Adam Haslett over de macht van schaamte
"For all the political rage on display in this election, the deeper, more private, and more pervasive feeling animating our current political misery is the shame that has always accompanied poverty, or not being able to provide all you want for your children, or enjoying less than you see others enjoying, or—in this second Gilded Age—simply not being rich. Add to this the humiliation that our society visits with such numbing regularity on women, racial and sexual minorities, and, increasingly, on white working-class people for their supposed pathologies, and you begin to see that shame has become the force that binds us together. [...] Despite all the attention to the rage supposedly being channeled by Trump’s campaign, it isn’t anger that has made this theater of his hypnotic. It’s the more primal pain and pleasure of public humiliation."