Demagoguery for Me, But Not for Thee

This is the latest example of a syndrome I've observed before on the Left: alternately agitating about how "extremely dangerous white supremacists are, how they're the new Nazis and if we aren't ceaselessly vigilant there will be a replay of 1930s Germany here in the Homeland" and at the same time "seem[ing] to believe that white supremacists are not really dangerous at all, that because Antifa's heart is pure they need only to chant some slogans and the Fascists will collapse and surrender; the Fascists' bullets will either bounce off Antifa's Breastplate of Virtue, be repelled by Antifa's wristlets of power, or simply dissolve into the air."

In McInnes' case there's no doubt that he's dangerous, he's been cultivating a gang of thugs for street fighting, and they've been actively doing their job.  And I must admit, having grown up on recycled WWII propaganda cartoons on children's TV in the 1950s, that the syndrome I'm describing is neither new nor limited to the Left: it was common to treat Hitler and Tojo as silly-looking clowns who would be brought down by laughter, and as dangerous enemies of all that was holy.  It's probably a lot older than that.  But I don't get it, not least because I remember how effective such tactics have been against Donald Trump: he's fat, he has stupid hair, he has tiny hands (and therefore a tiny wee-wee), he's Putin's cockholster, etc. -- and you see, here we are.  It's of a piece with the popular Internet tropes that this or that celebrity or liberal icon has schooled / taken down / destroyed / EVISCERATED etc. this or that Republican.

I guess I can understand the impulse, it's a way of letting off steam, and not actually incompatible with taking real action against these evils.  But it suggests to me that many if not most people have trouble concentrating on issues for more than a few minutes at a time.  That's just as true of the right-wing base, but liberals and the left like to claim that they're Better Than That.  And please note: I'm not at all concerned about McInnes's feelings.  This has little or nothing to do with him personally.  (Would the person who posted the above tweet feel differently about him if he were a hot Aryan stud, with a prominent chin?  Does it hurt less if you're beaten up by goons answering to a large-sized cartoon earthworm?)  What I find, however, is that many, perhaps most of the people who let off steam in this manner turn out not to be very thoughtful or knowledgeable about the issues involved.  Does that matter?  Maybe not.  Maybe all that matters is that you cheer for your team, which by definition is the Good Team because it's yours.  It puts important, life-and-death issues on the level of spectator sports, which are not important at all.

But is this the only way to build and maintain solidarity?  If so, I think we're in trouble.  If not, I think it's counterproductive.  It's demagoguery.  It's a tactic beloved of the Right: remember the memes depicting Barack Obama as a witch doctor, his family as monkeys?  Those upset liberals and progs no end.  But only, I think, because it was their guy being mocked.  The slut-shaming Melania memes circulated by liberals and leftists in 2016 were just as despicable, but defended by liberals and leftists in the same terms the Right used to defend the racist Obama memes.  And don't forget, kids, what liberals and conservatives alike agree: Michael Moore is fat.

I'm not sure that this kind of mockery is necessary to build and maintain solidarity.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for one, seems to manage very well without it.  So does Bernie Sanders.  I put the tactic's popularity down to intellectual, moral and political laziness.

The Tribute Vice Pays to Virtue

A former co-worker of mine likes to post garbage on Facebook, alternating between moist devotional memes about God's goodness, celebrations of the Confederate battle rag, defenses of gun ownership, and attacks on Musims and liberals, especially President Obama.  I've given up trying to reason with her, and now simply attack her, though still in less vitriolic terms than the junk she posts.  She never replies -- in fact, like many people I know, she rarely writes anything herself, preferring to let the makers of memes do the talking -- but now and then someone else she knows replies to my comments, though he also relies on scattershot slogans and soundbytes.  He never actually addresses what I've said.  (It's the same tactic used by liberal Democrats when Obama is criticized, though they plug in different epithets.)

So, a few days ago this guy replied, "You sure like the beheading of children, don't you, Duncan?" to a comment I wrote on a meme celebrating the killing of Muslims by American snipers.  In a way, his riposte was successful, because I wasn't sure how to respond to it: What can you say to something that stupid?

What I don't get is what a right-wing American Christian patriot has against beheading: beheading was a traditional method of execution in the Christian West (not to mention the rest of the world) until the 18th and 19th centuries; the last time in Great Britain was in 1817; in France the guillotine was used until 1977.  Our good friends the Saudis still behead criminals.  True, beheading in the West has succumbed to political correctness -- we in America now prefer to kill people with botched lethal injections -- but my co-worker and her defender despise political correctness and favor the death penalty for those they believe deserve it.

The other form of violence that has American patriots righteously indignant is burning people alive, though again, I don't see why.  Executing people by burning is another traditional Christian practice.  The United States has never used it as an official method of execution, but unofficially it has been popular among tradition-minded white Christian Americans well into the twentieth century.  That's only here in America, of course.  The US pioneered the use of firebombing civilian populations in World War II, adding the use of napalm in Korea and Vietnam, and now burns people alive with Hellfire missiles fired from drones.  Teenagers who should have picked "far more responsible" parents, for example, but nine-year-old children too.

That little girl survived, unlike many beneficiaries of this well-intentioned but pitiful and helpless giant.

The accusation that critics of US violence "like" the atrocities of our enemies is a familiar one.  I'm not going to say that my co-worker and her buddy necessarily like the atrocities committed by our country, though probably they do in many cases, where the victims are black or brown or Muslim or otherwise safely Other.  Still, like most Americans they prefer not to know too many details, and to cheer for the horrors from a safe distance, getting indignant only when their grubby noses are rubbed in reality.  And in this they are no different from Obama fans, who don't want to be reminded of his crimes either.  Patriotism is the opiate of the people.

Laying Layers and the Lays They Tell

Throw Grammar from the Train's post for May argues that the distinction between lie (as in lie down, not as in tell a lie) and lay, is being lost, because it's just too confusing.  Only a few anal compulsive grammar obsessives (like me) ever learned it anyway, and:

That's not because we're a nation of semiliterate texting addicts; lay and lie have never been easy to distinguish.  In fact, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, the verbs were not well differentiated until the 18th-century usage juggernaut got rolling. From 1300 to 1800, “the usage was unmarked: Sir Francis Bacon used [lay for lie] in the final and most polished edition of his essays in 1625.”

This doesn't bother me, because as Jan (the blogger) indicates, the distinction between lie and lay was not a genuine feature of the language but a distinction invented and imposed by people who didn't really understand grammar.  But it does make me wonder about the other sense of lie, the sense of deliberately saying something that isn't true.  I suppose people don't confuse it because the meaning is obviously different. Though have you noticed how many people, when they found they made a mistake, will say brightly -- semi-ironically, I think -- I lied!  Even some of my Mexican friends do it, saying Miento, miento (I lie, I lie) when they realize they misspoke.  It's not a grammatical issue, it's one of semantics, but because lying and truthtelling are also moral issues, it's that as well.

So a friend shared (in the Facebook sense) this meme today.

She didn't actually endorse it.  She added a remark to the effect that she was rushed and would read it later, so presumably she shared it so she'd be able to find it when she had time to read it.  (I often do this, but by "liking" rather than sharing.)  I did some looking around on the Internet and found that the information in the image has been debunked numerous times.  I put those links into a comment to her, and after a moment's thought added another comment, linking to the Ninth Commandment (Exodus 20:16) at a Bible site: "You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor."

My friend is the daughter of a minister, and remains devoutly (though not too obnoxiously) Christian.  Unlike some other people I know, she doesn't get all pissy when I post corrections to disinformational memes she passes along.  But it still never seems to occur to her to check those memes herself.  And you'd think, wouldn't you, that people who take their religion seriously, would be concerned that what they send out into the Intertoobz would be true?  According to very old canons of truth and falsehood, it's not enough just to refrain from saying something you know to be false, hard as that standard is to meet.  You also must try to make sure that what you are saying is true.  This means, among other things, that you have to evaluate what you get from other people and want to pass along. This, evidently, is even harder.  Yet the religious believers I know, be they conservative or liberal, seem to give it little thought, and that was true long before Facebook or the Internet.

I wrote last week about the Tasteful Jesus Lady, who despite her flaunted faith also doesn't care much whether what she's saying is true or not.  But I reached a personal tipping point about this during the 2012 election season, and the worst offenders were ostensibly secular Obama supporters like my liberal law professor friend.  (To be scrupulous, the avowed conservatives were just as bad, but I expected no better from them.  My bias.)  Then there's my fictive nephew, who often shares village-atheist memes on Facebook, like this one yesterday, from something called "The Free-Thinking Society":

This meme has the dubious distinction of being false in almost every particular, from the number of translators who worked on the New Testament to the claim that the KJV was "edited" from "previous translations" rather than translated directly from the original languages, and more.  Some of the errors are insultingly trivial, such as the reference to "scrolls": all New Testament manuscripts, including the earliest, are codices, not scrolls; but whether a document was written on a scroll or a codex tells you nothing about its truthfulness or lack thereof.  (The motive, I think, is to insinuate that because scrolls are totally primitive, what was written in them needn't be taken seriously by enlightened Free Thinkers.)  Since none of these facts are that hard to track down, whoever made this meme should be regarded as, if not a liar, then at least someone who doesn't care whether he or she is telling the truth.  If "Free Thinking" means freedom to make stuff up, I could get that in a church.

Speaking of lies, my friend got the meme about charities from a page called WorldTruth.TV.  When I went to download the meme to repost it here I found this one next to it, a cartoon of a crowd of white adults (weirdly enough; not only all middle-aged adults but all male) in multicolored clothing walking through a portal labeled PUBLIC SCHOOL and emerging all in gray, with this caption:

The public school system: Usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority.

There's a lot to criticize about the public school system, of course.  But I know of no indication that private schools are any different.  There's always been a divide between people who think schools should teach children to think and people who think schools should teach children to obey, and in general the latter group has usually gotten their way.  One of the reasons for religious schools is to make sure that the students are indoctrinated with a given cult's dogmas.  I get the impression that many people who complain that schools indoctrinate children really just want kids indoctrinated with their propaganda, not someone else's.

A friend of the friend who posted the Free Thinking meme attacked me for correcting it.  Significantly, he attacked me personally, not bothering to address the factual issues.  That's what most people think debate means, I suspect.  And then think again about the people who, realizing they said something untrue, say I lied.  Their tone of voice indicates they're joking, kind of, but I wonder.  The difference between making a mistake and deliberately telling a falsehood seems to be as difficult for many people to grasp as the difference between lie and lay, and it's a lot more important.

Just Say No

Which means I'm turning into myself.  Cool!

It also means that the people I spend the most time with are turning into me.  Even cooler!

Some of the comments under the place on Facebook where a friend of mine found this atrocious meme are sensible -- other people besides me noticed that it would imply that I also have an effect on others, for example.  But those had their downside, for example: "But, if you become like the people you spend time with, who isn't to say, they become more like you. Maybe they can learn to live their lives drama free."  Which expresses a central assumption of this meme and others like it, that "you" never create "drama," only other people do.  In my experience and observation, that's not true.

Just in passing, another friend found a meme captioned with a saying attributed to the mystic Meister Eckhart, "If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough."  I can't find an actual source for it (though Oprah likes it), so I presume it's bogus.  But even if Eckhart said it, I disagree.  It expresses the worst abusive aspects of spirituality, where the Lord chastiseth and the devotee thanks him for the stripes.  At the very mildest, believers need to learn to say "No" to their gods.

Seeing what intelligent people consider spiritual wisdom is generally disheartening to me.  I remind myself that I don't know what they've been through -- heavy addictions, in some cases; chronic illnesses and pain, in others; abuse, in still others; and all of the above for yet others -- and what they find useful to ease their pain, but something still seems so wrong here.  In particular, I wonder how well these rabbit pellets of affirmation actually work.  Are people really happier, healthier, saner, after years of repeating these cliches to themselves?  I'm not persuaded.

Then I consider how lucky I've been, how good life has been to me so far.  But I can't ignore how unlucky many people have been.  Should I thank a deity for sparing me what it has inflicted on others?  Rather, I think I should upbraid it for its cruelty, callousness, sadism.  That, I'd say, would be one better prayer than "Thank you," if one must pray at all.

Those Who Ignore History

(The picture above was taken in 1956 by Gordon Parks [via].)

Ah, the good old days.  Recently I saw a spate of nostalgia memes posted by friends on Facebook, many of whom are old enough to know better.  I thought about posting this article, which I wrote for my column in the student newspaper in May 2001.  I titled it "Forward Into the Past!", but the editors had to come up with their own, "Don't Change the Past."  At any rate, here it is: 

Netlore is fascinating.  You know, those strange or funny messages passed along from person to person, warning of nonexistent computer viruses or tugging your heart with tales of dying children whose last wish is to receive a million postcards?  Or containing a bogus quatrain by the seer Nostradamus, foretelling the ascension of the "village idiot" to leadership "in the home of greatest power" in the year 2000?  That's netlore.

The other day my sister-in-law passed a bit of nostalgic netlore along to me.  It was one of those heartwarming lists of things we ought to remember from the good old days, like "hide and seek at dusk," "eating Kool-Aid powder," "being tired from playing ... remember that?"  (Hey, I still get tired from playing.)

But then an agenda began to emerge.  Remember, urged the writer, "When nearly everyone's mom was at home when the kids got there." "When they threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed ... and did!"  "'Race issue' meant arguing about who ran the fastest."  "The worst thin you could catch from the opposite sex was cooties."  "Basically, we were in fear for our lives but it wasn't because of drive-by shootings, drugs, gangs, etc."

There was some strange wobbling going on.  Sometimes "when" referred simply to childhood; sometimes it referred to the good old days, the Fifties as depicted on television, when schools were tough and moms stayed at home and there were no drive-by shootings.

The trouble is, those good old days were imaginary.  Only a person who grew up in an all-white community, and suffers from selective amnesia to boot, could suppose that "race" wasn't an issue in the 1950s, including for children.  Being a child didn't (and doesn't) insulate or protect non-white children from the humiliations, large and small, that a racist society was (and is) all too ready to visit on them.

It requires equal memory control to believe that gangs and street violence weren't big stories and fears in the Fifties.  Even outsides the cities where the dangers were immediate, and had been since the 1800s, people feared that Marlon Brando would roar into town with his motorcycle gang and do unspeakable things.  Syphilis and gonorrhea were less threatening than they were before the invention of antibiotics, but "the worst thing you could catch from the opposite sex" was a baby; even a young child might wonder why Big Sister had to go away for six months to recover from a mysterious and secret "fever," and be treated as a pariah on her return.

The anonymous author of this piece remembers "Walking to school, no matter what the weather"; I remember school buses -- not everyone lived in Anytown, USA back then.  "War was a card game" -- but we had air raid drills at school, hiding under our desks for protection against the nuclear fallout that might arrive any day.  (For children so unlucky as not to live in the US, war could be much more than a card game.)

I know: I'm a humorless old prune who needs to take a chill pill.  When I expressed some of these reservations to a friend, she chided me not to be such a pessimist.  But, I told her, I'm not the pessimist here.  I'm not the one who thinks that American society was a soft-focus utopia in the 1950s that has rapidly gone downhill ever since.  Yes, we have bad problems now -- but we had bad problems then.  I don't believe that any good is done by falsifying the past.  It encourages kids who are growing up now to believe that they were born too late for happiness or the excitement of discovery.

I've often talked to college students who believed that, having missed the Sixties with its radical politics and counterculture, they had nothing but yuppiedom to look forward to.  I've had to remind them that there was activism in the 80s (the Nuclear Freeze movement, the movement for solidarity with people in the police states of Central America, to name just two), the 90s (antiwar movements, the movements against US sanction in Iraq), and now.  There's a vast counterculture that dwarfs its Sixties ancestor, with alternative media that didn't exist when I was young.

Really, the Fifties were a dreary time, for adults too: a time of deadening conformity (but also rising Civil Rights activism, the Beat movement and early rock'n'roll), fear of nuclear war, fear of "juvenile delinquency" (gangs and drugs, that is).  Children had hula hoops and Silly Putty, but we could smell the fear in the air.  And even today children have their joys, and a new world to explore.  We need to make it safer for them, not dwell uselessly on a past that never was.

I was limited to 700 words in my columns, so I couldn't mention everything I'd have liked.  Polio, for example.  There was a boy in my first-grade class who had a brace on one leg, probably from polio.  I happened to grow up when the Salk vaccine became available, and my parents made sure my brothers and I got our shots.  Already in my day polio wasn't the threat it had been even a decade earlier, but my parents worried about it and us for our sakes.

Today an article went up at The Atlantic about the change in personnel policy at IBM in January 1951, just a few days after I was born: women employees no longer had to be fired when they got married.  The article blames this policy on the postwar situation, where jobs were reserved for returning World War II veterans, but the general practice was older than that.

I'm taking a harder line on netlore these days, as the web and especially Facebook have made possible a flood of garbage.  Some of it's benign, some isn't.  Much of the worst is spread by liberals and leftists, though maybe I just feel that way because I expect better of people who are ostensibly on the same side as I am.

P.S.  I meant to include this in the post, but by the time I had everything else in place, it slipped my mind:

As I reread my 2001 column, I realize I'm a lot less positive about the present than I was even then.  After eight years of George W. Bush and four of Barack Obama in the White House, a dozen years of unjust war, and an economic depression followed by an inadequate recovery, and increasing global warming, the future of the US and the world looks bleak -- even worse than it did in 2001.  But that, come to think of it, wasn't what I was saying in the piece.  Things had been getting worse for decades even when I wrote it; even a cynic like me was surprised by how much worse they still could get.  But we've also had activism and resistance, and anyone who thinks that if they missed the Sixties there's nothing left to do, is seriously (and probably) willfully mistaken.

The Banality of Banality

This meme turned up in my feed at Facebook yesterday, and when I checked I found, to my surprise, that it was authentic: Wilde did write these words, in his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism.  No doubt he had in mind the gospel saying "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal" (Matthew 6:19-20).

But then I began to wonder, and not for the first time, why people choose a platitude like this from the writings of someone who produced a huge store of genuinely witty, intelligent, thought-provoking and meaningful sayings.  (One example out of many: "A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.")  Almost anyone could have said the words in that meme, and many have.  Jesus himself was hardly original: the transience of material possessions was a cliche in his own time.  (Helpful hint: if a religious or philosophical teacher preaches against accumulating material possessions, that is a sign that he lives in a culture where most people accumulate material possessions.)  Many of the quotations I see on Facebook consist of putting banalities into the mouths of famous people who didn't say them, which is why this one almost fooled me.