| Friday, December 24, 2004 |
10:48 - Let's at least pretend we're grown-ups
|
(top)  |
The more I see of the what-we're-like-when-we-think-nobody's-looking rhetoric of so many of the most objectionable on the Left, including those in positions of power, the more I think their problem is simply an inability—or unwillingness—to converse in adult terms. They don't want to mature. They don't want to have to hold themselves to the conversational standards of their parents, who inexplicably told them that there are some things you don't joke about.
Like Daily Kos, the biggest and most widely-read Left-leaning blog EVAR, whose opinions are read and absorbed daily by every bit as many people who read Glenn Reynolds or Lileks—who said:
But what makes me angry was Kerry and his gang's inability to take advantage of the situation. I may regret saying this later, but fuck it -- they should be lined up and shot. There's no reason they should've lost to this joker.
Heh. I guess he does support capital punishment... just not for any "crime" other than incompetence.
At least he recognizes that this kind of language might come back to haunt him; that shows uncommon self-awareness for someone in his position, I guess, but it's still not enough to have made him choose words better befitting someone claiming to be a political analyst. (I'm also suspicious that his worry about regretting it later might just be that "someone might notice and make a big deal of it", rather than "I might come to think better of having chosen these words, after my head has cooled".) But you know, I recognize this kind of rhetoric, this casual suggestion that people we don't like, people we oppose, or even people who simply disappoint us should be "drug out into the street and shot". I used it myself, routinely, back in high school.
I mean, why not? Even Garfield used language like that from time to time, so what could be wrong with it? (Heh—I wonder whether Jim Davis or his factory full of Swedish cartooning elves ever weighed in on the election. No need to ask on which side, of course. He's a cartoonist.)
There comes a time when, after you've spent some effort pondering the very real ramifications of things like individual liberty and suppression of dissent and the respect due the office of the President, that you begin to take to heart the idea that you shouldn't joke about things like assassinating the President or massacring people with opposing opinions. It just stops being funny. I've noted for a long time that I can't seem to find simple silly jokes funny anymore; if a comedian's routine is political in nature and misleading or wrongheaded, I want to argue with him rather than laugh at him. This isn't a fun situation, but somehow it's a bit of a consolation thinking that at least a majority of Americans seem willing to vote on the basis of their serious-minded consciences rather than on what seems to tickle their viscera on Comedy Central, or appeal to their latent violent, tribal, or totalitarian urges.
I recall this exchange with a friend from England, who has over time indicated that he seems prone to suggest that anything he doesn't like should be "banned". Cinnamon toothpaste: banned. Reality TV shows: banned. Squeaky pop music: banned. I can't recall the exact items whose expurgation from the market he called for; these are just examples of their nature. But small wonder that his impression of life in American society seems to be that we avoid using French words here because Bush banned them. I can't even tell how tongue-in-cheek he was being, but even still: what kind of mind is it that slips so casually into that kind of language? I know he's a smart, well-reasoned guy (especially if, for some reason, he's reading this); but doesn't this kind of conversational tic say something profound about the underlying thought processes?
I know not everyone is this glib, and many more deserve far more serious engagement in discussion of the issues of our day. But it's rapidly approaching the point where I'm going to have to trust to the inherent maturity of reasoning adults in this country to ignore the ravings of people like Kos, so that I can as well.
UPDATE: Dean Esmay unloads in a similar vein.
UPDATE: I guess I should also note that my erstwhile Correspondent, dialogue with whom I've chronicled here from time to time (the "massacring people" link above), mentioned as proof of the Hitlerian evil of the Bush administration that at one time he and his friends were questioned by the Secret Service after a Web forum discussion in which they voiced their hope that Bush should get a fatal disease and die. (He was sketchy on details; the fact that he's alternately described them as the "Secret Service" and the "CIA" at different times makes me wonder exactly what happend and how much he's simply hoping to make hay from a relatively painless ordeal.)
I had to point out to him that the Secret Service doesn't have a sense of humor about things like that and never has. Back when I was working at my local ISP in 1996, stories circulated about (for example) a 12-year-old kid who sent a prank e-mail to president@whitehouse.gov, only to end up with the Secret Service shadowing his family's house for the next two weeks. As I said to him, You made threats against the President in a public forum, and you're surprised that the Secret Service got on your case?
Some people just don't think twice about whether their actions might have consequences... and when given a reminder that they live in the real world, where there are rules about civil discourse, suddenly it's a Gestapo sighting.
That's why I have a hard time getting into these discussions anymore unless I've established to my satisfaction that the person is willing to be mature and thoughtful about expressing their side, not merely bleating about Halliburton and Karl Rove, or reciting Michael Moore factoids and mangled Ann Coulter quotes and then standing their smirking with their arms folded, firm in their conviction of rightness.
UPDATE: The Armchair Philosopher wrote along these lines a couple of weeks ago:
The idea that I’ve been playing with is that many of my Left-leaning/pacifist/social-justice friends see most social interactions primarily in terms of power, coercion, and exploitation. The basis for this idea is that these folks often use coercion metaphors to describe individual and collective social situations that many other perspectives regard as quite benign. What got me thinking was a friend’s comment that this blog’s lack of a comment feature “forced” her to do something she didn’t really want to do: respond to one of my posts on her blog (which is not argument-oriented) rather than in a comment. Now, I’m sure that my friend was joking — but even so, the metaphor stood out to me. It would never occur to me to even joke about my comments policy “forcing” anyone to do anything — I think about my feedback policy primarily in economic metaphors, not power metaphors.
Excellent observations here, including illustrations of the labor-theory versus the free-market philosophies, in terms that are hard to argue. (Mountain Dew should figure in all theorems.)
Undiscussed is the side of the coin that describes actual violent events—the two sides in the illustration continue to use different vocabularies to describe war. We talk about Iraq as being about "liberation", the "removal" of Saddam, the march of "freedom" and "democracy"—idealistic and sanitized words that can obscure the very real horrors of the battlefield. But the Left, in protesting it, goes beyond the obvious war vocabulary into metaphors such as "rape" and "stealing [oil]" and "Crusades"—religious, criminological, and sexual metaphors intended to make war out even worse than it is, by ascribing it the same kinds of anthromorphized malevolence as Steinbeck did in describing the overcultivation of the parched land in The Grapes of Wrath.
If there's a unifying theme here, it might be that whereas the one side sees the world as a collection of systems—self-sustaining, self-healing, occasionally klunky or kludgey but usually elegant systems—the other side thrives on personifying all acts as macrocosms of human behavior, with all the faults of the individual human projected onto our institutions and humanity as a whole.
I guess both views are necessary. Otherwise we might, I don't know, kick over our country's pillars and rape the foundations on our way to the troughs of the corporate luncheon where we feast upon the carcasses of the workers of the world and plot the kidnapping of innocent youths to send as fresh blood to lubricate our war machine.
UPDATE: Hmm. Do you suppose there's something to this idea, that conservatives see the world as being comprised of "systems" that are beyond human construction—either by divine design, or by natural law—and that liberals, i.e. "humanists", see the world as being comprised of human constructs, and thus is subject at a macroscopic level to all the weaknesses of the human mind?
Twalk amongst yourselves!
|
|
Brian Tiemann
