Gus Walz is the 17-year-old son of Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz. At the convention this week, Gus had an intense teary public reaction to his father.
Gus Walz is neurodivergent. He deals with ADHD, anxiety, and a nonverbal learning disorder. Kids and teens like Gus might struggle with controlling their feelings in social situations. pic.twitter.com/l4Y3SO1Rkh
— Sophie Rain Thread 🔥❤️ (@SophieRainForum) August 22, 2024
Ideally, you don’t react publicly to Gus by saying “What a retard!” Ideally, you don’t post, “What a spaz!”
It takes restraint for people who post every stray thought to social media to not publicly comment on Gus’s emotional display. I believe in the moral ideal to not pick on children and the disabled (at least publicly). Gus is 17, he’s not a child. Ideally, we don’t pick on candidate’s kids. That’s an awesome ideal. That’s the civil thing to do. But when we do that civil thing, we’re also diminishing truth. The natural human reaction is to have a response to Gus’s extreme reaction. The casual thing is to say somethinga bout Gus’s display, but the disciplined reflexive thing is to speak with care about members of a protected class such as children.
Similarly, when Joe Biden seems senile and Kamala sounds drunk, the natural thing is to describe what you sense, while the civil thing is to stay silent until you learn the socially appropriate response.
I love civility and I love truth and they are often in conflict and sometimes truth is more important than civility and sometimes civility is more important than truth. Stand-up comics often share forbidden truths. I like a wide Overton window. If politicians display their spouse and kids, then those people become more likely to catch flak. There are advantages and disadvantages from being displayed as the family of somebody famous. I’m the son of a famous preacher, and I’ve milked those advantages in often shameful ways (I showed up uninvited to my dad’s work place, Good News Unlimited, to get regular paid work during high school until I was fired).
Criticizing Gus’s outburst is not hate. It is a normal natural human reaction to mock Gus. It is also a normal natural human reaction to love Gus and to want to protect him.
When I put “Gus Walz hate” into Google News (without quotation marks), it receives dozens of results of the MSM condemning right-wing reactions to Gus as hateful. I think that’s a bogus critique. Ideally, people wouldn’t criticize the kid, but the amount of restraint that would take for many people would reduce their humanity. There are many ugly things about criticizing Gus, but there are ugly things I see in the loss of spontaneity and humanity that results restricting oneself to only socially acceptable comments about Gus.
We would have been better off as a nation if we had practiced less civility with Joe Biden’s long stretches of senility and used more truth to talk about the ugly things that were happening. Transmitting raw reactions of what you see and feel will come with upsides and downsides. In public discussion, we’re ratcheted too much towards civility and away from truth.
July 6, I blogged: “Liberals Were Blinded To Biden’s Senility By Their Own Speech Codes”
One way of reconciling the competing values of civility and truth is to describe what we see without adding ridicule. You can simply describe Biden’s seeming senility, Kamala’s seeming drunkeness, and Gus’s outburst and skip the vitriol but this will come at a loss of spontaneity and humanity.
If somebody around you dresses, speaks or acts provocatively, you usually have to reduce your humanity by inhibiting your natural reactions by staying silent.
The culture of the New Class exacts still other costs: since its discourse emphasizes the importance of carefully edited speech, this has the vices of its virtues: in its virtuous aspect, self-editing implies a commendable circumspection, carefulness, self-discipline and “seriousness.” In its negative modality, however, self-editing also disposes toward an unhealthy self-consciousness, toward stilted convoluted speech, an inhibition of play, imagination and passion, and continual pressure for expressive discipline. The new rationality thus becomes the source of a new alienation.
Calling for watchfulness and self-discipline, CCD [culture of critical discourse] is productive of intellectual reflexivity and the loss of warmth and spontaneity. Moreover, that very reflexivity stresses the importance of adjusting action to some pattern of propriety. There is, therefore, a structured inflexibility when facing changing situations; there is a certain disregard of the differences in situations, and an insistence on hewing to the required rule.
As a blogger without an editor, I often publish raw thoughts that normal people find socially unacceptable. Sometimes, when I look back on things I’ve published, I wince.
Publishing raw thoughts is sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful. Raw reactions aren’t inherently superior or inferior to considered reactions. Casual reactions aren’t inherently better or worse than reflexive reactions. There’s a price to pay with either type of reaction.
I grew up among Protestants who self-censor far more than Jews, the group I joined at age 27. I love the easy way Jews talk about the natural passions for sex, honor, money and the like but I recognize non-Jews often find this shocking. On the other hand, Jews often find Protestants fake, stilted and weirdly self-controlled.
