Evan Tucker is not intentionally provocative, he's crazy, there's a difference. An intentionally provocative person doesn't leak all his private shit over the internet where a thousand people can mock it in private, or bring it to light whenever they want to use against him, or use what he posted about others against them.
An intentionally provocative person wants people to feel worse because others' discomfort gives him pleasure. A crazy person makes people feel bad because he already does, and spends hours vomiting every thought he's had over the course of a day in public at the first sign of stress. What he posts may be provocative, but he thinks it's always been clear that behind the posts is a lunatic who's barely held it together for the nearly ten years he's been in Baltimore, and if he seems any more sane than that, it's because there's one way in which he's fortunate: his mania endows him the appearance of intelligence. The lunacy has cost him nearly everything, and he's quite sure it will cost him still more.
No matter how Tucker phrased finding Baltimore/Baltimoreans 'loathsome' in the other day's controversial post, it was an exaggeration in one of the many moments when his person becomes whatever emotion overwhelms him at that moment. He is extremely irritated by Baltimore, but he certainly doesn't hate it or most people within it, particularly friends....
He does fear Baltimore, but his fears about Baltimore are apiece with his fears for a country and a whole world that, to his obviously flawed perception, resembles ever more the whirlpooled contours of his head. Just as his head shouts future misfortune to him constantly, it shouts to him more and more every day about people he knows: it makes him fret the direction he's going, the city's going, the country's going, the world's going, and also the direction his own friends are going. In doing so, he is being both selfish and scared for us all. It's partially a question of fearing that no matter how ridiculous it sounded when relatives told us about how gentiles can only be friends up to a point before they stab you in the back might turn out true, and also a question of what becomes of people he loves once they turn into the fanatics he fears.
Everything which is true for other minorities is true as well for Jews, except that with Jews, it always seems inconvenient to consider Jews the underprivileged until one day you wake up and every Jew you've ever known is gone.
And more than anything else, it's a question of nuance vs. belief. Nutters don't ever have the luxury of letting go of their skepticism, but if you normies believe whatever you believe too passionately, you become the psychos, not us. We know the signs, because when a delirious mind is at its most frantic, it sees connections which aren't there - invisible structures for which there's no hard evidence, or mythologies and cultures whose truths seem incontrovertible. There is a part of the brain which craves meaning, and meaning comes from learning about the humanities and spirituality. You don't have to believe in the religions you learn about, you don't have to like the books and art you study, but that kind of learning is the healthy place to find meaning in life - and speaking personally, without them, he would have been in a permanent looney bin by college.
But when people don't have broad humanistic or spiritual learning, they try to find meaning in the realm of politics, a world so complicated that there is no possible conceptual meaning. There is only statistics and practical applications. If you want politics to conform to unbreakable rules, you will never ever reach success. You'll only reach failure, and double down with every attempt to make the world conform to your vision, and eventually, no solution seems extreme enough and all solutions can be justified.
When people are being honest with themselves, they know that life gets deeply, deeply complicated. Maybe it's Tucker's own failure of imagination, but he, who lives irrationality every day, doesn't understand how people who know in their bones that life is complicated forget their better angels so easily. Once a one paragraph political ideology tells them an invisible system or a simple mythology is responsible for ordering life in the fucked up way it does, everything becomes justified to prove it right, and every year they come closer to the realization that if they want to dismantle the oppressive invisible system they think exists, they'd have to dismantle the whole world. If that ever happened, Tucker would be remembered the sane one, and you're the ones who'd be remembered by your grandchildren as the nutcases.
Leaving aside Trumpism and the modern Republican party, for whom the problems are so obvious that they require no comment on social media, there is another problem which the perpetual reaction to Israel makes manifest.
There are so many people we know in Baltimore who identify with varying forms of idealistic socialism which tells them all sorts of things are possible from a world without war to a world where all people get the material goods they need.
Tucker doesn't think they're so ignorant as to not realize the century their ancestors just lived through, but there has to be an element of willful ignorance to it. When progressive people decide to rehabilitate socialism after socialism so easily turned into Soviet communism, what is to stop conservatives in the next generation from rehabilitating fascism because 'it's not Nazism.'? That vine's already beginning to choke us.
We're going to have a lot more immigrants by 2050, and authoritarian reactionaryism is going to seem a very attractive option to our children's generation - not just the dumbasses who followed Trump, but the similarly sensible great-grandchildren of moderate Reagan voters who were so easily convinced in the 80s that there was no contradiction between greater liberty and the loss of liberty.
Socialists claim we need a more robust social safety net, and that's obviously true, but modern American liberalism has always been the ideology of social safety net; but of course, nobody likes liberalism anymore because liberalism did not rid the world of conservatism, and now is equated with a vague all-purpose insult 'neoliberal' which exists as a gaslight to make people equate liberalism with conservatism, so that economic revolution seems the only tenable option.
Liberalism is also associated with American imperialism abroad but.... did anybody see what happened whenever America's refused to intervene? Does anyone remember what happened when Soviet and Russian sponsored dictators from Mao to Assad did? Whatever figleaf of concern the CIA had for human rights is something the KGB and FSB never had, and even if we are responsible for Seko and Suharto, dictators like Seko and Suharto spilled just the right amount of blood for what the Soviet sphere wanted out of their proxy tyrants.
People don't want to hear that, they want to hear that you can pursue policy without getting your hands filthy, because they're insufficiently grounded by experience into thinking that you can live in the world without blemishing it, and those who would blemish the world immediately exploit their good faith. Idealism is never an option. How often is it an option to keep your nose clean while living one meaningful life at a time? Why would cleanliness be an option when people live a hundred million lives at a time?
Reading lots of books, fiction and non-fiction, should teach very well that there are only the 'less filthy' options. And therefore, when it comes to a peoplehood who can only survive by getting their hands dirty, they become the great enemy because the rules of what is good and bad seem turned on their heads. Zionists and Jews seem imperialists because they have a land barely the size of a small American state, they seem bellicose because their existence is perpetually threatened by a nuclear/chemical attack, they seem like aggressors because leaders on the other side constantly threaten genocide, and they seem like grifters of the US government because they get funding from the US which twenty other countries should have.
When you're crazy enough to view the world in two dimensions, none of this is clear, but when you remember how complicated the world is, Israel just seems as flawed as any normal country, with all the same problems, only their problems are exacerbated by hundreds of millions wishing their annihilation.
Nobody knows what comes next, for Baltimore, for the world, for Tucker, least of all himself. He said what he said in a moment of deep rage, which he's been known to have from hour to hour... but just because you're paranoid doesn't mean the world isn't out to get you.
What he does know is that in Baltimore, unlike his DC years, people over time always seem to decide they like him less. Not that he should, yet again, spill his tea in public, but he had a kind of social mass-extinction in 2015 brought on by a semi-breakdown during which he realized that in his corner of Baltimore, friendship is a much better game talked than by DC, but bonded by gossamer.
In the span of four months Tucker lost three bands, a choir he conducted, a girlfriend, and perhaps a dozen close friendships. Why? He's never quite figured it out except to say that he might have been a little more difficult than his usually ornery self, a personality of whose nature they were never under illusions, but he was not particularly difficult by his own august standards.... success never wore Tucker well and no doubt the stress from one part of his life carried over into the other parts. But to this day he wonders, what changed in the minds of so many people who already knew the roller coaster they signed up for?
Nevertheless, it's very difficult after that to believe that friendships in the various 'scenes' all we Baltimore bohemians frequent is anything more than ersatz and that people aren't looking for ways to turn whole social groups on each other. Life here was never the same thereafter and he has spent every year since wondering what he might do to finish off the rind which was left from his extended Baltimore honeymoon. If nobody in Baltimore saw him again except as this daily avatar he's always been, what would they have lost? Almost all his close friends live elsewhere, even his remaining close friends from the Baltimore years have mostly moved.
Perhaps all that the other day was posted by someone not quite in his right mind (in other words, a normal day around here...), but nobody has the zest for life in their 30s that they had in the innocence of their 20s. How much moreso is that true for their 40s? Regardless of whether he does it for spite or mental/physical health, going back to the party/show/bar scene may well kill him. He'd obviously rather it didn't, and if he did die at a party, he'd rather it be in the presence of company he trusts...
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