How low can they go? Whether we’re talking about IQ scores, outbreaks of subhuman behavior or sinking levels of basic comprehension that seem to signal primate evolution in reverse, there are damaged Americans who keep surprising us, month after month. If you thought the raging epidemic of stupidity had scraped rock bottom when murderous cave-dwellers trashed the nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, if you thought QAnon theory represented brain-locked gullibility at its toxic, unsurpassable worst, here’s an invitation to think again. If you used to believe, as I did, that every human brain came equipped with at least a small window of access to reason, then bitter disillusion is the fate we share.
The appalling wave of abuse against Asian-Americans — most of it committed by feral White people, the usual suspects—-challenges even the most pessimistic theories of scapegoating and xenophobia. Hate crimes and verbal attacks on Asians and citizens who are perceived to be Asian have increased by more than 150% since the beginning of the pandemic. Pursuing logic where there is no logic, the media have traced this trend to several outbursts by the idiot ex-president Donald Trump, whose attempts to deflect and minimize this national catastrophe included references to the COVID virus as “The Kung Flu.” It’s an apparent fact that the virus originated in the Chinese province of Wuhan. Yet I doubt that even President Trump, mired in the cloacal darkness that shrouds his own sad brain, imagined that this fact and his careless attempt at racist humor could release the anti-Asian prejudices of a regiment of violent morons.
The New York Times has documented scores of verbal and physical attacks on Asian-Americans, the most recent a savage assault on 64-year-old Yao Pan Ma, an unemployed pastry chef, in New York City on April 27. Mr. Ma was pushing a shopping cart full of empty bottles when his assailant knocked him down from behind, stomped on his head and kicked him in the face repeatedly. As I’m writing this, he’s in a coma. In March New York witnessed a similar attack on an elderly Filipino woman who was walking to church. Older people walking alone are the most frequent victims. Naturally, the attackers are unable to distinguish one ethnic Asian from another — Japanese, Thais, Koreans and Vietnamese are as likely as Chinese-Americans to be targeted.
In America, accustomed as we are to mass murders by heartless gunmen, the sheer psychotic viciousness of these assaults no longer amazes us. What puzzles and arrests us, in these cases, are the mysterious thought processes that trigger such irrational violence. What were these assailants thinking? It’s hard to come up with anything that’s comparably illogical. You’re upset watching Al Pacino in “The Godfather Part II,” so you walk down to the corner trattoria and beat up the owner, whose grandparents emigrated from Sicily in 1891? You get sick reading about the sex life of Harvey Weinstein, so you assault the local rabbi and scrawl swastikas on the synagogue walls? You read about a tiger who ate a Pakistani farmer, so you shoot the neighbor’s cat?
What in hell were they thinking? Once again we encounter a wall of stupidity that’s much too high to scale. And we experience the same panic that seized us on Jan. 6. They CAN’T think! They are cognitively disconnected. Reality, for them, is like a distant star on a cloudy night, a light that never enters their field of vision. Yet they vote, they poke at their cellphones—-they reproduce, God help us. And one major political party not only embraces and encourages them, but depends on them, shapes its rhetoric to suit them, and shrinks to an electorally impotent size without them.
I don’t need to call out that party by name. What I’d avoid here if I could is the impression that this essay is just another salvo in the culture wars, another partisan shellburst in the perpetual faceoff between the Red and the Blue that has trivialized American democracy. (I am not and have never been a registered Democrat.) Loudmouths on both sides like to dismiss their political adversaries as cretins. Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, on the Right, always treated it as common knowledge that liberals are America’s village idiots; intellectual Democrats with Harvard Law pedigrees may have been too hard on Ronald Reagan, and even too hard on George W. Bush. Who suspected that W would weigh out like Bertrand Russell or Isaiah Berlin compared to the orange-thatched baboon the GOP had waiting in its on-deck circle?
This isn’t about partisan catfights and insults. The Asian-bashing phenomenon is one we can only approach as pathologists. I’m not a neuropathologist or even an MD, but after 50-plus years of professional observation, I think I can recognize extreme deviations from the norm. Knocking down harmless grandparents who look Asian and stomping on their faces? This is way beyond the reach of psychiatry, and so is the QAnon tribe’s firm belief that Hillary Clinton and George Soros are Satan-worshipping pedophiles who harvest children’s organs. Way, way beyond the pale. Something is eating American brains, and it’s not an army of zombies.
Plastics in the water supply, brain-eating bacteria, overdoses of Tucker Carlson, which are known to cause paralysis, organ failure and sometimes death? Your guess may be as good as mine. This is a citizen’s alarm, not a report from the Mayo Clinic. But a prime example of infectious, transcontinental mindlessness is the strange career of the ex-president who may have unleashed all this racial hatred. Donald Trump was no more qualified to serve as our president than Ivanka was qualified to perform liver transplants, or than Rudy Giuliani is qualified to practice law. Trump is a terrible, odious man, morally and genetically inferior, and almost certainly mentally ill. Consider only that orange dragon slobber he smears on his face. In the hospitals where Trump actually belongs, any patient who did that to himself would be scheduled for electroshock.
An important part of intelligence is the ability to judge character, or even more precisely to gauge the “quality” of another human being. It’s hard to do from a distance, through all these media filters. But up close there’s what I call the smell test, which Trump failed with nearly everyone, Left or Right, who ever shared his personal space. “Unhinged,” judged Glenn Beck, of all people. “A sentient pile of excrement,” was the harsh verdict of the late congressman Alcee Hastings, a Black leader who pulled no punches. Politics and ideology are irrelevant to assessments of Donald Trump (remember that he courted the Clintons and tried out for the Blue Team, which laughed at him). All you needed was a strong whiff of him — excuse me, Rep. Hastings — and your distaste was instinctive and visceral.
Hard proof of the smell test was Trump’s rejection in 2016 by 90% (86% in 2020) of the voters in Manhattan, where he’s worked and promoted himself all his life, where his name is on buildings everywhere. People who felt they knew him wouldn’t vote for him at gunpoint. Unfortunately, he was something of a mystery to most of America in 2016, at least to voters who didn’t read gossip rags or watch reality TV, and there were ways to explain his upset victory. There’s no kind way to explain how he won 73 million votes in 2020.
After four years of tragic chaos, 30,000 documented public lies, tens of thousands of unnecessary COVID deaths and excruciating familiarity with Trump’s face, his family and the parade of villains and fools who serve him, nearly 48%of the electorate chose him again, and believed him when he whined that the White House had been stolen from him. No doubt these loyalists included the Jan. 6 brigade and the maniacs who blame the pandemic on Chinese grandmothers. But Red-and-White America’s fatal love affair with a deranged real estate developer reads like cognitive failure on a vastly greater, almost an apocalyptic scale. Light a candle for Joe Biden. But will a nation burdened with so much brain damage be able to rise again?
As for Asian-Americans, I once employed several dozen, from Japan and four or five other countries, at a restaurant my wife and I owned in North Carolina. I can testify that they ranked, on the average, significantly above Anglo- and Euro-American employees in reliability, integrity and commitment to a work ethic. It was part of their culture. If White nationalist thugs needed a real reason to hate them, they might discover that these Asians, along with Asian Indians, are the most conspicuously upward-mobile ethnic groups in the American melting pot. The man who ran our kitchen was a Chinese Filipino whose children, as I recall, all attended medical schools and Ivy League universities.
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2021
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