As I wrote this on Sunday, Joe Biden pulled out, immediately causing the commentariat to suck all the oxygen from the mediasphere. (NPR binged on it for five straight hours!) Take a deep breath, have courage, discuss among yourselves, then, but for now let’s get on with our story.
But speaking of politics, a few days ago, a twenty-year-old kid who’d failed to make his high school’s rifle team shot at Donald Trump over a fence at a fairground in Butler, Pennsylvania, wounding him and two bystanders and killing a third. More about that later.
My thesis is that fences make bad neighbors, both physically and virtually. It’s easier to come to terms with people we know in real life than with strangers we encounter online. There’s nothing’s like physical proximity to temper belligerence, generally speaking. I illustrate with a couple of parables:
The Parable of the Fence: In his book Man Meets Dog, Konrad Lorenz relates a ritual confrontation between his dog and someone else’s whenever they walked past the other dog’s fenced-in yard:
Another fence story concerns my old Bully and his mortal enemy, a white Spitz, which lived in a house whose long, narrow garden flanked the village street and was bordered by green wooden railings. Along the thirty yards of this fence the two heroes would gallop backwards and forwards, barking furiously and only stopping for a moment at the turning points at both ends in order to curse each other with all the gestures and sounds of frustrated fury. One day, an embarrassing situation arose: the fence was undergoing repairs and parts of it had been carried away for the purpose. The upper fifteen yards of the fence, that is, the part furthest from the Danube, still remained, while the lower half was gone. Now Bully and I came down the hill from our house, on our way to the river.
Illustration by Konrad Lorenz
The Spitz of course, had noticed us and was waiting growling and quivering with excitement at the topmost corner of the garden. First of all, a stationary cursing duel took place as usual, then the dogs, one each side of the fence, broke into their customary gallop along its front. And now the disaster happened: they ran past the place where the fence had been removed and only notice their error on their arrival at the lower corner of the garden, where a further cursing match was due. There they stood with bristling hair and brutally bared fangs and— there was no fence. Immediately their barking ceased. And now, what did they do? As one dog, they turned about and rushed flank to flank back to the still remaining fence where they recommenced their barking as though nothing had happened.
—Konrad Lorenz, Man Meets Dog, Routledge: 2002, p. 103. Originally published in German as So Kam der Mensch auf den Hund, Verlag Dr. Borotha Schoeler: 1949.
To my nose, the dogs’ behavior smells like retail politics, which today are clearly more polarized, vituperative, and alt-truthy than yesterday’s. And one of the big reasons, I believe, is that ideological opponents are now more physically removed than ever before, while at the same time discuss among themselves much more than previously possible. Whatever your passion, it’s not hard to find folks online who share it. Even if your passion is, say, hating professional sports, you’ll soon find fellow haters out there to hang and bond with, plus plenty of sports-lovers to argue with. That’s your sport.
Partisans in particular love company, and have social media platforms, Facebook and texting groups, email lists, and blogs at their disposal to upgrade their reach and ratchet up their rhetoric. They adopt user names that obscure their identities and don’t disclose where they live, but love selfie photos and videos. Thus armed with a false sense of anonymity, they fearlessly denounce, taunt, and threaten their perceived enemies. Whatever dogfights they enter into are as safely bloodless as barking along a fence. As that famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon says, “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.” But they do know if you’re a jerk.
Speaking of dogs at fences, I heard barking while sitting here and went and went outside to see what the issue was. It was of course, the Pit Bull that lives diagonally across the street. The house’s back yard is enclosed by a high but decrepit wooden stake fence. A fifteen-foot section of the fence had collapsed and had been replaced by wire mesh. There stood the dog, tail erect, fiercely woofing at a man weeding his vegetable garden across the driveway, as if the dog had never seen him before.
I was on my front stoop, fifty feet away from them. After taking in the dog’s diatribe for about a minute, I coughed aloud. The dog turned to look at me but didn’t bark. I stared back, mouthing “go away,” and in five seconds the dog turned around, lowered tail, and ran back toward its house. Dogs, Konrad Lorenz said, tend to find people who stare at them intimidating.
Being stared at makes people uncomfortable too. Unless, of course, they are celebrities, love performing, or hunger for fame. Then they revel in having many eyes fixated on them, become addicted to applause, and often come to think of themselves as brands. They’re not your friends. They want to sell you something.
Donald Trump is all about branding. Indeed, his brand may be the only thing he truly cares about. You find it stamped on t-shirts, yard signs, high-rises, and even people’s bodies. I don’t understand how such a wise-ass loudmouth New York real estate huckster was able to transform so many middle Americans into MAGAs. Maybe his swipes at elite institutions articulate their resentments. Maybe they know he’s a con man, but they buy what he’s selling, and not just his merch.
Speaking of merch, three days after being grazed by a madman’s bullet shot over a fence, what did Trump do?
Following an assassination attempt on Trump’s life at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the GOP nominee is now selling a shoe commemorating the ordeal. The $299 white hightop sneaker has Trump with a fist raised, with blood across his face, and the words, “Fight, Fight, Fight” underneath.
[00:22:00] … I tell this story about, you know, at the end of the book, how when I was a kid, we lived in Queens, we were working class and there was one barbecue pit at the end of the block. Everybody used it. It would be like torched from Friday evening, right through Sunday afternoon, your mom would send you down with some weenies, some neighbor’s mom would — well, to me, the neighbor’s mom, but to her, it’s a neighbor would then cook the weenies for your kid, you know. And we trusted each other. They cooked our weenies and we ate. And it was this great, fun weekend-long thing. Kids would play kickball and whatever dodgeball around at the end of the block. And it was great.
[00:22:32] Then my dad made more money. We moved to Larchmont then to Scarsdale, these wealthier, upper middle class, Westchester towns. And all of a sudden there’s no barbecue pit at the end of the block. That’s déclassé. That’s what poor people do. Everyone had their own barbecue in their own backyard. But you’re not barbecuing with the Joneses anymore. Now you’re kind of barbecuing against the Joneses, and they’ve got porterhouse and you’ve got filet mignon. So they get lobsters, you get Kobe beef. It’s like, who’s got the best one? But it was awful. It was me, my brother and my mom and my dad alone at our barbecue because we’re wealthy now.
And that’s why fences make bad neighbors.
P.S. Don’t forget that you can join the excitement by ordering Her Own Devices for September delivery.
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