(H)ate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons.
How entirely at ease he feels as a result.
One of the moral defects of the online drumming community is the pretense of being apolitical. On the drumming forums, it’s largely to stay on topic— already few enough people on them want to actually talk about the drums. The sites themselves may be run by conservative people (to the extent the word has any meaning left), while most musicians are not conservative, and the owners don’t want to host the expression of views they oppose on their site. I don’t know the actual politics of the major drumming influencers, though, as a grifting mentality, it’s inherently right wing, and I won’t be shocked if a few of them make a lateral move into hawking that product. There’s too much money in it. There are a couple I have my eye on. I’m sure many of them just don’t want to limit their “reach” by getting into it.
Reality has a way of intruding on that apolitical pretense— the conversations about fine distinctions between brands of drum sticks, “will my chosen lug lubricant hurt my drums’ resonance”, inane to begin with, become jarringly ludicrous as the things happening in the real world are more dire. I began writing this on occasion of the last intolerable abomination committed by our present rulers in the United States, and am now posting it on the occasion of another one— the terroristic invasion of Minneaopolis by a band of federal thugs, resulting in two outright homicides of citizen observers.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s book Anti-Semite And Jew is instructive and widely relevant right now— you can read it free at that link. It’s about anti-Semitism in France, written at the end of 1944, fresh off the experience of a fascist occupation of its own. It’s not just local to that topic, it’s informative on an entire mentality of the present global right, and the false populism it trafficks in, and the type of people who follow it. It’s 80 years old, but it could have been written yesterday.
If you find yourself asking, every day, what’s wrong with these people?— it’s here.
How can one choose to reason falsely? It is because of a longing for impenetrability. The rational man groans as he gropes for the truth; he knows that his reasoning is no more than tentative, that other considerations may supervene to cast doubt on it. He never sees very clearly where he is going; he is “open”; he may even appear to be hesitant. But there are people who are attracted by the durability of a stone. They wish to be massive and impenetrable; they wish not to change. Where, indeed, would change take them? We have here a basic fear of oneself and of truth. What frightens them is not the content of truth, of which they have no conception, but the form itself of truth, that thing of indefinite approximation. It is as if their own existence were in continual suspension.
The anti‐Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has placed himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse.
Never believe that anti‐Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.
If then, as we have been able to observe, the anti‐Semite is impervious to reason and to experience, it is not because his conviction is strong. Rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen first of all to be impervious. He has chosen also to be terrifying. People are afraid of irritating him. No one knows to what lengths the aberrations of his passion will carry him — but be knows, for this passion is not provoked by something external.
As a character in a movie said, “What can men do against such reckless hate?”
Clearly, there is no winning over such people, on a personal level, being in conversation with them is losing, we can only cut them out of our lives. Nationally, they can only be defeated. We’re most familiar with the examples where they had to be violently rooted out and eradicated— the Third Reich is most famous, and illustrative of the mentality: a country had to be overrun by foreign armies, virtually to the doorstep of the dictator’s bunker, before he would deal with the reality that he was defeated. If that’s your only example, it can seem like that’s the only way these things can end: massively destructive total war.
Or illegally, by coup or assassination, both of which would be terrible outcomes for people of the United States, which makes things seem hopeless— this continuing on the one hand, total war on the other.
That isn’t the only way these things can end. There have been other reigns of terror, of other scales. It’s as if the present criminal cabal has used them as a model, but skipped reading about how they ended up. See Sejanus, Beria, even Joseph McCarthy. One of their tools is to make it seem like the law is meaningless, but ultimately it proves durable enough to bring them down— often through its ordinary workings. A critical moment comes when the people surrounding the central figures sense their own legal exposure, and abandon them, and their power evaporates, and they are crushed.
So: back to our regular “content”, as we await that happy day, we’ll keep resisting in whatever way we can locally, and doing our music, because doing music means being one of the good guys, music is civilization.
I am happy to help you with any of the materials on the site, and with anything else drumming related— contact me for private lessons, online world wide, or in person in Portland, Oregon. All levels of players, and all people, are welcome.
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