I was reading through Phil Williams' story on Franklin candidate for alderman Jeff Feldman, who finally, thankfully, revealed who the scary Antifa forces are — the ones who far-right candidates need to bring in Nazis to defend themselves from:
On and on, he continued, suggesting the kids were dressed in black, signifying they were part of a larger plot.
"We call them Antifa because that's what they are," he explained.
"And you're talking teenagers?"
"Well, is an 18-year-old a teenager? Is an 18-year-old a teenager?"
"Were these 18-year-olds?"
"Well, they were all driving so they were at least 16."
"OK, a 16-year-old is Antifa?"
"Who knows?"
Brad Lewis and the Nazi fight club drove all the way to Franklin because of goth kids driving around lighting off firecrackers? Hey Franklin — everyone knows that, if you don’t want goth kids lighting firecrackers on your porch, you just leave clove cigarettes out for them. Hell, I’ve had real good success with keeping goth kids off my lawn simply by tying a copy of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal to my mailbox, which makes them think another goth kid has already claimed this property, so they leave me alone.
Seriously, though, imagine you have enough money to live in one of Franklin’s more affluent subdivisions. (Hell, I don’t even understand how Franklin could have better areas of town than others. You live in goddamn Franklin!) OK, but here we go. You live in the best subdivision of the best town in the best county in the state. Your public schools are the best. Music and movie stars are your neighbors. You have enough power and social standing that you can run for elected office, and if you can appear to be a normal person who doesn’t have embarrassing beliefs, you could win.
Imagine having all that going for you and still being so angry and afraid.
The older I get, the more sympathy I have for the old hymn writers. Well, except for Charles Wesley. Save some words for other hymn writers, Charles! No, we don’t need 93 verses of “Oh for a Thousand Tongues to Sing.” You know how there’s that part in the last third of Moby Dick where the sailors spend a chapter grasping hands and squeezing sperm and then a guy puts on a whale foreskin and goes around being all “I’m a bishopric! I’m a bishopric!” because the foreskin looks like a bishop’s get-up, and pric and prick are homophones, and no one ever mentions it and you never see Moby Dick on the list of banned books because only a handful of living Americans at any given time has even read Moby Dick, and everyone else has no idea what’s in there, but no one can admit it because how can you be a cultured American and not have read Moby Dick?
I feel certain that’s probably true of Charles Wesley hymns. Like, deep into verse 46 of “Oh for a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” it’s probably like, “I’ve read the Bible and I’ve found no verse that doth condemn women kissing other women like they would kiss men.” And no one has ever noticed it, because no one’s going to sing that many verses.
Anyway. I would apologize for getting sidetracked by Charles Wesley, but let’s all be grateful that we didn’t have to stop and sing one of his hymns before I got on to my point.
No, I’m thinking of Civilla Martin, who in 1904 wrote “God Will Take Care of You.” For those of you unfamiliar with this song, it basically goes: “Hey, yeah, shit’s going to happen, but it’s OK. God is on your side. You don’t have anything to worry about.” (I was trying to find a video on YouTube to link to that would gesture toward what it’s like to sing this song in a little country church in the stifling summer with the windows open and the crickets in the corn singing along, but literally everyone on YouTube sings it way, way, way too slow; and the slower it’s sung, the more of its charm it loses.) Martin was big on this message. She also wrote “His Eye is on the Sparrow,” which is all, “Jesus loves me as much as he loves this bird, and he loves this bird a lot, so I’m not going to borrow trouble.”
Since Martin wrote these songs more than a century ago, based on Bible verses written thousands of years before that, we can gather that people not being willing or able to see that they can relax a little and appreciate what they have is a perpetual problem of humanity. And it’s a big enough problem that we’ve realized we can’t handle it secularly. We can’t write some, “You will take a deep breath and count to 10 and get a grip,” law. This deep anxiety, this panic that can lead a grown man to see Antifa behind every tree and seem to be threatening teenagers on Facebook, it’s a soul problem.
And it’s sad. I mean, I think Feldman and his cohorts are dangerous and ridiculous. But it’s also very sad. Imagine having everything Feldman has and still being so angry and afraid. He’s literally won at life, by every objective metric. He’s well-off and living in a great place. And he can’t turn off the evil churn in his brain long enough to enjoy it. He’s at the least presenting himself as a danger to children, if not an actual danger to children, because he can’t let go of the feeling that he must be under attack by someone, even if there’s no attack, no actual someone out to get him.
In a perfect world, when your brain was telling you that you were under attack by a fiery cabal of moody teenage Antifa agents, you could look around and see that, objectively, you’re not under attack, and the kids dressed in black in your neighborhood doing the dumbass shit kids in your neighborhood do aren’t a real threat. Then you could realize that your brain is stuck in “fight or flight” mode when it should be in, “Enjoy this awesome life I have built for myself,” mode, and you could go get mental health care.
Alas, we don’t live in that world. So the solution here, I guess, is instead of talking to a therapist, you go talk to Phil Williams and we all see how troubled you are.
