"The fact that they get together to play dress-up — to engage in a large and sometimes murderous game of cowboys and Indians — may give us our answer. They want to be someone other than who they are. That's the great irony of identity politics: They seek identity in the tribe because they are failed individuals. They are a chain composed exclusively of weak links.
"What they are engaged in isn't politics, but theater: play-acting in the hopes of achieving catharsis. Their online personas — knights, Vikings, reincarnations of Charles Martel — will be familiar enough to anybody with a Dungeons and Dragons nerd in his life. But sometimes, role-playing around a card table isn't enough: Sometimes, you need a stage and an audience. In the theater, actors and audience both can forget ourselves for an hour or two. Under the soft glow of the tiki torches, these angry white boys can be something else — for a night."
"In the morning, they wake up with the same faces. And there is something in the faces," Williamson writes. "James Alex Fields Jr. has more than a little whiff of Dylann Roof about him, and we know what Dylann Roof wanted: to murder black people. Sometimes, it is worth taking angry white boys at their word."
To me it feels like 1940 all over again in UK.
ReplyDeleteOur country has been invaded, it may not have been apparent when the Charlottesville permit was issued, but once the people started marching it was obvious. What do people do about an invasion - they fight.