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A Story for the MAGA Folks -- and for the Rest of Us [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-06-20  

I'm going to tell you a story I first heard more than fifty years ago. “One night a motorist is driving down a country road and his tire blows out. He looks in the trunk for a tire iron and a jack, and discovers that his jack is missing. Well, of course he is upset by this, but he remembers he saw a farmhouse about a half a mile back. Perhaps the farmer there has a jack he can borrow. As he trudges along in the darkness, he's worried about disturbing the farmer and disrupting his sleep. But he really does need that jack, even though the farmer might be angry for being woken up. So he is worried and angry and upset all at once. Worse yet, the distance to the farmhouse is longer than he suspected, and in the darkness he stubs his toe, which doesn't help. He starts getting angry at the unfairness of it all. He starts thinking that maybe the farmer might not even have a jack – just his kind of luck – and all this effort is for nothing. For that matter, what if the farmer does have a jack, but doesn't want to be bothered? What if he doesn't give him the jack at all? What if the farmer is just one of those cranky people who doesn't help others who are in need? It would fit well with the rest of the events of the night so far. And so he stews over this as he walks with his sore toe, getting angrier and angrier at the unfairness of it all. So, of course, by the time he actually reaches the farmhouse, he pounds on the door instead of knocking. When the dazed, sleepy farmer finally opens it, the motorist yells 'You can keep your damn jack!' and stomps away in a righteous fury.”

I want you to observe your response to this little bit of silliness. The laughter is real, the chagrin is real, the feeling sympathy for both the farmer and the motorist is real – but it's all just a story. It's all been made up. It's a lie. It isn't real. And yet we are sufficiently engaged with it that we expend real energy and emotion in our response to it. If you were a non-storytelling alien from another planet, this would all be mind-blowing. How can we get ourselves so involved with and worked up over something that isn't real, and we even know isn't real?

I may be putting myself out on a limb here, but I think that humans are the only animals that tell stories. Everyone knows what a story is, even the youngest child, and they will vehemently protest if you“tell it wrong.” We have whole industries devoted to story-making, and you can make big bucks doing it. Not just because people want stories but, as it turns out, writing stories is actually quite difficult – which, as author David Brin once said, is why they pay you for it in the first place. But we all know what a story is and how it is supposed to work, even if we can't all write them (no matter how many self-help books we get on how to write, no matter how deeply we delve into character arcs, or the seven basic plots, or the hero's journey). Stories have been told around campfires since humans were humans, and they have guided and shaped us in ways we are often not even aware of.

Something so universal in human cultures as storytelling obviously has a survival advantage, or it wouldn't persist. We need to predict the future in order to survive – and telling ourselves stories is one of the ways in which we do this. Stories help us understand the world in a quick, efficient fashion – even if they sometimes get it wrong, that sort of efficiency can save our lives more times than not. They encourage cooperation between individuals – if we all follow the same narrative, we work together better – and human beings must cooperate in order to survive. On a personal level, they give us guidance, a role to play, a function and purpose, a meaningful life. On a cultural level, they can allow us to explore possible futures and alternatives to current actions before we actually act on them – or they can justify continuing on as we have been. On an existential level, they can give answers to how the world came to be, how it works, and what our place is in it. On all levels,we use stories as a means of self-guidance and reassurance: What should I do in any given circumstance?

The darkness comes when the story we are told is not just false, but maliciously false – and suddenly the narrative becomes toxic. Scams are entirely story-based, and catch you up in a narrative of you being in immediate, horrible danger unless you send the scammer money right now! Grift tells you a story that promises you all kinds of riches and rewards if you just pony up a little money ahead of time – after all, the promised reward is worth it, right? Cults are toxic narratives based on the story that this group you have joined is somehow super-special and that makes you super-special and better than everyone else, so of course you will support this group with money, time, devotion, and even your life. Certain religious narratives tell you that god is not just an authority, but an author, that you are an important character in his story at the very least and even its potential hero, that you have a vital role to play in the literal saving of the universe.(“You! Yes you! Can save the universe in just five easy steps! Just send 39.95 …”) It may seem weird to think of Christo-Fascism as a LARP, but that's what it is.

What makes stories work is that we become emotionally involved with them. And that is the hook to all toxic narratives – to get you so emotionally involved you can't break free of them. All you need to do to succumb to a toxic narrative is not be able to step back, relax, look at the man behind the curtain – and realize it is just a story. And the heartbreak is that all of us are susceptible to falling for them. Not because we are stupid – in fact, intelligent people can be even more likely to fall for scams if they are played right, since their intelligence involves them in the story so much more strongly – but because we are story-telling animals. Stories are vital to our survival, engage us deeply and emotionally, and bind us together as human beings. Whether the stories we tell ourselves actually reflect reality is almost beside the point – if they give us a reason to get out of bed in the morning and further whatever cooperative human enterprise we are involved in and depend upon for our mutual survival, that is enough.

MAGA is a perfect storm of toxic narratives – cult, grift, scam, and cosmic role-playing. But to the MAGA folk, it is not a story, but reality. Christina Bobbs's mugshot – is she actually wearing orange make-up? She for sure has the Hitler/Trump defiant stare. And what about the folks running around wearing diapers and literally wrapping themselves in flags? What about the recent MTG quote –does she really believe using an electric car is going to raise the price of gas? Why are they making so many people's lives miserable (blacks, women, Jews, LBGTQ+, indigenous people, heck, just about everyone else but them) even though it's really none of their business? What makes them keep doing this horrible harm to other people over and over again, with no respite in sight? Simple – they have been caught up in the story, in the toxic narrative, that they have a desperate, vital, crucial role to play – and they are deadly serious about it. If you truly believe in the story you are following, you are not role-playing – no, not at all. The very fact you are serious about it is what gives it all its meaning. And so you wear diapers and paint your face and stare defiantly into the camera – and, even if you flub your lines like MTG did, it doesn't matter, as long as you get the emotional part right.

On a deep level, the MAGA folk literally can not allow themselves to realize it is a story. They can never allow themselves to realize that the people pulling the strings behind it all are the most callous of sociopaths, deliberately manipulating the marks to do whatever they want – which appears to be, for some reason, to make themselves even more morbidly rich than they already are to prove their superiority over all the rest of us. (Of course, the irony is that the supposed “superiority” of those same sociopaths is just a story they tell themselves!)

Against this onslaught, we liberals are very much like the poor farmer,blinking sleepily at a crazed man who is screaming at us,“You can keep your damn jack!” Under these circumstances, it does no good to tell these folks it is all just a story – do that, and you are literally threatening the very core of their existence and purpose in life. The result has been deadly, and has the potential to be far worse. (What if the motorist brought along a gun “for protection”as he walks the dark country roads? What if he had been listening to talk radio with someone pontificating about the sudden increase in the number of farmers who refuse to help others in need? What if the motorist is white and the farmer is black?) How are we poor “farmers”supposed to deal with this?

We can prosecute those people who have been directly responsible for harming others. We can hope that the emotional fervor will eventually burn itself out before too many more people are murdered or democracy is destroyed. We can at least try to calmly point out that all of this madness is just a toxic narrative – but without blaming the poor suckers who fell for it, because we know how vulnerable we are to being sucked into them as well. And of course, we can GOTV!

But there is something else we can try. Let me give you a happy ending to the story. “After the door is slammed in his face, the farmer wakes up his wife and tells her what happened, utterly baffled by the motorist's behavior. The farmer's wife thinks on it for a bit, and concludes that the poor man has just been caught up in a story. 'Well, then, there is only one thing to do,' the farmer says. He goes out to the barn and gets the jack while his wife gets the first-aid kit (since the farmer noticed the motorist's limp as he stomped righteously away). They eventually find the motorist sobbing on a log beside his car. The farmer fixes the car, the farmer's wife binds up his wounds, and eventually the motorist calms down and realizes that people aren't so bad after all.”

And isn't that just what Joe and Jill Biden are doing?

Go forth, and do the same.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/6/20/2247687/-A-Story-for-the-MAGA-Folks-and-for-the-Rest-of-Us?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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