Morning Ed: Society {2016.10.11.T}

Saul Degraw says:

Slate published an essay against the EPIC rant that has been en vogue among liberals for the past few years:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/10/keith_olbermann_and_our_vogue_for_eviscerations_and_epic_rants.html

Politics
Who’s winning, who’s losing, and why.
Oct. 10 2016 11:49 AM
Our Gutless Eviscerators
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Keith Olbermann and our vogue for EPIC RANTS are a product of liberalism’s blind spots.
By Sam Kriss
TV Personality Keith Olbermann speaks onstage during the Olbermann panel at the ESPN portion of the 2013 Summer Television Critics Association tour at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on July 24, 2013 in Beverly Hills, California.
Eviscerator-in-chief Keith Olbermann in Beverly Hills, California, on July 24, 2013.

Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

An evisceration is a very specific and very simple procedure: the removal of the viscera. With whatever weapon you might have, you cut someone open across the belly, laboriously pull out all the guts in their wormy coils, red and steaming, and dump them on the ground. Death is inevitable, but excruciatingly slow, unless you choose to speed it up. Human intestines are about 25 feet long, end to end, so it’s possible to get quite inventive here. In one account of the punishment, from the Icelandic Njáls Saga, one end of the victim’s gut is nailed to a tree, and he is then forced at spearpoint to walk around it in slow agonizing circles until his entire intestine is wound around its trunk. Many versions, like the hanging, drawing, and quartering on the books in English law until 1870, also include castration, decapitation, and the removal of the heart—to eviscerate someone is to not just kill them but to utterly destroy them, to show that this was never a human being, not even a body, only some stinking flesh with ideas above its station. No wonder it was most often used for the crime of treason: What it represents first of all is the impotence of bodies before the awesome power of the state. Evisceration is a horrific punishment, which is why it was phased out over the course of the 19th century. But like so many horrors of that age—debtor’s prisons, wars of plunder, long and stultifying literary novels—it’s back.

A couple of headlines, just from the past few weeks: “Elizabeth Warren Eviscerate ‘Gutless’ Wells Fargo CEO,” “Trevor Noah Eviscerates Matt Lauer’s Presidential Forum Performance,” “Soledad O’Brien Eviscerates CNN,” “This Celebrity-Packed Political Ad Eviscerates Donald Trump.” The only other arena that sees nearly as much evisceration is sports, but it’s not even close: Politics has become incredibly dangerous. There must be some kind of brutal revolt in progress, an insurrection in which nobody is so secure and powerful that he might not find his guts suddenly sliding out of a gashed-open belly; the halls of government are blood-flecked and stink of human garum, and politicians wade to work through the dug-out viscera of their fallen colleagues. An incredible massacre, surely.

So where are all the bodies?

Every week brings news of gruesome tortures, but the next day the victims are still there, guts still wobbling happily inside their skin, and still pumping out the same old shit. Wells Fargo is still printing money; CNN is still seeping blather; Donald Trump might still stomp his way to a big, beautiful nuclear arsenal. Nothing is tamer, nothing is more toothless, more flaccid, more uselessly limp and passive and sterile than the click-mediated evisceration. In a recent column, the New York Times’ Ross Douthat writes that various liberal monologists have built a new political consensus, “an echo chamber from which the imagination struggles to escape”—which probably says far more about the powers of Ross Douthat’s imagination than it does about the state of the discourse. Political invective is weak, far weaker now than it’s ever been. Look at the gleeful pornographic slanders of ancient Rome or revolutionary France, Marx tearing into Louis-Napoléon, or Malcolm X declaiming the sins of white America, and try to find even an echo of that caustic fury in a talk-show host raising his eyebrows. It’s not just that these things are ineffective (after all, what have you or I ever actually done to stop the banking system? What could we do?), they’re not even polemical. Instead of exposing the evils of the world, our ranters have resigned themselves to laughing at stupid people. Real polemic surges up from below; these people look down and sneer. The left—and these eviscerations are always almost from something that, at the very least, calls itself the left—has lost something important. It still likes to see itself as an agent of merciless justice, cutting through the stomachs of its enemies, but it’s had a bad turn; it can no longer stand the sight of blood.

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