JANUARY 20, 2021 – When I was an immature teenager (as opposed to an immature geezer), my immature friends and I applied a disrespectful nickname to one of our high school dorm counselors. The guy’s last name was “Bliss,” so we called him, “Ignorance Is” for short—or rather, for long. We considered this clever—nearly as intelligent as using a rope to tie the rear wheel of his (parked) motorcycle to a nearby tree, then waiting for Ignorance Is to fly, as it were. Thankfully, the prank didn’t work as planned. The motorcycle was too small, Ignorance Is was too heavy, and the rope too poorly tied to produce the desired outcome.
The actual result was anything but “bliss.” After Ignorance Is flew off the handle (verbally) at his anonymous pranksters, we called him, “Ignorance Was.”
This morning I thought of Mr. Bliss as I watched the Orange Man address his despicable family and small group of followers at Andrews Air Force Base. More precisely, I thought of just plain “ignorance.” Or was it something worse than ignorance? Was it shamelessness, abject selfishness, shocking myopia, and destructively poor judgment that afflict not simply the Orange Miscreant and his progeny, but tens of millions of people who voted for such a person bereft of a single identifiable redeeming quality?
Call my intemperateness “immature.” I readily accept the charge, just as I confess that if you were among Trump’s trumpeters, my opinion of you would “skyrocket downward”—to borrow a perfectly upside down phrase from Trump’s farewell “address.”
The overarching question of America’s darkest political era since the Civil War remains, “How did so many people go for this guy?” What caused so many people to wallow in willful ignorance?
I liken our national political dichotomy to being shoved into a large echo chamber stuffed with a wide mix of people. For a time our ears are filled with the music of various genres—folk, rock, blues, gospel, classical. Some of it resonates more with some in the crowd than with others, but the volume, at least, is mostly tolerable. Every so often, bars of a Bach cantata or phrases from a Mozart piano sonata soar above the crowd—or we ourselves soar upon hearing Barber’s Adagio for Strings or the triumphal theme from Beethoven’s Ninth.
But then an abrupt change occurs. The music stops. In its place: ear-shattering noise blasting so hard the thick walls of the echo chamber shake violently. Half of us instinctively, instantly press our palms against our ears and bend and twist in agony. The other half of the crowd, however, cheer and wave their hands in the air. “No more noise! No more noise!” they shout gleefully—denouncing . . . music.
We music-lovers would be as dumbfounded by that situation as we are by the draw of Orange Man nonsense, indecency and . . . ignorance.
If today the noise stops, how long before the music resumes? And how many of us have been left with compromised hearing—or worse?
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
