Bitter Grace

Part the first.
Part the second.
Part the third.
Part the fourth.

I started this morning feeling bleak for no very obvious reason except this is early in the third year of the Trump presidency, and and I'm a 58-year-old woman with no social status except as Wife and Mother, and being tired. Moved on to gloomy, before fulfilling part of my duties by waking Chun Woo and helping him to get moving, which is kind of juicier than bleak. Have now achieved gloomy with some energy.

So this is the post in which I complain about about (probably just some of) the current dialectical habits, transmitting and receiving and combined, that get my down.

Remember, these are all based on competition, amnesia, lack of attention. simply repeating things and demanding that others just repeat things, resentment of initial lack of comprehension or knowledge, limitations in the level of abstraction that some, many, or most people can follow easily, and our staggeringly hierarchical society.

Mostly, of course, I just speak into an abyss. Some people care what I say, but not many, and mostly people seem to be interested in Following The Anointed [who I guess must be Best]. Widely anointed as public persons, or anointed within their circles of friends as Deep Thinkers.

I get jealous.

But silence doesn't silence me. I taught for many years, after and amid and before being a student for many years, and I know that you can't tell the effectiveness of a communicated idea or perspective from immediate response to it.

I get tired of being headhunted for Conversation Points. The more so when it's done with erroneous logic. (I don't object to, often don't mind, sometimes appreciate a correction that's logically or informationally legit.)

Here are habits of competitive discourse that get way up my nose:
- plain old sneering based on identity, or the supposed identity of people who say Things Like That
- assuming the position of judge-- acting as if what's happening isn't a conversation, but my making a submission to their august judgment, their views not being explicated because they're understood to be The Standard; their right to demand and dismiss credentials; and so forth
-- absolutisms: going from, say, "No, a Border Wall does not do what you claim for it even were it desirable," to "You demand open borders!" or from "Law enforcement operates imperfectly" to "You are pro-crime!" -- and what absolute is selected depends on the combatant's categorization system, which is not necessarily shared, making things weirder and more frustrating
-- people claiming Their Motives on the one hand, and The Effect of What I Said on Them, on the other, as the relevant criterion
-- people just reciting things, especially repetitively
-- people going from, say, "I'm not interested in what you're saying" to "what you say is uninteresting," or "I don't understand what you're saying" to "you don't make any sense"

And I am really, really tired of chin-stroking White men who are regarded as great sages because they Reason Without Doing Any Background Research on What Anyone Else Has Ever Said. Especially when they're assholes to me.