| Sunday, July 18, 2004 |
12:43 - That's more like what I had in mind
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2004-06-13-1.html
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Via Cold Fury—Orson Scott Card is at least one storysmith who's put his talents to good use lately.
How stupid are Americans?
I think the answer is:
As dumb as we wanna be.
Well, let's come back to that thought.
Kerry's voting record in the Senate says that he'd rather our military consisted of a sixty-man chorus dressed in camo and singing "Give Me Some Men Who Are Stout-Hearted Men."
And maybe, maybe, one bugler.
If it had been up to Kerry, we wouldn't have had enough of a military to take over downtown Dallas, let alone Iraq.
But, just like Clinton, Kerry has realized that you can say anything you want during the campaign. As long as you're the Democratic candidate, the liberal media will actually take your promises seriously; and when the Republicans start attacking your record, they'll accuse them of "negative campaigning."
Not only that, but Kerry's sudden "stronger defense" plans are not provoking howls of outrage from the anti-war wing of his own party.
Why is that? Don't you wonder?
I mean, they're still ripping into President Bush as if he were the anti-Christ -- no, as if he were Mel Gibson -- because they hate this war that has closed down two terrorist-sponsoring governments and liberated millions from tyranny.
But when Kerry promises to do exactly what President Bush has been doing, only "better," they don't attack him at all. Why is that?
For the same reason that the economic leftists of the Democratic Party didn't attack Clinton back in 1992.
They don't believe him.
It's as simple as that.
They know that Kerry, like Clinton, is merely saying whatever it takes to get elected. You paint yourself as the sober moderate so people will vote for you. Then, when you're in office, you behave exactly like the leftist you really are.
This would explain the peals of giddy laughter that Kerry gets whenever he drools out that joke about how Bush wants to "lay off your camel, tax your shovel, kick your ass and tell you there is no promised land", so hoary that it's been used on every President since Truman; his audience, apparently, is simply so starved to hear any words come out of any mouth but Bush's that they'll cheer however loudly they have to, for whatever moronic babble it is, toward the greater goal of having Bush defeated in November. Issues? Issues don't matter. Deeds don't matter. Character doesn't matter. The only thing, evidently, that matters is the name—as long as the name of the guy sitting in the Oval Office is not spelled B-U-S-H, the actual person whose name it is could be Rasputin and they'd still slurp at his toes.
But the vast middle group, the people who get their news from Leno and Letterman and Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show, all they know is "Bush Is Dumb" and "Kerry's Going to Win the War." So guess which one they'll vote for.
Precisely what I've been saying. We've become a people that derives our political views from the Ivy-League snobbishness of Doonesbury, the anarchic nihilism of George Carlin, and whoever can do the best impression of the President on Saturday Night Live. Sincerity is lost; we assume that whatever any politician actually says is a lie, so we depend on humorists and satirists—dealers in irony and invective—to have done our thinking for us, to have analyzed the politicians' lie-filled speeches and separated the meaning from the rhetoric, then gone to the trouble to distill it into a series of Flash-animated caricatures to be shown on VH1. If they've got a funny-as-hell joke all queued up, ready to stake their ratings on it, we think, surely that means they've thought the matter through! We worship the irreverent because it deconstructs complex reality for us into something to laugh at derisively and shriek "It's true! It's so true!" in ecstatic response.
Regardless of what Kerry promises during his campaign, a vote for him is a vote to end any serious effort to fight terrorism using our military abroad. And since he is also committed to dismantling the laws that make serious homeland security possible, just how do you think he's going to do against our sworn enemies?
There is a difference between the two candidates. A huge one.
In the past couple of weeks, people have been giving Reagan way too much credit for being an international tough guy. The collapse of the Soviet Union? I recall that Gorbachev and Yeltsin had something to do with bringing the idea of freedom to Russia. Reagan might have said, "Tear down this wall," but he also traded arms for hostages and pulled the Marines out of Beirut as a reward to the terrorists.
In other words, we revere Reagan for his toughness, but he had his non-tough moments, and he got lots of credit for things he only contributed to.
George W. Bush is the real thing. Despite unbelievable political hostility, at home and abroad, he has determinedly pursued the war that we had to fight, and still have to pursue until we win.
Reagan caved in on Beirut and on paying off hostage-takers. George W. Bush hasn't caved in on anything significant concerning this war.
But W isn't smooth on TV. He has Letterman ridiculing him viciously every night on NBC. He has a lot of liars calling him a liar. The media message is constantly being pounded home: Even though W has successfully governed our country through the first two campaigns of a war that was forced on us; even though he has presided over a recovery from the recession that began during Clinton's presidency, despite the huge economic setback caused by 9/11; even though he has a track record that would be the envy of any wartime or peacetime president ...
In other words, even though he has the job of President and has done it as well as anyone in recent years (and, I believe, better than Reagan by quite some) ...
He still might lose the election, because Americans are so dumb we actually believe it when political dimwits like Letterman call Bush stupid ...
Which brings us back to the original question Card poses. Are we Americans actually that stupid? I think not. I don't think we're any more stupid as a people than anyone else on the planet. I don't even think most Leftists are stupid—I'd venture that genuine stupidity is a characteristic that gets distributed fairly evenly across the spectrum, and is in fact really quite rare. If stupidity were the hallmark of any particular political view, we wouldn't have people like Ralph Nader or Pat Robertson—both geniuses in their own right—commanding empires of personality at opposite ends of the landscape.
No, it isn't stupidity. It's just the dynamics of our modern form of political discourse. Everything has to be reduced to a joke, a one-liner, a sound bite. And in polite private conversation, everyone wants to have their own little anecdote or slogan that defines how they feel politically, so if the guy across the dinner table makes some jibe about our leaders, we'll know how to swat it right back with the dexterity of a badminton champion.
Peer pressure is what it is. Peer pressure is a very powerful force; the smartest among us can fall prey to it, and have ever since we've had peers. If you take a random sample of people, with differing political views, they'll all generally sort of avoid hanging their banners out too far, because nobody wants to be unpleasant in mixed company. But stir the pot a little, leave it out in the sun—and sooner or later, people will gravitate toward others of like mind. Our form of political discourse is to suck in what the comics on Comedy Central say and then regurgitate it at opportune times; and since comedians all sing the same tune nowadays (how funny can someone be while waving a flag? You've got to tackle The Man, right? And comedians band together too, once they see which way the wind is blowing), the audiences soon find themselves bobbing in a sea of uniform derision and hatred for Bush.
Then, while walking your dog through a pleasant residential neighborhood, you find a truck parked at the sidewalk with the words BUSH LIED — VOTE HIM OUT written in duct tape on the back window, and you stop in your tracks and stare for a moment... and then you just shake your head and keep moving, because what good would it do? How likely is the truck's driver going to be to listen to you quote the Butler Report, or challenge him to explain exactly how Bush did lie? You're harshing his mellow, to use an apt expression from a site I seem to have seen recently. You're not being funny. In this day and age, even facts have to be weighed against what the comedians say, and they're at a distinct disadvantage too. We don't give sincerity a second thought. If it can't be spun into a relentlessly infectious joke on prime-time cable, where the only voice that bucks the trend is the ever-more-my-hero Trey Parker, we don't take it seriously.
No, we're not being stupid. We're just assuming that the pop-culture consensus burbling around us got that way for a reason—that if every comedian in the world says "Bush is Stupid" or "Bush Lied", then how can it not be so? After all, fifty million Americans can't be wrong . . .
Anyway, read Card's whole piece. It's best absorbed in unedited sequence. Authors tend to be like that.
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Brian Tiemann
