The Blind Eye

A number of people have posted on social media and elsewhere that whatever else people were expressing when they voted for Donald Trump--anger, fear over economics, etc.--they were also endorsing his racism, sexism, etc. Trump’s extreme bigotry, according to this view, was not a deal breaker. I understand this way of thinking, and I abhor Trump’s bigotry, but I also view it in a context that I want to share. Here it is: I think it’s possible that a few of those people--or many--allowed themselves to vote for Trump because they were dissociated from his extremism. Some of what he said, or how he said it, or his apparent estrangement from business as usual, appealed and made sense to them. The other stuff? Well, it was over there.

“Over there” is the term I use for the things we don’t want to deal with. Or acknowledge the existence of. And you know what? We all have an “over there.” Most of us have a whole slew of “over theres.” Some people have so many that they have to take psychotropic drugs in order to spend a few moments tethered to reality. I know parents who were so dissociated from their children’s problems (usually having been the cause of them) that they could have killed them, and would have if those kids had been unlucky enough to spend more than a few hours alone with them. This is no exaggeration at all, yet most of those parents would be appalled by Trump and his outsized nastiness. Though most of us are not dangerously detached from our children, all of us use dissociation to some extent to cope with a world too confusing and tragic to meaningfully cope with while getting through the day. This kind of divided mind is a reality of our lives and our conduct in our families and in the world.

This explanation for Trump’s support may strike some as farfetched, but these expressions of dissociation--including the kind in which you are capable of killing your offspring--are all of a piece, and one can be dissociated from plenty of people and problems and still appear to be a responsible adult. This is not exotica but rather a very pedestrian shortcoming, not to mention a very human and necessary capacity; if you are completely free of dissociation then you are a rare individual indeed.

I have experience of my own with dissociation, past and present. When I was a teenager, I needed it because of being alone with problems that were much, much bigger than I. As an adult, I used to be carless because I understood that every minute you drive a car you produce pollution that fouls the air and contributes to global warming, and I didn’t want to be responsible for that. Today, as a car owner, I still know this to be true, but I put it....well, over there. Dissociation. I know intellectually that when I drive my car I help hasten the end of the planet as we know it, but I don’t allow myself to feel that understanding like I used to. (Millions of people and I are helped in this detachment by our awareness that everybody else drives. How harmful can it, or how guilty can I really be if everyone does it? This kind of illogic is pervasive.) Clearly Trump supporters are far from the only people permitted by dissociation to ignore ugly facts. Even Sanders supporters had to deny or suppress their aversion to one or more aspect of his record, and our capacity for political denial has had a good workout since long before this election cycle. Here’s a case in point:

“Despite internal warnings that U.S. weapons would almost certainly be used to commit war crimes against Yemeni citizens, the Obama administration since 2015 has approved US$1.3 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia.”...”The U.S. has also confirmed that it had previously sold white phosphorus, a napalm-like chemical, to the Saudis.”

War crimes. Napalm-like chemical. Used to kill children and destroy homes and bought with our tax dollars. Paid for by you. And me. And how’d you sleep last night? Pretty well, I’d guess. I know I did. Is this less appalling than Donald Trump making fun of a disabled person, as breathtakingly callous as that was? Of course not. It’s simply...over there. We haven’t had to look at pictures of Yemenis blown apart by bombs supplied by us and dropped by the Saudis, our longtime allies. (Are you familiar with how the dissociation from the Vietnam War was disrupted by news footage of body bags coming home? That coverage was the graphic information people needed to make the war real, and it initiated the beginning of large-scale protests against the war.)

We all dissociate plenty, it’s just that some of us do it while exercising great power. And while it is easy to hate a man like Donald Trump, who takes no pains to disguise his primitive, mean-spirited view of his fellow humans, it’s also easy, when convenient for us, to put equally ugly or even uglier behavior “over there,” out of our awareness. We can do this because we have so much practice doing it, and one could argue that we must do it because circumstances sometimes seem to demand that we choose between various uglinesses, as much as it would be preferable to reject all of them. When we do such choosing between the “lesser” of two evils, we often do it by minimizing the ugliness that is over there (literally), not the one which is closer to home; by distancing ourselves from the more complex, long-term ugliness but not the simpler, more easily understood one; by repressing our awareness of the ugliness that, deep down, we know we are implicated in, instead of the one that allows us to believe that the fault lies entirely with someone else.

These criteria are used every day by all of us to choose which horrors of modern life to invest outrage and limited energy in and which not to. I believe these criteria explain why so many people not only supported Hillary Clinton but held her up as a progressive. They found it easy to be outraged by Trump supporter David Duke while glossing over or ignoring altogether Henry Kissinger’s support for and association with Clinton. (Perhaps some of these people have even been involved in protests against Kissinger when he has planned talks at universities, but now he is...over there.) Many people find themselves already missing President Obama while recoiling in horror at the ascension of Trump, even while Obama is responsible for American participation in the slaughter of Yemenis touched on above, among other kinds of behavior they will give Trump exactly zero slack for. There are people who are genuinely incensed that the Russians may have had a hand in bringing Trump to the White House, while being unable to muster any feeling at all about Hillary Clinton helping to depose the elected leader of Honduras or orchestrating the killing of Muammar Khadafi, both of which places are engulfed in violence and chaos. Dissociation.

I appreciate that people are horrified by the sexism, racism and general bigotry of Donald Trump; we’re going to need all the outrage we can muster in the next few years. But I am unmoved by the righteousness of those who rail against the bigotry of Trump and his supporters while ignoring Hillary Clinton’s deadly policies as Secretary of State; who sound the alarm about Trump’s obvious eagerness to further slant the playing field in favor of billionaires while putting Hillary Clinton’s support for mass incarceration of black people and the repeal of Glass-Steagall...over there.

Dissociation helps us feel better and avoid paralysis under absurd and appalling conditions, but it does so by allowing us to turn a blind eye--and heart--to selective atrocities and injustice, even while vilifying people who cannot bring themselves to accept any of a number of retrograde choices. I don’t know what the solution is, for dissociation is a mechanism deeply ingrained in our nature and our daily lives, and indeed it is a critically necessary mechanism, being utterly essential for abused and neglected children, for example. I would only ask that people bring awareness to their own capacity for minimizing or ignoring horror and work against their tendency toward dissociation, while having more understanding of it in others. 

Not a single person who follows American politics or is awake to any aspect of reality, should really be able to sleep well at night. We must appreciate that we can do so only by ignoring big chunks of those realities, and that everyone around us is doing likewise.

COPYRIGHT DECEMBER 2016