Why the so-called "Believers" on the Texas State Board of Education are actually Nihilists.

The neo-secessionist, racist and neo-McCarthyist antics of Texans have become so commonplace, that it's hard to muster up the energy to be outraged by anything them folk down there get up to. Nevertheless, I wish to argue that the recent actions of the Texas Board of Education, radically revising the state's prescribed curriculum for history and social studies textbooks, is a turn of events that we should find especially shocking.

Why is it such a big deal? First of all, there is the matter of the scale of the the decision's impact. Few of us know anything at all about the political economy of textbooks, and we are thus oblivious to the textbook publishing industry's vertical consolidation, which has ascended to heights that would have Gilded Age industrialists calling on the White House to 'Bust the damn trusts!', its systematic price-gouging of captive consumers, and its many other anti-competitive and crony-capitalistic practices.

The impact of the Board's action upon public school systems extends beyond the boarders of Texas itself, already containing a huge population, and into several other states. The reason for this is that Texas's particular system of centralized textbook-standardization (which in itself is more than a little reminiscent of Bolshevism) means that the state exercises tremendous influence over textbook content in many other states. The reason for this is that it's expedient economically for the textbook publishing oligopoly simply to produce a single, one-size-fits-all textbook for distribution to many states, as opposed to creating specific editions for specific localities. The only way in which publishers can accomplish this is by producing a single textbook that is written such that it happens to fulfill the guidelines of the Texas Board of Education. The state of California has a similar set-up and therefore exercises similar control.

So, that addresses the scale of the impact of this decision. Now, onto substantive reasons we should be shocked and outraged: for one, the shamelessness and hypocrisy of the alliance of Born-Again Christians, libertarians and "state's rights" types that assumed majority control of the Board. These right-wing ideologues got themselves elected to the Board with the explicit intention of appropriating the school history textbook as the terrain upon which they would declare 'cultural warfare'. The entire project was undertaken in nakedly ideological terms, and in a way that does not even pretend to comprehend the study of history and other social sciences. In fact, as Thomas Frank mentions in his excellent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, the members of the Board are openly resentful of historical expertise itself. (And any kind of expertise, for that matter!) As Frank points out, whatever the real or perceived 'ideological excesses' of past academic historians and textbook authors, nobody could reasonably doubt that those people were undertaking sincerely to produce curricula that did the best possible job of teaching social studies to public school students.

The Far-Right alliance's putative 'revision' has no rationale that has anything at all to do with history, education or students. The 'revision' reflects no coherent understanding of how textbooks work, how historical representations relate to historical facts. It takes textbooks to be nothing more than ideologically grounded statements and interpretations, strung together in a chronological sequence. Of course, its notions of what constitutes 'chronology' is skewed, in that its ideological preoccupations are entirely presentist, which is to say that even its political readings of what various narrative interpretations "mean" are based entirely in the politics of the present day, as opposed to the political frameworks as they were known and understood by historical agents at specific times.

It's funny that some of these Culture Warriors style themselves as "Believers", because their actions bespeak a worldview that is fundamentally nihilistic. The simple equation of curriculum with site of ideological struggle could not be less concerned with educating students -- the function that schools are supposed to perform. For members of the Board to act in the interest of carrying out their ideological struggle alone, means that the are literally not performing their prescribed duty in good faith: they are not fulfilling the only responsibilities that membership on the Board entails. Moreover, they can hardly be said to be acting in accord with their own ideological convictions, because their actions and rationale are motivated by a lack of belief, a lack of faith in public education.

How can you honestly claim to be acting honestly and in accord with your faith and convictions if you are sitting on a board overseeing an institution that you either

1. don't believe is equipped to serve its mission of educating children, but rather, is merely a platform for ideological struggle? or
   
   
2. -- as some members of the Board explicitly state -- wish to destroy the institution of public education?

Is this really a way of behaving that evinces faith in your beliefs and convictions? If you want to get rid of public education, is sitting on the Board of Education really the place in which to carry out this political mission with the honor and dignity that befits your cause and your supposed faith? Can you literally act in bad faith as a way of demonstrating your faith??

In response to the frequent, self-righteous accusations that the Fundamentalist Religionists are in the habit of flinging at we so-called "secularists," I ask:

Who the hyper-relativists now? Who are the nihilists now?

As our accidental poet used to say, make no mistake: the nihilists are on the Right.

Surprise, surprise...

...The Republican Party really has become the party of the South.

The following graph breaks down by region the 'favorability rating' of the Grand Old Party:

I mean, it's not even close!

These data, culled from recent polling, were translated into graph form in a piece that appeared in The Washington Monthly earlier this month. I discovered it through a link posted on Andrew Sullivan's blog.

An atheist denunciation of Sam Harris.PART TWOHarris bends over backwards to justify torture & is an apologist for neoconservative militarism.

Sam Harris. Aw, shucks. What a nice, friendly, moderate, liberal, young man.

Into justifying the use of torture against enemies in the American War On Terror? Then, allow me to introduce you to the Reader's Digest-league philosophical musings of one Sam Harris. The following quotations are taken from an article that first appeared in the Huffington Post back in the halcyon days of 2005. The title of this pièce de résistance is 'In Defense of Torture'.

Golly gee, Sam! responds the unsuspecting HuffPo junkie, as she wraps her Reader's Digest-quality mind around Harris's provocative titular gambit. But isn't torture a bad thing?

Turns out, it's not! Well, not always, anyways. You might not, says Harris, have considered a strange bit of highly technical, jargony whatsit known as the 'ticking-bomb' scenario. If this term of art -- familiar to experts in highly specialized fields of philosophy -- has you confused, don't worry. Uncle Sam's gonna lay it out plain, in old-fashioned, workin'-man's English:

Imagine that a known terrorist has planted a bomb in the heart of a nearby city. He now sits in your custody. Rather than conceal his guilt, he gloats about the forthcoming explosion and the magnitude of human suffering it will cause. Given this state of affairs—in particular, given that there is still time to prevent an imminent atrocity—it seems that subjecting this unpleasant fellow to torture may be justifiable. For those who make it their business to debate the ethics of torture this is known as the “ticking-bomb” case.

Ya see? So, now that we're equipped with the specialty knowledge required for rational discussion of the ethics of torture, we can begin to, as it were, unwrap some of the underlying presuppositions that we tolerant, middle-class, bleeding-heart liberal Americans bring to bear in approaching highly complex ethics of torture. What are these presuppositions....these variables, and in what manner might they becloud our usually adaptable, dynamic and context-sensitive sense of justice? Of right and -- as it were -- wrong?

Well, glad you asked. Turns out that

many variables influence our feelings about an act of physical violence. The philosopher Jonathan Glover points out that “in modern war, what is most shocking is a poor guide to what is most harmful.” To learn that one’s grandfather flew a bombing mission over Dresden in the Second World War is one thing; to hear that he killed five little girls and their mother with a shovel is another. We can be sure that he would have killed many more women and girls by dropping bombs from pristine heights, and they are likely to have died equally horrible deaths, but his culpability would not appear the same. There is much to be said about the disparity here, but the relevance to the ethics of torture should be obvious.

Yes, yes, Sam. Much to be said about the disparity, but no: let's waste no time pondering these disparities! I mean, we're talking about a 'ticking-bomb' here, right? No time to sit and chat! [To be read in the voice of T.V.'s Batman, as portrayed by Adam West:] Mustn't....waste time discussing....things to be said.....about....disparity........Only....time....to.....torture!

.....If you think that the equivalence between torture and collateral damage does not hold, because torture is up close and personal while stray bombs aren’t, you stand convicted of a failure of imagination on at least two counts: first, a moment’s reflection on the horrors that must have been visited upon innocent Afghanis and Iraqis by our bombs will reveal that they are on par with those of any dungeon. If our intuition about the wrongness of torture is born of an aversion to how people generally behave while being tortured, we should note that this particular infelicity could be circumvented pharmacologically, because paralytic drugs make it unnecessary for screaming ever to be heard or writhing seen. We could easily devise methods of torture that would render a torturer as blind to the plight of his victims as a bomber pilot is at thirty thousand feet. Consequently, our natural aversion to the sights and sounds of the dungeon provide no foothold for those who would argue against the use of torture.

Whew. I haven't learned so much since I took Torture 101, sophomore year of high school. Here is an objection: Harris is getting it backwards. The failure of imagination is his own: He confuses the aversion of we middle class Westerners to torture with our aversion to particular sets of aural and visual associations that the concept of torture brings to mind. After all, for 99 percent of inhabitants of the lazy, fat, TV-watching West, the 'conventional' military aerial bombing raid is every bit as unfamiliar to our lived experience as is torture. Therefore: if there is a basis upon which we shall formulate our ethical point of view as regards torture, it is not going to be our (non-existent) lived experience of how the monstrous, barbaric act is carried out. It is even less advisable that we formulate our view by way of comparison to another monstrous, barbaric act with which we also have no firsthand experience.

And anyone who is actually going to formulate his view of the ethics of torture v. the ethics of the aerial bombing raid without reflecting seriously upon his personal estrangement from the actual physical, lived circumstances of both is someone who lacks the imagination and empathy to defer to the firsthand testimony of others who have actually experienced these horrors. He is someone who is so myopic and solipsistic as to base his impressions of the outside world entirely on television shows crafted especially for fat uneducated rednecks: easy targets for indoctrination into ethical dispositions that would have seemed unthinkable and certainly un-American just a few years ago.

Shows like Fox's 24, which dramatizes during each episode at least one, if not two or three instances of Harris's 'ticking-bomb' scenario.

By the way, in real life, do you want to know how many times the 'ticking bomb' scenario has occurred? NEVER. Not once.

The creator of 24 -- a ultra-neoconservative whack-job called Joel Surnow -- knows that his award-winning show's portrayal of torture as useful, ethically sound, and consistent with American values in fact bears no relation to reality. And yet, he feels that his show is "patriotic."

Joel Surnow, creator of TV's 24: Doesn't he look like a guy who has chronic erectile dysfunction?

Patriotic, huh? Well, I think that Surnow is poisoning the well of civil discourse, imbuing people's commonsense notions of what it means to be a patriotic American citizen with an ideologically calibrated and exceedingly reckless fabrication that taps into the bloodlust, cultural resentment and aimlessness of wide swaths of an especially vulnerable (and, for a host of reasons, ticked-off [so to speak]) American population. Whatever vision Surnow wishes to advance of what it means to be an American is glaringly at odds with the vision shared by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry.

One thing that I find galling about this is: where the hell is the sex and violence on T.V. crowd? I mean, is it, like, the new thing among Conservative White Evangelical Christian parents to say: "Well, sex is still bad, but violence may now be okay in particular circumstances; as long as it takes the form of lots and lots of explicit, gruesome, agonizing dehumanizing torture"?

I mean, I'm a First-Amendment Fundamentalist and feel that censorship in any form functions to undermine the capacity of human beings to live in the real world. But, I feel tempted to drive a pickup truck out to some megachurch tomorrow and ask the hoards of Bible-thumping parents: do you really want to bring your kids up in an American society in which torture is seen as not only acceptable but patriotic?

My answer's no.

Look: anyone that knows me will tell you that despite my habit of chatting about politics ad nauseum, I'm not much of a going-out-into-the-streets-and-chanting-things-through-megaphones type. But if there's any issue I'm passionate about, it's this one. As far as I'm concerned, to so much as attempt to justify legalizing torture on the basis of its putative utility is itself INSANE. Like, for instance, this washed-up mockery of a law professor

Alan Dershowitz: One of O.J. Simpson's defense attorneys. The first time around.

-- you know, Alan Dershowitz, the guy who was among the lawyers that represented O. J. Simpson? -- has written articles and even appeared on television proposing a law that would make torture legal under certain circumstances. Which circumstances? Why, of course, the ticking-time bomb scenario. You know, the one that's never ONCE happened in real life? His proposed law would, however, require getting a warrant from a judge. Now, honestly, would you want to become a judge if you knew that it meant periodically signing off on waterboarding people? It's a good thing no sentient human could possibly give a shit what Dershowitz says.

Should the neoconservative tendency ever -- God forbid -- show signs of reemergence on the scale of the pre-Iraq War National Brainwashing Project, I think it will likely be entirely necessary for the quote-unquote 'secular Left', Left-leaning Catholics and the non-evangelical Protestant Left to join forces with anti-torture portions of the evangelical Christian community in order to block the truly chilling specter of legally sanctioned torture from coming into existence.

Anyway, back to Sam Harris. Our friendly atheist continues his tortured explanation of why torture should be okay with us (albeit only in the specific circumstances that, as we have discussed, have never once occurred):

To demonstrate just how abstract the torments of the tortured can be made to seem, we need only imagine an ideal “torture pill”—a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their concealment. The action of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and transitory misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a second time. Imagine how we torturers would feel if, after giving this pill to captive terrorists, each lay down for what appeared to be an hour’s nap only to arise and immediately confess everything he knows about the workings of his organization. Might we not be tempted to call it a “truth pill” in the end? No, there is no ethical difference to be found in how the suffering of the tortured or the collaterally damaged appears.

All right. Instead of responding myself, why don't I just go ahead and quote George Orwell? The following is from 1984, in particular from The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, a copy of which the novel's protagonist Winston Smith is given to read by O'Brien, an Inner Party member who initiates Smith to the "Brotherhood," a secret organization that plots to overthrow the Party. Read this excerpt -- which lays out candidly the function of torture in the totalitarian state -- and compare it with Harris's assertions:

In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance -- meaning, in effect, war and police espionage -- the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life.

The banality of evil, indeed. Of course, as we know, O'Brien turns out not to have in fact been a member of "The Brotherhood," but is in fact himself a scientist -- a psychologist -- working for the totalitarian regime. For Big Brother. He applies his expertise in precisely the manner elaborated in the above excerpt.

Harris is said to be pursuing a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. Hmmm.

I shall conclude with a voice of sanity, that of the legal scholar David Luban (Virginia Law Review, 9/15/05):

The only reasonable inference to draw from these recent efforts by the government to defend its actions is that the torture culture is still firmly in place, notwithstanding official condemnation of torture. Indeed, given that lawyers at the highest levels of government continue to loophole the laws against torture as energetically as ever, more than half a year after the Abu Ghraib revelations, the only reasonable inference to draw is that the United States government is currently engaging in brutal and humiliating interrogations. At most, torture has given way to CID. The persistence of interrogational brutality should surprise no one, because the liberal ideology of torture fully legitimizes it. The memos illustrate the ease with which arguments that pretend that torture can exist in liberal society, but only as an exception, quickly lead to erecting a torture culture, a network of institutions and practices that regularize the exception and make it standard operating procedure.

For this reason, the liberal ideology of torture, which assumes that torture can be neatly confined to exceptional ticking-bomb cases and surgically severed from cruelty and tyranny, represents a dangerous delusion. It becomes more dangerous still coupled with an endless war on terror, a permanent emergency in which the White House eagerly insists that its emergency powers rise above the limiting power of statutes and treaties. Claims to long-term emergency powers that entail the power to torture should send chills through liberals of the right as well as the left, and no one should still think that liberal torture has nothing to do with tyranny.

The declining political currency of outrage,Part II: Is the media literacy of younger generations obviating the culture wars?

This post proceeds from the spot at which Part I left off. Contrasting his persona and rhetoric with that of President-elect Obama, I characterized Former President Bill Clinton as follows:

Clinton demonized his enemies and inflated the scurrilousness of their charges and tactics, in effect shoring up support from 'his side', but simultaneously enraging and radicalizing his opposition. ... People sided with Clinton because he was needy of our attention and our love; he needed us to prop him up against the mean bullies who were out to get him.

Clinton's presidency coincided with eight years of particularly cacophonous culture-war waging: the far-Right devoted itself to fighting and re-fighting ad nauseum the same perceived 'social'-political battles that were seen to have sprouted during the oh-so-turbulent late 1960's and early 1970's. The battle lines were drawn not around the big issues of the period -- Vietnam, the Draft, the incendiary fretwork of Jerry Garcia -- but around some fairly slight stuff like whether or not the sexual mores portrayed in prime time television programming reflect those of everyday Joes in the Heartland. (A textbook opportunity for Heartland outrage, considering that any such television show enjoys high ratings specifically because millions of viewers in the Heartland tune in week after week, whether they're honest about it or not.) This has been the dominant cultural divide of the past thirty years; not coincidentally, it centers almost exclusively on the opinions, values and resentments of Baby Boomers, in relation to those of other Baby Boomers. The rest of us were mere spectators.

The duration of Clinton's two terms was a period during which the far-Right sated its appetite for pandering to, fueling and masterminding the direction of a host of 'anti-elite' resentments. This masterminding of direction was accomplished not only in the service of galvanizing political support, but in making loads of money. Rush Limbaugh's barely occluded racism, anti-semitism and general bigotry were pilfered from Father Coughlin's bag o' tricks. But what's most shocking of all is the amount of money the fat douche has been able to make by yelling into a microphone at millions of other fat douches.*

William Jefferson Clinton was the perfect focal point for this good-old-boy outrage, in no small part because he already in fact was an outrageous figure, every bit as invested in dusting off and utilizing the codes, metaphors and assumptions of the 1960's culture wars as was Limbaugh. Clinton practiced the politics of division every bit as shrewdly as Karl Rove would do subsequently, especially when he managed to assemble the coalition that handed George W. Bush the second term that he unquestionably didn't deserve. Clinton knew how to rally his coalition to his side; he knew how to draw people in. His travails became ours.

Enter many of the tropes, habits and labels of contemporary campaigning in our heavily (basically: psychotically) mediated lives. Entertainment and news are difficult for the common man (of which there is one somewhere inside all of us, lest you think I'm being elitist [although, I guess I sort of am, but indulge me]) to distinguish from one another.

In Part I, we talked about a form of political theater that uses outrage as its jet fuel: taking umbrage. What a useful tool! We describe the media circus between the Clinton Administration and the Right in terms of lobbing accusations and insults back and forth. But the culture wars wouldn't have gotten under our skin were it simply about slamming the other guy. In contradistinction to the NBA, playing offense is itself not a good enough spectacle. I mean, attacks are exciting, but as they escalate, they become increasingly unmemorable. They blend together. After all, as outrageous as they might be, they're still just words. And if you're going to have a war of words, you may as well have it over policy issues, because words are going to bore people anyway. And debating policy issues is no good for national politics; it turns too many people off.

So it's not about offense but defense. The culture wars of the 1990's got under our skin because we identified with the participants. We took sides. We were divided up into two teams. We lived vicariously through personalities. Bill Clinton was a stand-in for you. He was on your side, advocating for you; honoring your memory and experience, and your belief in the unwavering moral imperatives that your experience taught you to hold dear. On the Right, there were a succession of demagogic good-old-boys to identify with, including politicians like Newt Gingrich and proliferating numbers of ideological profiteers who took a cue from Rush, and began yelling their outrage into microphones for some fast cash.

We observed in Part I that President-elect Barack Obama has a tremendous knack for staring-down and -- in effect -- minimizing ludicrous character attacks. This has the further effect of making the person who utters the attacks look like he is about two feet tall. It's an exhilarating part of Obama's appeal -- and one for which the Zeitgeist could not be more receptive -- that he is an adult. I would add that it is by striking this chord of responsible, intelligent (even cerebral), savvy and -- let's face it -- exceedingly cool adult-ness that Obama stands to unite the country. United in the very real sense that a majority of the country (by a mind-bendingly substantial margin) wants a leader with these very qualities.

I know what you're thinking. What's all this hippie bullshit about 'uniting the country'? You don't actually believe that stuff, do you? The answer is that I do believe it, but maybe not in the way that triggered your incredulity mechanism. What I mean is that when Obama speaks in a language that addresses rhetorically the entire nation, he is in effect -- and to precisely the extent to which his rhetoric is successful at performing this feat of unification -- uniting the country.

By contrast, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush -- both of them Baby Boomers -- were culture warriors, each of whom therefore (by definition) thrived on a rhetorical model that to a lesser or greater extent, pitted one population against another. It's possible that there'd have been no other way in which a Baby Boomer could govern (or, perhaps: no other way in which a Baby Boomer Democrat could govern and/or win an election). It's even more certain that both men are products of their time: that there's something about their personalities, certain (and contrasting) forms of Doublespeak, certain (and contrasting) forms of smugness that are in part generational timestamps. I guess the word would be immaturity.

Both Clinton and Bush are juvenile figures in exactly the sense that Obama is an adult figure. As we've discussed, as a candidate, Obama stared down the sophomoric slime-balling, whisper campaigns, race-baiting and neo-McCarthyist tactics of the McCain/Palin campaign, making their attacks them look like puny spit-balls, thrown by tiny, desperate and mediocre men. Which is exactly what they were. Both Bush and especially Clinton had talent for doing precisely the opposite: taking small problems and made them big. Each constituency identified with 'his struggle' because each constituency identified with its guy and what he 'stood for'.

Each president's constituency was united more or less by the common experience of having lived through the late 60's/early 70's cultural-political climate; a climate that was mediated in an unprecedented way and to an unprecedented extent. And that period of skyrocketing media- and advertising-saturation was distinguished by -- as much as anything else -- the magnification/amplification of small, inconsequential, abstruse and even fictitious phenomena. And, to an unprecedented extent, instantaneously! This was the period of Bush's and Clinton's halcyon youth. These phenomena are what the culture wars are all about: fashion, lifestyle, taste.

By the way, I'm not saying that this historical fact is good or bad; I'm just drawing our attention to it. I mean, an inarguable example of this explosion of commercial media is also something that is unarguably good: The Beatles, for instance. Its sudden popularity and huge influence hinged entirely on some hype and one appearance on one television show.

Media have changed. We docile consumers have too. Can you even imagine a 2008-equivalent to a phenomenon like The Beatles? Although, I suppose it was equally unimaginable in the early 1960's.

Obama grew up at a time during which people had already become acclimated to television and radio. He is a member of the post-Baby Boomer generations, in which all of us are, to a lesser or greater degree, habitually savvy media critics. Watch video footage some time of Tricky Dick Nixon. It's not -- I don't think -- merely the benefit of hindsight that makes him such an obvious phony. It's that we know instinctively how to read media; we're equipped with conceptual tools and interpretive devices that simply could not have been available to the vast majority of Boomers. Is it any surprise that so many people from that generation and older fell for George W. Bush's ludicrous I'm-from-Texas routine? Or that slime ball neocons were able to manufacture a groundswell of support for the Iraq War out of a combination of half-truths, Doublespeak, fear tactics and 'patriotism' talk?

Among all of the voters who participated in the presidential election of 2008, the only so-called demographic of which a majority supported John McCain was white people over the age of 65. The generations that fall under that heading are going to hold on tight and continue voting for the duration of old age. They're likely to become really really old, too. They have most of the money, they have huge numbers, and they represent myriad special interests to which elected leaders will continue to be beholden. Try as they might, they probably don't have the best interest of younger generations in mind.

The way to curtail their power is to continue making progress on what was started with the Obama's electoral and popular majority. How much do you want to bet that the divide will over time cease to be cultural and will become generational. That means that if we're smart, we can continue electing candidates cut from the same cloth as Obama. Candidates that resist and even condemn demagogy, that speak plainly, practically and in a manner that respects the electorate.

If the Republicans continue confining themselves to the backward, resentful, provincial niche they have carved out for themselves, the Democrats have a real opportunity for continued dominance. Now that we've seen that it can work, the new Democratic coalition can only become stronger. If the Republicans wise up and drop their weirdo social conservatism/pro-racism platform, it might save their party, but it would do so in a way that -- we can hope -- has a chance of pulling the country back from the dangerous precipice upon which it currently finds itself perched.

If voters continue to send a message that they won't fall for totalitarian, neo-McCarthyist, fear-mongering shenanigans, then politicians will respond by getting in line. We need to keep demanding that the Constitution be respected and not distorted, that the Bill of Rights is not negotiable in times of 'war', that we won't stand for declarations of war against vaguely defined enemies, with no discernible objectives. In other words, if younger generations hold firm to their media literacy, the message it sends to politicians is clear: don't fuck with us, Old Man. Don't fuck with our rights.

(Heh heh heh.... I think I just had to get that out of my system. Which is, after all, the point of having a blog.....Don't mind me....)


_______________

* For the benefit of readers uninitiated to urban slang: the term "douche" is here used as an abbreviation for "douche-bag."

The declining political currency of outrage,Part I: The Taking of Umbrage

For the duration of the recent -- for a while, seemingly interminable -- election season, the day-to-day coverage of the cable news-ish punditocracy was dominated by discussion and analysis of a blow-by-blow succession of statements, gestures and reactions, usually embodied by the candidates themselves, whether on 'the stump' or in a television studio, and sometimes simply written-up in a press release in rapid-fire fashion.

Some examples. Criticisms and denunciations: 'Senator McCain strongly criticized Senator Obama for his tax plan, ridiculing it as "socialism"'; 'Senator Obama's campaign shortly thereafter fired back, releasing a statement denouncing Senator McCain's allegations as "more smear tactics from the Karl Rove playbook.'" And, of course, the 'gaffes', the 'favorability ratings', 'raised questions about', etc. That kind of thing.

My favorite of these gestures, by a landslide, was umbrage-taking. It was at once among the most frequently cited gestures on the campaign trail and easily the most ill-defined. It often seemed simply to be imaginary. You were never quite sure who it was who was taking the umbrage, and on whose behalf. Nobody ever announces himself as having 'taken umbrage'. He just takes it!

In fact, it almost has more to do with what you don't do than with what you do, in fact, do. After The New Yorker ran its inscrutable cover portraying Senator and Mrs. Obama as black-power activists/terrorists/Muslims/whatever -- and by the way, re that cover: yes, of course we 'got' that it was an attempt at parody...the trouble is that that's not the same as it actually being funny -- Obama's campaign released a statement denouncing the cover as being in poor taste. But the denunciation was worded vaguely, if with all requisite rhetorical passion. And Obama himself didn't seem to personally care all that much about it, soon thereafter going on the record saying that it wasn't really a big deal.

This is leading me to a couple of points which foreshadow the meatier portions of this discussion (which will follow when I post Part Two):

Despite the near-constant perceived and actual taking of umbrage that occurred throughout the campaign, neither McCain nor Obama were all that convincing about it. It's almost like they were going through the motions. I think that in McCain's case it was unconvincing because he was bullshitting us, and McCain -- despite having tried repeatedly to the point of embarrassing himself and everyone else during his weird campaign -- has never been a good bullshitter. By contrast, in Obama's case, I think that the minimizing of umbrage-taking was part and parcel of the political and rhetorical values on which his campaign was based.

It's not that Obama undertook so lofty and impractical a goal as to transcend the tit-for-tat politics of ridiculing the other guy and taking umbrage when he tries to ridicule you. If you think that either Obama's campaign or his nascent administration contains so much as a speck of the impractical, you're ignoring all available evidence. No: the aspirational aspect of Obama, his espousal of our nation's founding principles and his articulation of the dream of achieving better future, this is not pie-in the sky idealism. Rather, it represents specifically the undercutting of the assumed and unquestioned antimonies between our capacities and our ideals.

One of the practical methods by which Obama undercuts these polarities is encapsulated in my final observation in this post: the difference between Obama's style of umbrage-taking and that of Former President Bill Clinton.* Clinton's style was to make his critics look bigger and meaner and more sinister than they already were**, in effect garnering the sympathy and support of the electorate, or anyway of the slight majority of it that was in his camp.

Clinton demonized his enemies and inflated the scurrilousness of their charges and tactics, in effect shoring up support from 'his side', but simultaneously enraging and radicalizing his opposition. Obama's style is exactly the opposite. He deflates the scurrilousness embedded intentionally in the rhetorical excesses of his opposition (of which, lest we forget, there was tons of the most reprehensible and even dangerous sort imaginable). Instead of demonizing his opposition, he stares it down, as though the would-be demon is revealed to be nothing more than shadows in the bedroom of a child afraid of the dark.

People sided with Clinton because he was needy of our attention and our love; he needed us to prop him up against the mean bullies who were out to get him. People side with Obama precisely because he doesn't need a babysitter to watch over him. We are drawn to him not because he needs us, but because we need him. And when it comes down to it (and part of Obama's brilliance is that he recognizes this even when many of us fail to), we don't need him because he's Barack Obama.

We need him because he's an adult.

Think that's small beans? Not if you consider that the last three decades -- and, arguably, the last half century -- has placed us under the leadership of whiny, needy children.

In comparison to Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton and Bush Junior, Barack Obama is not only an adult, but he is a paragon of practicality. Think about it. How many things can you name that are more juvenile, more pie-in-the-sky/fantasy than:

• "Star Wars" (aka: Strategic Defense Initiative)
• "trickle-down economics,"
• "a thousand points of light,"
• "the era of big government is over,"
• "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,"
• "Ownership Society,"
• "Mission Accomplished,"
• "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
• "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job,"
• "No one anticipated the breach of the levies,"
• "We do not torture"....

.... ??

I rest my case. Part Two of this item, coming up.



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* And actually, during the primary, Hillary perfected a style of umbrage-taking that was -- adjusted for constituency, gender and political climate -- taken straight from of her husband's playbook.

** Although, to be fair, among many of his critics, certain GOP gadflies and thugs, Clinton's characterizations of them proved prophetic and even tame. Ken Starr, for instance. What a weaselly little motherfucker that slight, puffed-up specimen of grandiose Bible-Belt foppery turned out to be!

Resentment is not an idea. Nor is resentment a means by which one achieves intellectual or moral clarity.

This thought, or some variation on it, has been coursing through the nether regions of my mind lately.

I think it has arisen in conjunction with my attempts to think through what exactly it is that fuels the continuing existence of a political party while the remaining traces of its longtime ideology -- the ideology that the party has (so to speak:) bet the bank on -- have frayed themselves into utter incoherence.

Like stray, dead leaves left over from autumn that reemerge with the melting away of blanket-upon-blanket of wet, winter snow, only to shrivel dry and decompose under the hot July sun.

A voter's resentment (conscious or not), when reproduced, amplified, refracted and echoed back to him by men and women seeking political or economic power, is his blindness. A politics that endeavors to flatter a voter for his blindness is a politics that subjugates and -- indeed -- infantilizes the voter.

To the precise extent to which a voter's resentments are flattered, reinforced and catered to, that voter becomes dependant upon the politician, and more importantly, upon the continued ascendancy of a politics that so flatters him.

It is in this respect that observing the decomposition* of Goldwater/Reagan Republicanism calls to mind a condition that could be described in terms that are not dissimilar to those that were used repeatedly by Goldwater/Reagan Republicans** in undertaking to describe the dreaded, feared, much-lambasted and -lampooned relic, the Welfare State:

paternalism.

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* And if you doubt that that's what we're observing, I'm afraid that you flatter yourself. (I know, lame joke.)

** Not to mention the pathetic/embarrassing "Obama's a socialist" antics of John McCain. It's really hard to pin the 'socialism' label on the Democratic Party in an environment in which the sitting Republican Administration has enacted the most sweeping regime of the nationalization of formerly private resources in the history of the United States.