Have mercy on yourself (for career purposes, if nothing else)

Tell your inner J.D. Vance to shut up, please.

Here’s the first thing I couldn’t stand about Bishop Mariann Budde’s National Prayer Service sermon on Tuesday:

She’s already represented by Aevitas. ::shakes fist at sky:: I’m too late!¹

The other thing was J.D. Vance’s face—his stupid, smirking face.

(This is a publishing advice email, I promise. We’re getting there.)

If you watched the service, I bet the image is burned on your brain, too: Budde pleading with POTUS to have mercy on the nation’s undocumented workers—you know, like Christ would—while that 40-year-old gourd-headed loser turned not once but twice to his wife, itching to share a contemptuous eye roll. (She ignored him. Delicious.)

Vance’s behavior was…wow. It was breathtakingly offensive. It was antipodal to anything Christ ever stood for, astounding in the precision and depth of its evil. It was like witnessing a five-second cameo from actual, Biblical Hell.

Did this “Christian” guy ever learn what the first and worst of the seven deadly sins happens to be? Did anyone teach him the first and most important of the Ten fucking Commandments?

What an utterly repulsive person he is—a repulsive person in whom I am horrified to have recognized something of myself.

What am I doing right now, after all, if not trying to catch you with my hatred, the better to roll our eyes together? Why am I reacting to this behavior with the kind of protracted, public, attention-lavishing shit fit on which people like J.D. Vance count from people like me?

Here’s a more useful thing I might have taken away from Tuesday’s service, looking out on those rows full of Trumps and their cronies: Not one of those people, not one, except for maybe Usha Vance because who knows anything about her, ever had a parent who loved them.

This is not my assumption; this is amply-reported fact. Not a single person in that crowd ever had a parent who loved them.

Which is to say: these monsters did not enter the outer darkness voluntarily; they were born and mutilated in situ. They have long since so habituated to a life without unconditional love—to a joyless, anoxic, meaningless, humiliating hell—that they could never, ever hope to survive elsewhere.

How ghastly. How sad. And how pathetic—like, in the original Greek sense of the word. These people are terminally ill.

People like this will never even substantially disappear from the population absent mass collective effort to end child abuse at all socioeconomic levels.

It would also help if the United States stopped treating women and children like trash under the law, but, you know, that’s not really actionable on the federal level right now.

What is actionable is on the personal and community levels. It starts with how we treat our own children, including—and I apologize, because I’m about to get real corny here—our inner children.

No, but really. In order to have a prayer of making it out of this age, as individuals and as a nation, we have to stop stomping on all the innocent and tender parts of the system, including the ones we carry inside.

You personally need to do this. It’s wildly important for your publishing career no less than for your nation and your soul.

Be honest with me: somewhere inside you, is there a little James David Vance who doesn’t know what to do with his rage and sorrow?

Is that beady-eyed manbaby flailing in fear and anger, throwing his grief around instead of taking it apart and putting it gently away like he might have if any part of him were capable of unconditional love?

You might not be projecting your self-contempt onto marginalized people, which, yes, in case you’re curious, DOES make you an objectively better person than J.D. Vance. But if you’re throwing that shit around at all, even at the helpless parts of yourself, I’m sorry to say that some part of you is still a little bit immature and even ::whispers:: abusive.

You’re abusing yourself, and your self-abuse is almost certainly affecting other people in a bad way. You’re not doing everything you can to bring peace and sanity back into this system. You’re perpetuating trauma instead of healing it. Oh, and: if you have children, you’re modeling something for them that you really don’t want to be modeling.

I’m not trying to be hard on you. (I’m actually sort of yelling at myself in the mirror.) You don’t suck. You’re not bad. You’re just human—but you can do better, and you know it. Why aren’t you showing more mercy to your own vulnerable parts? What did they ever do to you?

Did it ever occur to you that you might NEED those parts of yourself, just like America needs immigrants to pick its crops, care for its children and parents, tend to the sick, etc. etc.?

The next time you feel tempted to roll your eyes at your own vulnerability, please visualize that impulse as that of a miniature, inward J.D. Vance.

I can’t think of any aversion therapy more powerful than imagining that man inside your body. Can you?

This is urgent. Among other things, your self-contempt is making you a worse writer.