Discussion of T. Wayne Downey's “Notes on Hate and Hating”

T. Wayne Downey and i were recently talking about this academic ritual of paper and response. How might we think about the different styles of responding—agreeing, highlighting, supportive responses, raising questions, unrelated but interesting responses, and surely responses completely outside the individual or even general thrust of the paper. We decided that one style had a particular appeal—musical improvisation, much like a jazz or bluegrass group where one musician sets a key, a melody or harmonic line and another does a riff using one or several of these elements as a starting point. So here's my riff to the wonderfully harmonic line Wayne Downey (Coltrane, Armstrong, Marsalis) has set before us.

The key to begin on is set by the simple but eloquent question posed by Wayne's friend—“Isn't hate always hateful, always alien to our humanity?” Shouldn't hate always be discussed in one of the darker minor keys, non-pentatonic modes, or an atonal throbbing that capture the “not me” self-deceiving quality of those individuals caught in the deepest, imprisoning web of unconscious hating and moving steadily, inevitably toward their own and others' destruction? This is the stuff that evil is made of, from which we recoil in horror and vow to destroy in the name of righteous goodness and purity lest