I’m starting to think I might have the Crazy Miss Martha Syndrome. Miss Martha lived alone. She was the quiet, old (at least from my seven-year-old perspective) across-the-street neighbor whom I often saw sweeping her front porch or putzing around in her front yard flower garden. Actually, she was quiet until around noon every Saturday when my mother and I would hear strident yelling, foot stomping, and agitated groaning coming from her living room. That’s when my mother would explain to me: “That’s just Miss Martha watching her wrestling shows.” 

So now, I’m starting to act like Miss Martha, especially when a certain home cleaning commercial pops up on my television. The ad features a young blonde, who manages to look smug and perky at the same time, bragging about firing her house cleaner. Bold italics emphasize the pleasure she seems to take in saying the word “firing”. The delivery of that one word speaks volumes: “I’m a boss lady who has power!”  My cerebral cortex knows that I’m getting into full-blown extrapolation, but that is exactly how commercials motivate us to buy the product. They sell us something beyond the item itself. I also know that the young actor is just trying to get paid, but the rest of my nervous system doesn’t seem to sync up with that information. So like Miss Martha, I become the crazy old lady who screams at the TV. As much as I try to, sometimes I can’t seem to hit the mute button quickly enough – on the TV or on my mouth.  Is it more than just a home cleaning commercial, or is something going on? (Hint: if it’s a commercial, a whole lot else is going on.) What commodity, besides window washing and floor mopping, are those marketing geniuses selling? What presumptions about deservingness and belonging create the market value of power and pleasure? 

It wasn’t so long ago that American audiences became captivated by a certain overblown, orange-tinted character whose signature line of script was “You’re fired!” Episode after episode, audiences eagerly anticipated those two words.  Too bad it wasn’t “just entertainment”. The whole thing played like mindless ephemera, except that it has had deadly serious consequences. Every major network rushed into the market with shows valorizing extractive survival because they now had a money-making product. The message was clear: meanness sells. 

Screaming at a television commercial is irrational if it produces nothing but hypertension and a sore throat. However, agitation can be a soul-check; it can help us to recognize how easily we adapt to meanness as a cultural norm. When meanness is normative, it passes itself off as good business, common sense, or patriotic values that make the US great again. Although some folks claim to be surprised by the malevolence of the current political climate, the truth is that the politics of mega-MAGA, chainsaw meanness didn’t erupt overnight. The resentments that fuel meanness have been strategically cultivated and are as old as the US. They are fueled by the notion that some designated group called “You” (the subject) is better than some group called “They” (the object). The resentments determine what we see and what we choose not to see. They manifest in the stories we tell, the silences we accommodate, and the moral concessions we make to protect our preferred realities. 

The politics of meanness may appear to be as mundane as household budgeting or as lethal as the One Big, Beautiful Bill working its way through Congress. In fact, the “fired housekeeper” commercial perfectly illustrates why meanness works on the national and international scale. It starts with presumptions about worth and deservingness. In the rank ordering of market value, the person who wipes out toilets must be viewed as less important than the smiling blonde lady who deserves to have a spotless, gleaming house. (Yes. I’m saying blonde because optics matter. I seriously doubt that an Asian or Native woman would have been cast in that role.) And can we seriously imagine a scenario in which an actor boasts about paying another professional, say a dentist or surgeon or hair stylist, as little as possible? Could the message be that the house cleaner deserves to be paid as little as possible because her kids aren’t worthy of braces or lacrosse equipment or even a bed of their own? Could the message be that we can justifiably gloat about denying a living wage to people whose work, however important, has low market value?  I think the economist Larry Summers might say so.  He once said that “maybe inequality has gone up in our society because people are being treated closer to the way they should be treated.”

So let’s get real.

It’s time for us to get real about the mega-MAGA meanness that is dominating the political landscape. Even more, it is time to acknowledge that the political landscape is not some faraway abstraction; our everyday lives are situated within the context of that political landscape.  It manifests in what we do and what we fail to do; in what we notice and in what we refuse to notice, what we rush to embrace and what we attempt to erase. Legislated cruelty is not new to the US, and the madness of the executive orders was completely predictable. In fact, it was foretold: “I can stand in the middle of 5^th Avenue and shoot someone and get away with it.” To give the devil his due, “he” (whose name need not be mentioned) wasn’t lying that time. But “he” lies a lot, so much so that we as a culture are learning not to expect truth.  

The brazen mendacity of this current administration is enabled by sacralized notions about who we are and how the US came to be.  We avoid complicity by beginning to speak radical truths – radical because they are painful to speak and to hear. Now is exactly the right time for us to face the truths of how we came to be who we are today.  The project of US nation-building was predicated on class division, on genocidal erasure, human trafficking, and chattel slavery. Certainly, there was some freedom seeking and lofty philosophizing about democracy, but that the freedom seeking and philosophizing was performed within a context of massive cruelty. Truly, the freedom seeking and philosophizing helped to justify the cruelty. In this context, power metastasized into the ability to determine the parameters of human worth: to establish the borders of inclusion through exclusion, to cultivate wealth through exploitation, and to experience pleasure by inflicting pain. It’s a very old US story, one that can be reliably evoked whenever chainsaw meanness is needed to create profit, opportunity, and the pursuit of happiness for the designated “deservers” (in this case, a handful of billionaires).  

Again, they get away with it when we learn to live with the lies. They get away with it when we learn to accept language that obscures reality. The One Big Beautiful Bill is so named to hide the ugliness of the bill. Just two examples: persons between the ages of 10 and 64 must work to receive health care assistance. Notice the assumptions underlying this bill. Could it be that some able-bodied 31-year-old is sitting on the porch drinking beer and eating Cheetos while waiting for someone else (the hard-working and deserving) to pay for their health care? Who are we envisioning with this narrative these lawmakers are saturating the media with? What do they look like? How about the $200 billion cut to food assistance that has been described as government “waste”? Who are we wasting resources on? Who is the waste? 

Let me offer a picture of what “waste” looks like.  This “waste” looks like a thirty-something, married white woman from Nebraska. She and I happened to be sitting together at a conference lunch when she told me that both she and her husband have jobs, but they take turns eating on alternate days – just to make sure their three children can have dinner each night. When we refuse to see the living realities beyond the abstractions and the falsehoods, they really can shoot someone in the middle of 5^th Avenue and get away with it. 

What I find most heartbreaking is the pleasure that the lawmakers and their stakeholders get from inflicting such pain.  In his book, The Cruelty is the Point, Adam Serwer recalls how “he” enjoined a crowd to mock the painful testimony of Christine Blasey Ford when she testified about her sexual assault and to laugh at the New York Times journalist who lives with a chronic disability. As Serwer pointed out, “he” encouraged the crowd to form community around cruelty. There’s nothing new about meanness – especially as a political strategy. Indeed, racialized cruelty in one form or the other has been a long-practiced cultural norm. There is no other way to explain the faces of white men, women, and children dressed in their Sunday best and smiling for the camera while a smoldering, dismembered black body hangs from the limb of a tree. 

The lies that foment meanness have always been deeply racialized. Before this nation became a nation, the myth of white superiority was created and whiteness concretized as a protected status.  In other words, one group was designated as deserving of resources and respect over and against another group deemed deserving of neither. More pointedly, the philosophizing founders established a polity in which the pleasure and power of the deserving group was predicated on the pain and suffering of the undeserving group. To be very clear, whiteness as a protected status does not mean all white people enjoy its privileges in equal measure. Also, one does not need pale skin to be conscripted into the whiteness project. (Just ask Uncle Clarence.) It does mean that white bodies represent the standard against which all other groups are measured and deemed worthy of rights, resources, and respect. It is no mystery then why this administration relies so heavily on anti-black sentiment to consolidate power. In fact, the leader of this administration has relied on anti-blackness to fortify his riches even before “he” decided to try politics as another entrepreneurial venture. 

As it did in the 17^th century, this specific variety of meanness continues to operate as a useful political strategy. The playbook is simple: Evoke White Status Anxiety. Incite fear and panic in the protected group with dire predictions of imminent threat. Tell them their entitlements are under attack by DEI (black and brown people) recipients, immigrants from sh*thole countries, or otherwise undeserving hordes. Folks experiencing White Status Anxiety will vilify not only black and brown people but will cannibalize themselves as well. Because a lie is never more effective than when laced with plausible deniability, it might be called something else like “the price of eggs” or “eliminating government waste”. Under these conditions, even chaotic and incoherent lies ring true to folks who are fighting to defend their protected status. Human organisms can always justify cruelty as a means of fending off destruction. It works. It also helps to explain the 57% of white voters who chose to elect a serial criminal, notorious for his disregard of truth and empathy, as their leader and protector.

• Enact voter suppression laws? Check.
• Accuse the leader of an African nation of white genocide? Of course.
• Eviscerate the civil rights protections? Why not.
• Deny resources (i.e., food, education, and health care) to non-wealthy families? It’s the cost of making US great again.  Who is us, again?

How must we confront these old, inbred patterns? I know that the Crazy Miss Martha Syndrome is less than useful, as is arguing with strangers on social media. In fact, it just may be that screaming at the television or at strangers on the internet perpetuates madness. It is also a distraction from the meanness. It is much harder to do is to allow our multifaceted truths to move us into collective and righteous grief. It is always hardest to feel when it gets real. But grieve is exactly what we need to do. We need to face the reality that the sanitized myths have worn thin, and they have brought us to the edge of collapse. These illusions of US innocence and invincibility have left us ill-prepared to face down a liar who hides his fever dreams of omnipotence inside vague appeals to patriotism. No amount of whitewashing will change the ramifications of our shared legacy: a legacy that includes a celebrated founder who enslaved over 600 people to build his wealth and used them as collateral to secure his debts; who used a 14 year-old enslaved girl as his baby mama all the while making declarations about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So long as we are held captive by the lies that make US seem special, we will pledge allegiance to the delusions of a would-be dictator.

 In this climate of crisis and opportunity, we must face the thorny truths about how we became who we are and who we want to become.  Facing the whole truth of who we are and who we have become will lead us through grief and sorrow, but it is through that collective grief that we might begin to glimpse possibilities of that “more perfect union”.  It is through shared grief that we resurrect a hope so revolutionary that we begin to discover the meaning of “We”: the people who commit to promoting the general welfare, the common good, and the blessings of liberty. In the light of those truths, we the people might dare to support leaders who refrain from the politics of false morality, such as legislating who can kiss whom. In this light, we might confront politicians who pursue power by criminalizing people who are unwell or unhoused.  Maybe, just maybe, we might risk speaking into the light, into the truths of our own complexity – which might include some meanness and momentary disregard of other beings. Maybe, just maybe, these small steps can move us, not toward delusional greatness, but real, human goodness.