Editorials

“What fresh hell is this?”

The quotation is attributed, most often humorously, to Dorothy Parker, supposedly what she said when she answered the door, or perhaps the telephone.

It crossed my mind as I’ve been trying to decide what, if anything, is worth writing about this week.

Folks, we’ve have a rough couple of weeks, experiencing what the New York Times headlines as “a violent news cycle’. Yes, you could call it that.

A nightclub full of people attacked by a man claiming religious motivation. Two Black men senselessly gunned down by police within days of each other. Five policemen gunned down by a one crazed man openly carrying a legally-authorized assault weapon designed to kill many people quickly and efficiently, which it did. Another crazed man who didn’t need a gun running down a couple of hundred men, women and children strolling along a Riviera esplanade on a lovely holiday, killing very close to a hundred of them.

People all over the world seem to be going berserk (and that doesn’t even count whatever’s happening in Turkey as I write, which may or may not be irrational and might or might not succeed.)

It’s tempting to attribute all of this to the influence of the media: too much publicity given to too many bad actors which encourages others to emulate them, but you know what? It’s been going on for a long time. 

Sadly, truly, hatred of human beings for one another has surfaced intermittently from time immemorial, all the way back to Cain and Abel if you believe that origin story, or to the Neanderthals vs. Homo Sapiens if that’s how you explain the past. (Lately it’s come out that the last two groups might even have had sex in the mix to make things worse.) 

A constant thread in human history is xenophobia, fear of foreigners. In a milder form it’s behind a lot of what has produced Brexit and Trump’s spite wall, as well as quasi-Fascist governments in places like Hungary and Poland. It’s a word with Greek roots (ξένος ,xenos, meaning "strange", "foreigner", and φόβος, phobos, meaning "fear"). 

I learned about the more virulent form of xenophobia in my high school Latin class, reading Cesar’s Gallic Wars, in which he blamed detestable, uncivilized foreigners as a cover for seizing their assets. 

Nothing’s new. “No War for Oil” says fading Berkeley bumper stickers, but in fact that’s what the last decade of Middle East invasion by you know who is really about: oil. 

Oh, but it’s radical Islam, you might have heard some say. Yes, religion has repeatedly over history been used as an additional disguise for greed when xenophobia’s not enough. Christians excelled at it over the centuries, but they weren’t the only ones. 

Consider, for example, the Albigensian Crusades. They were a bloody but eminently successful attempt by the dominant Catholic faction in the Christian church to eliminate a competitive cult which had taken hold in the Languedoc region of France at the beginning of the 13^th century. The bait dangled before the crusaders by the Pope: kill them all and you can have their stuff. And it worked, with the climax in the battle known as the Massacre of Bezier. Maybe as many as 20,000 humans were killed in a small town whose whole population was approximately that size: men, women and children, with very little credible effort on the part of the crusaders even to figure out which were faithful Catholics and which were heretics. 

There’s a famous Latin quote from a bishop about this: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. (Kill them all, because the Lord knows which ones are his). It’s a slogan which might well be adopted by the contemporaries who’ve been murdering in the name of Islam, since they have been killing Moslems and non-Moslems indiscriminately in recent attacks. 

The Cathar heretics in Languedoc tended to believe that good and evil were equally powerful in the world, and they may have had something there. Evil has certainly been rearing its ugly head lately in a big way. It’s tempting to believe that an actual Satan is behind the fresh hells which seem to be popping up everywhere. I can’t be quite that literal, but I do think it’s wise to expect the worst from humans, so if things do go right you’ll be pleasantly surprised. 

Take, as a case in point, what seems to be the war by the police on all too many African-American men and some women. It’s popular to say that most police officers are fine, it’s just a few bad apples that are not. 

That’s a mistake. It is all too easy for most police officers, like most humans, to perceive the “other” as the person with darker skin than your own and to fear that person. A former Seattle police chief has lately been on the public radio talk circuit with a theory that all police forces need to be retrained from the ground up, because they’re all afraid of people of different races from their own, and I think he’s on to something. 

In the cases which have become unexpectedly public in recent months, it’s clear that the officers who fired the shots which killed harmless Black men were operating in panic mode, scared out of their minds with no real excuse except irrational fear of Blacks. I would bet a lot of money that if some bold psychologist were to experiment with wiring up a few police officers—no, in all fairness, any similar group of White Americans—it would be possible to see the fear centers in their brains lighting up when they saw pictures of Black men doing nothing at all. It will take a whole lot of unlearning to solve this problem. 

A recent NextDoor discussion I saw featured a sizeable group of North Berkeleyans all bent out of shape because a report of a mugging in their neighborhood didn’t say whether or not the suspect was Black. A few patient liberals attempted to explain that if racial names are used in crime reports with no other identifying characteristics it exposes all others of that race to unwarranted scrutiny and possible danger, but the fearers just didn’t get it. 

Bottom line: xenophobia, religious fanaticism, greed disguised as religion: It’s all been done before, and it will be done again. Evil is everywhere, always has been, though definitions differ. For recently anointed candidate Mike Pence, it seems to be incarnate in same sex marriages, though others might think Donald Trump’s serial adultery is a more classic case in the same genre. 

Regardless, I think we could all agree that killing innocent people is wrong, at least in principle. Even Pence and Trump might agree that some of the cases documented on cell phones by witnesses have nothing good about them. 

With a constant supply of fresh hells facing the human race, it’s tempting to take up arms for one side or the other, but someone will always outgun you. Even though I'm White, when one White Northside Berkeley neighbor said online that he wasn’t worried because he had a whole lot of guns in his house, I was glad I live on the other side of town, particularly on behalf of my darker-skinned friends and family members. I'm afraid of that guy, for sure. 

Ainsi soit-il..as they say in France: And so it goes, as it always has.