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The Cootie Culture of Contemporary Politics
Everything I needed to know about politics I learned on the kindergarten playground.
Many years ago in elementary school, there was this thing called cooties. You could catch them – by kissing a girl, touching the wrong person, wearing the wrong clothes, even exchanging a friendly word or two with another kid. Heck, you didn’t even have to have contact with the pestilential kid to catch them. “Ew, Alice germs! You have Alice germs!” one kid would say, touching another to “infest” them.
And so it would go, the outbreak of cooties sweeping through the playground.
Meanwhile, the cootie kid? Yeah, she’d sit up against the slide or sway forlornly on the swing, watching glumly without participating as the other kids mockingly raced around infecting people with her “germs.”
Sometimes it was worse. A circle formed around the poor cootie kid, taunting her or fleeing in mock horror from her Medusan gaze. Very occasionally, it would proceed to violence, either the victim lashing out in despair at her taunters or one bully bolder than the rest stepping forward to shove her down or humiliate her. Typically, a teacher stepped in at that point to stop it, if one was present.
I found out firsthand that cooties were contagious in more than one way. If you did not join the tormentors, you became a fresh target, and often the original cootie kid joined in with the tormentors in an attempt to self-immunize. If you defended the cootie kid, all bets were off, and often enough you became the primary target.
And there were rules. You did not sit with, associate with, or talk to a cootie kid. Even minimal contact could be infectious. Those related by blood or circumstance to the victim were really in danger of having cooties.
Childish and mean, no? And yet how else could you describe the circle of tormentors attempting to trap and disempower the Trump administration and, even more unfairly, the Trump family? After a political campaign almost entirely devoid, despite several multimillion-dollar research efforts and perhaps the illegal co-opting of the secret services, of viable mud to sling at President Trump, the media and leftist politicians are working in tandem to create “cooties” – fake news and shrill, tedious insults – to use against them.
Is it working? Well, we have seen politicians on the left refuse to speak with Trump or his administration, shake hands with them, look at them, applaud them (even out of politeness) or recognize they even exist. It’s dangerous to go against the crowd, so even right-wing politicians are turning against the Trumps for fear of contagion. So long, free thought.
And if you think about it, cooties sounds familiar to another philosophy.
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Saul Alinsky could have learned this on the playground. He also said, “Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy” and “Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)” Alinsky, in effect, wrote the book on cooties — and on bullying as an adult. The peer pressure involved (which adults, one would think, had long outgrown) ensures that your cruelty picks up allies. When you have a personality cult engaging in the cruelty, you have an instrument of great power. And the magic of cooties can transform into a hysterical witch hunt when adults are the ones perpetrating them, altering insults and meanness into genuine tangible harm through riots, legal harassment, or individual violence.
Yet cooties only happen when the crowd says they do. That is why when Democrats do the exact same things Republicans do, they’re safe; the media has inoculated them against generating cooties, the way a teacher might do with her favorite kid. Democrats can also declare “no tagbacks” when they label a Republican or non-loyal Democrat as a cootie-bearer.
When you’re an adult, there is no teacher to intervene and tell everyone to stop with the cooties. The stakes involved aren’t a child’s ego, but an adult’s reputation, possessions, loved ones and safety. The collateral damage can be not just significant, but devastating. Those who are willing to use cootie culture to destroy people politically are engaging not in childishness, but in evil.
Published in Culture
Washington, DC—cooties as far as the eye can see. Eeeewwwwww!
The socratic method plays out well in those situations. When people invite me in to a two-minutes-of-hate conversation I ask them what is bothering them. Then I ask why, why, why? I employ some active listening and repeat back what they tell me as best I understand it, giving them the best case possible. Sometimes I understand they may have a point. Often they either look at me with doubtful faces realizing they may be overreacting, or they narrow their eyes and tell me I just don’t get it. They’re right, I don’t.
We need to make “cootie catchers” like some of us did as children. We’d fold corners of paper over on itself numerous times until there was enough openings to insert 2 fingers and a thumb, opening and closing as you snatched the cooties off your friend and gave them to the enemy, preferably the girl that started the nonsense.
I always thought only girls had cooties.
Strange, when I was about 10 I thought it was only boys!
I never saw any of the harassment discussed in the OP. We would never even have thought about them if it hadn’t been for the game.
Most people don’t know this any more, so I’ll share some knowledge.
My mother’s name was Judy, and she grew up in extreme poverty in Ohio. As she liked to tell us, she didn’t live in a house with indoor plumbing until she married my dad.
She told me that in the 30’s and 40’s, cooties were head lice. Boys usually had their heads shaved or crew-cut because it was a cheap way for mothers to keep them looking respectable. Girls, on the other hand, all had long hair; no butch cuts back then for girls.
So, to point out the obvious, with the haircuts back then, “Girls have cooties”. Boys did too, sometimes, but at a much smaller rate than girls with their long hair.
I saw the tears in her eyes when Mom told me her schoolmates called her “Cootie Judy” through much of her childhood. An unfortunate rhyme that children loved to exploit.
I had forgotten this connection. We were taught never, ever, use another person’s comb at school. Or to put on another person’s hat. My maternal grandmother keep her kids hair cut supper short because of head lice. In back my mom’s hair was cut to her hair line. This was in the 20s and 30s.
When I was in junior high, I was told it would be better to share your toothbrush than your comb.
Thank you for this post; it never ceases to amaze me how many people just never grow up. When people in their 40’s, 50’s and 60’s are acting like children, it is definitely evil-and pathetic.
I think this is one of the more insightful posts. Thank you.
To me the funny thing is how inapposite the cootie-memes are. Look at Trump, a seventy-year old paterfamilias whose business is real estate, and who rebuilt Western Manhattan, who won the presidency against all odds in a two-way matchup, expending his own treasure to do so. A man who has always hired and relied upon women, paid them well! And treated them well (as NY Times found out when it tried to put a negative spin on an article detailing interviews with his female employees.)
Yet on the “playground”, he is an impulsive toddler incapable of taking counsel, a raging id always seeking out gratification at the expense of any women who come within range.
And Ivanka: a beautiful, accomplished woman, a mother, a devoutly religious Jew, whose love for and closeness to her father despite his two marriages since divorcing her mom speaks volumes about his “family values”….
Are you kidding me? America has always loved people like this! And still would, were it not for the mean-girl bullying of the MSM..
It seems facetious after a fashion but nonetheless this really nails it.
So much about the Left is adolescent and childlike, annoying kids who never grew up.
Great post. I’m old enough to remember this. I went to Kindergarden in southern Ohio where there were lots of poor people in the one public school. The poor had cooties. I’d not known about the lice connection, mentioned by JC but it makes sense. Those with cooties, we knew they weren’t real, were obviously poor because they were poorly dressed not always clean and usually girls. I never saw the mob psychology and bullying however, or maybe was just out of it, not unusual. Ann Coulter wrote a book, “Demonic” about Democrats use of mob psychology which was under appreciated. I thought she nailed it. The Democrats are never off message even though the message can reverse instantly, change direction or targets on a dime because they are always part of a mob. There is no there there. At some point in the past there may have been lice but it became pure mob, pure bullying and it is in fact evil. Send the wonderful cootie story to all your Democrat friends.
I was and continue to be a Ted Cruz fan, know all about cooties.
My mom grew up in Washington Court House, Ohio, so there you go.
I don’t think this type of thinking is limited to the left. We do ourselves a disservice to ignore the beam in our own eye, so to speak. I know there are times that I dislike a policy or person for no reason other than, in one way or another, someone told me I should. In essence “cootie, cootie.” I watched recently as one relative talked about how much she disliked the house republicans and congressional leadership. I was in mild agreement, they’re spineless – right? Then another relative quietly began asking questions.
R1. Chuck them all out and start over. R2. Why? R1. They rolled over on Obamacare, immigration, and everything. R2. Did you know that it was congressional action that stopped Obama’s immigration order? R1. No, they didn’t do anything. R2. It was a congressional law suit that got a court injuction. R1. Oh. Why didn’t anyone tell me that? I never heard that. R2. Because it doesn’t increase they’re ratings to tell you that congressional leadership are playing the cards they have and doing the best they can. Better to start the internal circular firing squad. R1. Hmph.
The conversation was more extended with many more examples put forward. I quietly realized that I had outsourced some of my thinking. The point isn’t to say that all our leaders are great or not, the truth is probably somewhere in between. The point was that I wasn’t working off evidence like I thought I was. I was a cootie pointer.
The growth of federal power into all areas of our lives, from the number of aphids allowed in a head of lettuce (last I checked it was 6), the size of your toilet, how much money you can carry without it being confiscated, etc., has made it so that every issue becomes a life and death struggle. You must align with one polarized party or the other because if you want anything to happen, you have to back the party that endorses that position. In order for that to prevail, you have to back everything that party says. Losing on one issue, no matter how small, necessarily requires that you lose on everything. There is no cross party support for anything. If one party says the sky is blue, the other party is obliged to claim it is azure and they will go to the barricades over it.
Visiting Washington with the family this coming week. I hope to come back cootie-free.
Don’t count on it. If any place were infested with cooties, it’d be DC.