Are We All Members of the Glanton Gang Now?
This is a bit of a meandering piece, but it’s something I’ve been mulling over in my head since I finished reading Blood Meridian recently. I just wanted to write some things down and hope to get you to consider these points. I am not looking to persuade you or for this to be professional writing.
Social media has turned us all into members of the Glanton Gang, and there is no way to put that back in the box. Something that I’ve seen more and more of online is this delight and reverie at the suffering of the supposed other. While this isn’t a new problem some recent events have really highlighted the Glanton Gang-ification of society. The Glanton Gang was a group of scalp hunters in Texas/Mexico that was famous for their wanton acts of cruelty. Despite their propensity for extreme violence the gang shows camaraderie or group solidarity in certain situations, particularly when dealing with outside threats. The concept of the gang banding together in times of danger to protect their own is a recurring theme.
Also like the Glanton Gang, participation in this new social media dynamic is highly conditional on if members of the gang feel like you are about to betray the gang. Members of the gang, including their leader John Joel Glanton, have no qualms about committing acts of violence against their own, especially if they believe a member has betrayed them or has become a liability. This lack of genuine loyalty or moral restraint within the group underscores the overall theme of chaos, lawlessness, and the brutal struggle for survival depicted in the novel.
Like the Glanton’s we all now seem to delight in the suffering of people that we deem outside of the gang, or as former members of the gang. The most recent event that comes to mind is the OceanGate submarine disaster. People were very quick to celebrate the fact that “5 billionaires just got turned into human salsa! This is a victory for the working class!” I have no problem with dark jokes, edgy jokes, and gallows humor. I’ve made 9/11 jokes before to friends, and like most people my age have done the whole, “Ugh white men, amirite folks?” Something that you notice when you constantly do these kinds of jokes is that if you are in a room full of 10 people and you tell these kinds of jokes 8 of them will understand it’s a joke and laugh and the last two will laugh but not because it’s a joke. Because you are signaling to them that you actually agree with them on this thing.
For those of you who are a certain age you might remember when it was cool to call everything gay. That’s gay, this is gay, you’re gay, I’m gay. Most of the people who were saying that when I was a kid had no actual issue with gay people and were just using the popular slang at the time, but as we got a little older we realized that while most of our peers didn’t have a problem with gay people, some of them did. You then realize that by making those jokes you normalized that behavior for those people.
The justification used to celebrate the death of these people is the same justification used when someone gets shot by police and it makes national news. “They were no angel!” becomes “They made their money on the suffering of others!”, and so on. There is always a valid excuse when it comes to justifying the suffering of the other. I’m sure that if I had to hang out with these people I wouldn’t have gotten along with them, but me personally not liking them isn’t a good enough reason to celebrate their death.
I don’t think that we need to end all edgy jokes, but I do encourage you to look around the room when you make these jokes and try to figure out who understands the joke, and who is missing the point. A great example of this is a political streamer named Hasan recently had a pretty unhinged take about “failsons only doing date rape to other billionaire fail daughters. Taking these guys and putting them in a pen together is ultimately good for society.” I am not really sure what the “joke” is here aside from being edgy about sexual assault, but this is exactly the kind of, “Well [bad thing] is funny when it happens to the right people” stuff that makes me wonder when we all joined the Glanton Gang. The only joke I can find in this is that rape can be funny if it happens to someone with parents you don’t like. Sins of the father type shit.
Have a little more emotional intelligence, pay attention to how often people around you are making these jokes, and sometimes it doesn’t hurt to just ask them, “Do you really think this?” Our society can’t function like this. The mentality of “Fuck you, I got mine” is not going to help us moving forward. We already live in a system where we just accept political gridlock and the slow circling of the drain as the political norm. We shouldn’t tolerate it as the social norm as well.
As corny as using this quote is, Friedrich Nietzsche was really onto something when he said it. “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Be crass, be edgy, but don’t trade little pieces of your humanity away so you can dunk on the other.
Keep Heavy The Sabbath Day