John Inazu, for whom issues of civility and pluralism have been a long-running concern, has a Substack page that reflects on these issues regularly. This week, he takes on the question of civility directly. Obviously, his post appears in light of both recent events and the resultant, frequent, somewhat rote calls for civility in political discourse. Arguing against Roxane Gay, he rejects the view that civility is necessarily a “trap,” a “cheap trick,” and fundamentally “about exerting power.” I agree, and would just reiterate that “it’s all about power,” a rallying cry for crits both left and right, is a fundamentally boring and shallow insight–not, to be sure, a wholly false one, but an uninteresting one that mostly leads to uninteresting places.
I believe John is also mostly right to say that it is an error to date the collapse of political norms to January 2025–or, for that matter, January 2017. We have been sowing for some time, even if only numbskulls and nihilists get off on reaping. (The “mostly” reflects the difference between selective or piecemeal norm violation, which is a vice but still pays tribute to virtue, and intentional, industrial-level rejection of norms, which can be both a difference in kind and/or sufficiently different in degree to be the equivalent of one. Of course, rejecting civility–which has been the subject of critical writing on roughly the left for a few years now, and is second nature to Donald Trump–is itself a rejection of an essential democratic political norm.)
Mostly, I would like to use John’s post, which discusses the value of “empathy and understanding” and “humility, patience, and tolerance,” to put in a word for the value of “fake blood, urine, and semen.”
GWAR are not my cup of tea or, I guess, some other fluid. I prefer Aaron Parks or maybe Missing Foundation. But plenty of people think they put on a pretty good show! (Bring a rain poncho. No, really.) But for some reason, it apparently occasioned some recent upset in That Place when the band staged a mock beheading of Elon Musk at a concert this past weekend, which featured “the mannequin’s head…flying off with a slice of the costumed band member’s sword, sending a jet of fake blood spurting into the air,” along with “an overweight model of Donald Trump violently bleeding out on stage.” (Should they have had it gently bleed out?)
Given the nature of social media, that someone would be outraged is a statistical certainty. The objections are worth noting only because of the dynamic, as well as the appearance of the now-standard formulation of the accusation–that the band had “normalize[d] violence.” (Truly, is there any credible doubt that many on the contemporary right are cheerfully singing from the same hymnal that provided the soundtrack for the years 2015-25 on the left?)
GWAR pointed out in response that they have, in fact, long “taken their prop chainsaws and swords to public figures left, right, and center, including former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, Justin Bieber and Pope Francis, as well as America’s most recent non-Trump president, democrat Joe Biden.” In a lovely rebuke to the standard “if it were Obama, you would/wouldn’t say X” trope, they have also delivered the coup de grace to him at their shows. As a review of a 2024 show put it, “From Kamala Harris and Donald Trump to Barack Obama, Abe Lincoln and George Bush, no one was safe from GWAR.”
GWAR are proud purveyors of equal-opportunity cartoonish Grand Guignol. What a pleasure it is, in a world that is both too absurd and not absurd enough, to be able to quote a lovely sentence like this: “‘The idea that GWAR is normalizing violence is patently absurd,’ lead singer Michael ‘Blöthar the Berserker’ Bishop tells Billboard.” And how apt, in this age of “prudence” on the part of large institutions who falsely or nonsensically cite things like “mission,” “expectations,” or “reputation” to justify their cowardice, to see Blothar the Berserker adding, “We’re not millionaires that are afraid of what people are going to say when they see what we do.” They are bloody, crazed, gross–and, withal, less vulgar than the current Oval Office, and less nihilistic and destructive than what used to be the Manhattan Institute, or the executive branch’s current employee directory.
Look, everyone knows GWAR’s gonna GWAR, just like wrestlers are gonna wrestle. The real measure of a decent society’s dignity–not its civility, but rather its lack of crass vulgarity–is not that it avoids all such things, but that it knows better than to do them on, say, the White House lawn. But a civil, and civilized, society has to be able to kick off its shoes and remove the tie now and then. It needs its carnivals and feasts of misrule. The alternative is just the return of the repressed. It is, let us say, unfortunate that the current crop of leaders are either opportunistic enough to cater to the mob in search of such trivial rewards as the presidency or, as in the case of the current president, are lords of misrule not by design, but enthusiastically and because they simply lack any trace of character or adulthood.
But there are valuable elements of culture and discourse that are just not captured by either our current focus on “civility” or the terms–dignity, humility, sense of occasion, prudence, humility, and so on–that we habitually, almost ritualistically use around and about them. They include vulgarities and offenses committed by individuals on the left, right, and center. They embrace offensive conservative stand-up comedians and loudmouth assistant professors alike. Were he not serving in a public office he is unfit to occupy, they would include the emanations of our short-fingered vulgarian-in-chief himself. The problem with something like social media is not that it is unbearably vulgar and stupid, although of course that is a problem. It is that it serves as the rule and not the exception–as the model and substitute for an entire culture, and for the current regime, instead of being relegated to the minor diversion it ought to be at best.
Nevertheless, as we discuss the role of civility in ostensibly “public” and political discourse, we should remember the importance of leaving some room for GWAR.