The Christian gaze I recognize is more full of guilt-inducing scrutiny than that. An overwhelming majority of Americans profess to believe in heaven (slightly fewer in hell), and of those, an overwhelming majority think redemption is theirs. Isn't that presumptuous? Shouldn't Christians live in fear of their God and his judgment? And the Catholicism I remember from my childhood was full of terror and pain. Where'd all that stuff go?
Doug -----------
The sketch on whiteness wasn't empirical behaviorism. It was an attempt to evoke insight through literary means and references to Arendt, Mann, Melville and Paz. So, if it failed to do that, then it fails on that account, not on fidelity to realism.
Even so, your point on scorn is well taken but that scorn was supposed to be seen through race, through the idea that one can never be white enough, just as one can never be faithful enough. What I was trying to depict is the mythological blending of religion and race, Christianity and Whiteness. In this lexicon, scorn is both religious and secular. At the moment we are watching the secular expression of it delivered with religious fervor. Clinton is formally scorned through impeachment for not being white enough.
But my narrative didn't do its job, so I'll be borish. The blank gaze is the look of absolute indifference. It is the unconscious dismissal given to things, to the subhuman.
You were supposed to hear in the long rhetorical sentences a similitude to German in word combinations like The New Heartland, read as die neue Herzland, or the right race as das Reich. I don't know German or I could have done a much better job, maybe even mimicked the rhythms and flows of some of the more famous Nuremberg speeches.
But the larger point is that the American Right doesn't look like the National Socialist movement until you put their petite bourgeois status, their protestantism and their race identification all together. Remember that the national socialist were not part of the power elite and really didn't get anywhere with them until they commanded enough political machinery to make the upper crust pay attention. So far the Right has a firm grip but not a decisive one on the federal government and I don't how many state governments. And remember too, that the brown shirts were the euro-trash equivalent to the white trash militia. The brown shirts were disbanded and then I think some their leadership were prosecuted on some pretext. The historical parallels only go so far, but the deeper affinity between these movements and the potential results seem to me much more astonishing, once I started to think of the Right through the lens of racial anxiety.
The point on race isn't about which other race is threatened, but that the Right is defining the white race. Other races are simply beneath definition, hence the gaze of indifference. The scorn you were talking about is directed from one family member to another, say between the Right and Clinton.
Chuck Grimes