for fixing anything. Using the same pernicious tools someone else wielded to accomplish bad things to fix bad things makes no sense.
Right now Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer, sits in the Big Spring Federal Correctional Institution in Texas after having been convicted by a Minnesota jury of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in the death of George Floyd, a habitual criminal and drug abuser. Chauvin later pleaded guilty to federal charges of violating Floyd's civil rights in order to secure incarceration in a federal penitentiary outside of Minnesota. Chauvin was, unsurprisingly, stabbed several times while in state prison.
I’ve watched every bit of video footage that the media and activists have used as definitive proof that George Floyd was a victim of fatal police brutality. Not one time have I ever seen what they all claim to see in any of this. Instead, I witness a mentally unstable suspect who is actively resisting arrest. I see four officers trying to figure out what to do about it in a chaotic environment surrounded by a less-than-friendly crowd.
Methamphetamine and fentanyl were found in Floyd’s car during the arrest, and a later toxicology report revealed the presence of these drugs in Floyd’s system at the time of his death. I’d have certainly chosen a different method of restraint and started CPR as soon as I noticed that Floyd was unresponsive, but that lacking adds up to poor judgment, not murder and manslaughter.
Not one of these officers knew of Floyd’s serious heart condition. Did Chauvin’s method of restraint contribute to Floyd’s death? Certainly. But so did drugs, lifestyle, behavior, poor health, and resisting arrest. Chauvin should have lost his job, not his liberty. And prosecuting the other three officers involved meets nearly every definition of insane.
But that’s not the way that a jury, amped up in the wake of cities being torched during George Floyd protests, saw it. Worse, Minnesota has a very particular definition of unintentional murder in the second degree that gave a determined jury all the room they needed to convict. This, to me, is a clear application of noted academic fraudster and race hustler Ibram X. Kendi’s notion that the only way to fight injustice is with more injustice.
This dovetails with rage #3 - the nefarious toll that a general lack of knowledge concerning American exceptionalism has wrought in our society. If we don’t start mandating civics education as part of a more robust K-12 curriculum, we’re years, not decades, from imploding. Just look around.
America's fundamental foundational ideal was to craft a first-in-history system of governing, where citizens chose representatives to run the country on their behalf, recognizing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as every citizen's birthright. In the United States, the burden of proof in order to interfere in any of this isn’t on the citizen; it’s on the government. Nouveau rage ignores all of this.
In a United States where the values instilled by a robust education in civics and American history were enough to productively influence public discourse, the entire idea of allowing the government to achieve justice through injustice would be anathema. Jailing Derek Chauvin to achieve racial justice would make no sense. Prosecuting Donald Trump for made-up crimes in a New York real estate case just to get him off the board would make no sense.
You can be no fan of Trump (like me) and still understand that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s recent prosecution of Trump is the antithesis of what justice is supposed to be about in this country. You may like what happened to Trump because you think that he’s a bad guy, but my question to you is this: Trump’s got a lot of money and resources to fight the government. How are you, with far fewer resources, going to feel if it ever becomes your time in the barrel?
That’s just criminal law. It gets worse. I’m way tired of politicians pissing, moaning, and complaining about the judiciary every time a new decision involving the government comes down the pike that they don’t like. Just the other day I heard Senator John Fetterman bemoaning the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission of 2010. This is the famous SCOTUS decision that rendered corporate political spending as a form of protected speech under the First Amendment. Corporations are people too, my friends
Our founding fathers established three separate but co-equal branches of government, each with distinct governing responsibilities: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial branches. The problem now is that for more than a century, the legislative branch has abdicated many of its responsibilities to the executive branch. The executive branch, under dozens of presidents, has decided that it is more equal than the other co-equal branches. And both the executive and legislative branches have come to let SCOTUS sort things out when they can’t do it themselves. It’s a longstanding problem that’s gotten worse with time.
So, John Fetterman, there’s a remedy for what ails you: get off your ass and do your job. You get paid $174,000 annually to legislate, not sit on your hands and gripe about others doing things you are supposed to be minding to in the first place. Yeah, it’s work. But it’s not work like digging coal or bailing hay or throwing touchdowns; it’s even indoors. You might not (in fact, probably would not) succeed without some effort in the beginning, but it’d be way easier not to laugh out loud when you and your colleagues on both sides of the aisle gripe about the Supreme Court doing your job for you.
Don’t like bureaucrats either, Senator? There are 534 opportunities besides just you to get this fixed.
#4) Confusing science with advocacy. As I mentioned in the previous column, the left has spent decades remaking science, the best objective tool ever invented for advancing the human condition and tempering our worst instincts, and turned it into a buttfuckathon over COVID, climate change, gender nonsense, and green bullshit. This was accomplished with a long march through the academies and government institutions in which science is practiced in our country, to our detriment. It will be decades before “follow the science” will be anything other than a sardonic epithet.
In fairness, the right has tried this as well, just with nowhere near the same success. Selling the idea that COVID originated zoonotically as settled science is way easier than selling a literal interpretation of the Christian creation timeline of seven days, cumulating with Adam and Eve.
#6 Real accomplishment is hard. I realize that many people today, in lieu of work, are counting on the invention of a new drug that will bestow upon them all of the knowledge, physical prowess, and rewards that previous generations had to bust their asses to achieve the old-fashioned way—by working for them. I have some bad news for you. That day ain’t coming. Not tomorrow, not the day after that, and next week isn’t looking too good either. In the meantime, I suggest that you set goals for yourself, then cowboy the fuck up and get after ‘em.
Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com
“witness a mentally unstable suspect who is actively resisting arrest” and in addition the suspect being a Goliath of an amped up meth-head vs one regular sized Chauvin and his three Munchkin - sized helpers.
And swallowing your entire score of fentanyl, an opiate that suppresses breathing likely contributed much to his “I can’t breathe!”
Then Nancy Pelosi and her fellow droogs wearing Kinte clothes (indicating slave-owning status among Yoruba chieftains) doing the nine minute kneeling turned hilarious when a video shot of Pelosi showed one of her female vassals behind her looking at her cell-phone and then scratching her cootchie before all the world!