But What About the Whataboutism, Huh?

Here's my position at the moment.  (If you don't like it, I have others.)

I take it for granted that Russia (the whole country, every dang one of 'em!) meddled in the 2016 US elections.  Probably all states meddle in other states' affairs, and the US is no exception.  It's like spying: every country does it.  When they catch another country's spies, they expel or punish them, which is fair enough; it's the pretense of violated innocence that I find insufferable.

What effect, if any, Russian meddling had on the outcome of the election is another question, which most commentators, professional and amateur alike, seem not to recognize; they evidently assume that if not for Russian interference, Clinton would have beaten Trump. On that question I'm agnostic.  Given the myriad of factors that affect electoral results, I don't think it's possible to isolate just one -- if you're really interested in understanding why Clinton lost and Trump won, that is, or in preventing such interference in the future.  I don't believe that most of those who are presently obsessed with Russia and Putin are interested.  As Seth Ackerman wrote recently at Jacobin:

Despite ubiquitous demands to “take the threat seriously,” none of these voices has plausibly explained what the US ought to do about it. Democratic senator Chuck Schumer demanded that Trump “cancel his meeting with Vladimir Putin until Russia takes demonstrable and transparent steps to prove that they won’t interfere in future elections.” And how exactly would that work? ...

It seems clear that the current Beltway panic isn’t really a reflection of the magnitude of the perceived threat from Moscow. It reflects panic that someone like Trump could win an election in the United States. If Russia’s actions did, in fact, shape the outcome — and I doubt they did — it was by changing a tiny, marginal number of votes in what would have been a close election anyway. Russian meddling is not the reason Trump was a viable presidential candidate.

Ackerman also wrote:

Think of it as “the expressive function of the Russia freakout.” Just as there is what Cass Sunstein called “the expressive function of law” — “the function of law in ‘making statements’ as opposed to controlling behavior” — there’s a purpose served by the constant keening over Putin. It conveys liberals’ sense of bewilderment and disorientation at a country they no longer recognize — a feeling not so different from that which motivated the Right’s manifold freakouts in the Obama era.

On both sides there’s a sense of loss about a bygone America that no longer exists: for the Right, the white, middle-class utopia of the Eisenhower years. For liberals, the upright decency of the Jed Bartlet administration. The problem with these fantasies is neither of them ever existed.

So it's easy enough to see why the most popular riposte to criticism of the Russia Freakout is an accusation of "whataboutism."  I've been seeing it used more lately -- which does not mean that it's absolutely more common, of course, only that I am seeing it more.  It's bipartisan, too: my Never-Trump Right Wing Acquaintance uses it just as Democratic loyalists do.  Of course, he's engaged in whatboutism himself many times, just as they have; indeed, many accusations of whataboutism are accompanied by more whataboutism.  Whataboutism is only bad when the wrong people use it. 

The first time I remember encountering whataboutism online was in the late 1980s, when a College Republican, defending the Reagan/Bush support for death squads in Central America asked me Whatabout the Sandinistas' human rights violations in Nicaragua?  (Which were, though real, much less severe than those in El Salvador or Guatemala.)  I don't think I missed a beat; I replied that the US should cut off all military aid to the Sandinistas.  I was being snotty, of course, because the US wasn't giving military aid to the Sandinistas: we were waging a vicious proxy war against Nicaragua, killing and wounding thousands of civilians.  I don't recall that my interlocutor had an answer to that; the home office hadn't provided one.

Whataboutism is much older than that, for reasons I'll get to presently.  It was a common response to US propaganda against the Soviet Union, both by the USSR and by apologists in the West. But the US propaganda was itself whataboutist: sure, things aren't perfect in the US or in our client states, but whatabout the terrible conditions behind the Iron Curtain?  (It's related to the popular parental response to kids who won't eat their spinach: Whatabout the starving children in India who'd love to have that spinach?)

But once you start to pay attention, you'll find whataboutism everywhere.  When American racists threw tantrums because the Kenyan Usurper was putting his big dirty feet on the sacred Oval Office Desk (a gift to America from Queen Victoria!), the usual and entirely proper rebuttal was to point out that his predecessors had done the same thing, and more.  When I pointed this out in a whataboutism thread on Twitter, one person indignantly replied that those rebuttals were just stating facts, they weren't meant to insult and mock the people they were rebutting (as the case we were debating allegedly did).  It must take quite a bit of determined effort to miss the scorn and mockery in the article I'd linked, but a partisan will make that effort.

Another classic example of whataboutism I've been citing comes from Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1967 "Beyond Vietnam" speech (emphasis added):

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

When someone accuses me (usually accurately) of whataboutism, I reply demurely that if whataboutism was good enough for Dr. King, it's good enough for me.

As this example indicates, whataboutism is really a basic component of critical thinking.  That emerges in Walter Kaufmann's formula for his canon, quoted here:

Confronted with a proposition, view, belief, hypothesis, conviction -- one's own or another person's -- those with high standards of honesty apply the canon, which commands us to ask seven questions: (1) What does this mean? (2) What speaks for it and (3) against it?  (4) What alternatives are available?  (5) What speaks for and (6) against each?  And (7) what alternatives are most plausible in the light of these considerations?

Now it may be objected that doing all this is rather difficult.  But has it ever been a condition of virtue that it required no great exertion?  On the contrary.

Patricia Miller-Roberts' discussion of demagoguery and debate is also helpful, if only to show that Kaufmann's formulation of critical thinking isn't unique to him.

Another entertaining example of whataboutism went viral recently when a young Anglo-Asian journalist yelled "I'm a communist, you idiot!" at Piers Morgan on a British talk show.  Morgan had been hectoring her about the protests greeting Donald Trump's visit to the UK, asking why there hadn't been any protests when Barack Obama came to call.  Now, in fact, there were protests during Obama's visits to the UK; it's hard to tell under the cross-yelling, but I think Ash Sarkar tried to say so.  Morgan finally referred to Obama as Sarkar's "hero," which prompted her now-famous reply.

Morgan did have a point, one that Obama's critics on the left made repeatedly during his time in office: people who objected to George W. Bush's policies and actions suddenly tolerated or celebrated them when they became Obama's policies.  Antiwar activism diminished during Obama's presidency, for example.  But not all activism disappeared: protests against Obama's immigration policies were big and troublesome enough to push him to try to disarm or appease his critics.  It doesn't matter what Morgan's intentions were, he raised a valid question, and Sarkar tried to answer it.

Whataboutism criers claim that whataboutism is intended to stop debate.  It can be, but so is the accusation of whataboutism.  (More whataboutism -- whatever shall we do, wherever shall we go?)  One reply to this objection would be that whataboutism can also be intended to start debate.  The trouble seems to be, as I've noticed before, that most people have no idea how debate works, what to do once their opponent make a first rebuttal.  They know their talking point, which they got from a meme on Facebook, but it stops there.  They've seen that this or that liberal hero/ine EVISCERATED or DESTROYED the Rethugs with a single well-chosen word, and they think they can do it too.  But those Rethug targets, far from being destroyed or eviscerated, are still in good health and at large.

The proper use of whataboutism is to find out how consistent someone's position is.  If they are outraged by Obama's feet on his desk, did they object to (or even notice) Bush's feet on the desk?  If Bush's surveillance of American citizens was outrageous, did it stop being outrageous when Obama did it?  Remember, though: a responsible critical thinker will ask him or herself such questions before an opponent raises them: not to win debating points, but to test whether he or she has a sound position.  As Nietzsche said, "A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions!!!"

When I point out the US' record of interfering in other countries' elections, I'm not trying to stop debate: I want to start it.  I have some relevant and important questions for the Russiagaters.  For example, should other countries respond to US interference as they want the US to respond to Russian interference?  One difficulty is that it's not at all clear, as Seth Ackerman and Lyle Jeremy Rubin pointed out, how they want the US to respond.  As with liberals' vaunted concern over Syrian atrocities, they are upset and want everybody to know they're upset, but they don't know and don't much care what should be done.  Concrete suggestions, on the rare occasions when they were offered, consisted mainly of a US war against Syria.  As Ackerman pointed out, there's similar vagueness about what we should do about Russia.  There's a lot of posturing and xenophobic grandstanding, but little substance. Some measures for better cybersecurity have been enacted, but they are mostly not being implemented; Ackerman linked to a Politico story which reported that although millions of dollars had been appropriated to help states improve voting security, little of that money has been used.  But, I suppose, it's whataboutism to bring that up.

Constructive Criticism

I'm sorting out some ideas I might post to Facebook.  If they turn out to hang together, I'll just post them here.  It may take a while, but I hope that before too long I'll finish venting and can return either to slacking off or writing on other subjects.  For now I'll try to be entertaining, at least.

It's easy enough to pick on people who are upset because Sarah Huckabee Sanders was refused service at a small restaurant in Virginia.  I've tried to explain why they are fundamentally wrong, but it might help to suggest how they could do a better job.  A better job of framing the problem and the controversy, if you will.

For example, instead of fixating on the nonexistent injustice Sanders suffered, let's try a different perspective.  Having been ejected, civilly and politely, from the Red Hen restaurant, Huckabee Sanders decided to use her bully pulpit as White House Press Secretary, her government Twitter account, to stomp on the restaurant and its owner.  A worker at the restaurant had already posted about it on Facebook, but most of the corporate media didn't pick on it until Sanders notified her vast audience that she'd been treated with disrespect.

If a journalist really wanted to raise the alarm about civility, he or she could have begun by pointing out that, inconvenient and unpleasant as it was to be refused service, it was incomparably more unpleasant for the Red Hen to be put in the crosshairs of the Trump base, and vastly more uncivil for Sanders to put it there.  So a really fair journalist might say something along those lines: We sympathize with Mrs. Sanders for having her dinner plans interrupted, though of course she is completely in favor of less godly persons being refused service, but civility and indeed democracy are under threat when a powerful government official takes petty revenge on a small business for putting her to inconvenience.

My Right Wing Acquaintance, RWA1, lamented on Facebook that "We are all the losers" when this kind of incivility takes place.  He was not, of course, referring to Sanders's abuse of her office to trash a small business, though one might have thought that as a (retired) small business owner himself and a critic of big-government abuses (when they hurt the wrong people, that is), he might have thought of the chilling effect her behavior could have on small business owners who dare to disrespect POTUS and his crew.  He might write something like: I would never refuse service to anyone, but Mrs. Sanders's conduct is uncivil and inexcusable, even if she does feel that she should have been served.  As a believer in small government, I shudder to think that small business owners should hesitate to exercise their rights for fear of being attacked by some unaccountable bureaucrat in Washington.

The important thing is, this never seems to have occurred to either RWA1 or the centrist pundits who've been piling on the Red Hen with Sanders.  It's not surprising, of course: RWA1 and his kindred spirits always side with the bigots first.  They may pay lip service to the bigots' targets, but only on the way to offer comfort to the already comfortable, who suffered so greatly by not receiving the obedience and servility that is their due.

RWA1 was very indignant, for example, when Ben Carson encountered resistance to his giving a commencement address at Johns Hopkins and decided to forego the honor.  "I'm for gay marriage," RWA1 commented as he linked to a fatuous and mendacious essay by the centrist writer Michael Kinsley, "but Kinsley is right about PC heresy-hunting in academia and elsewhere."

Carson took flak for a Fox News appearance in which, among other pleasantries, he compared same-sex marriage to bestiality and pedophilia.  He addressed these themes further soon afterwards on MSNBC.  In addition to declaring that they don't make homophobes like they used to, Kinsley pointed out that Carson is a distinguished neurosurgeon and not your stereotypical toothless redneck bigot.  As if he suddenly realized the absurdity of that defense, Kinsley doubled back and acknowledged that even a university-educated military officer of impeccable pedigree can be the commandant of a death camp, but hey, this is America and we should be tolerant of bigots as long as they have advanced degrees and dress nice.  Kinsley also claimed that he and Andrew Sullivan invented gay marriage in 1989, I suppose to establish his bona fides as an Ally, howbeit a delusional one.  That claim was revised in the online version, but only the first time (of two) he made it; as far as I know, the second instance is still there, later in the text.

But I dissected Kinsley's claims at length at the time.  What I still find interesting is that 1) though antigay bigots must know by now that they will get in trouble if they compare homosexuality to bestiality on national TV, they just can't seem to stop themselves from doing it; 2) though apologists for bigotry will admit the absurdity and viciousness of the bigots' discourse, they will still insist that no one should get upset about it and the bigots should suffer no consequences whatever ("why can't [gays] just laugh off nutty comments like Carson's...?" Kinsley asked); and 3) RWA1, who is not as stupid as he often seems (though as time goes on, I'm beginning to reconsider that judgment), could still post Kinsley's gabbling as an exemplary diagnosis and refutation of "PC heresy hunting in academia."  I was going to wonder just how vile someone would have to be for RWA1 and his ilk to refuse to defend their freedom of expression, but then I remembered the Westboro Baptist Church: RWA1 is always ready not just to place them behind the pale, but to deny their First Amendment rights and to hint coyly that it would be nice if someone were to shoot them in the face or something.  So there are limits, but only for "demon-possessed preachers" and unruly rabble on the left.

There's the consistent pattern in the centrist-media outcry about the death of civility in America, into which people like RWA1 fit comfortably: they always side with the bigots first.  Their balanced, but-on-the-other-hand analyses may admit that perhaps the bigots have gone too far now and then, but that's no reason to say mean things about them or make them uncomfortable in public.  This is a consideration that they do not extend to left-wing agitators, let alone the bigots' targets.  We are supposed to grow thicker skins; the bigots and their apologists can feel a pea through thirty mattresses, and that sensitivity is protected by all the norms of democratic society.  It doesn't take an advanced degree to detect where their sympathies lie.  They're entitled to lay their sympathies wherever they like, but so are the rest of us, and if they want to be taken seriously, they should start being honest about their real allegiance.

The Poverty of "Moderation" and "Civility"

The media haven't yet found something to distract them from the horror of Sarah Huckabee Sanders being refused service at a little restaurant in Virginia, and far be it from me to wander away from the fold.

I'd wondered if any of my Facebook friends would have anything to say about it yet, but so far most of them haven't, as far as I've seen.  My Right Wing Acquaintance did not disappoint: he weighed in with a lament about the lack of "civility" in our society today, and the divisiveness we face.  I pointed out that Sanders was treated civilly by the owner of the Red Hen, and that refusing service is not in itself considered incivility by the Right as long as the right people are refused service; in that case, it's objecting to the refusal of service that is uncivil.  I also pointed out a couple of instances of RWA1's own incivility, along with the example of Ronald Reagan: a bigot and recreational liar much like Trump, whose attacks on the poor and other safe targets delighted his base in his day.  We haven't gone beyond that yet.

As for divisiveness, Jon Schwarz tweeted yesterday that the Right "never imagined that their all-out attack on America might one day have the most mild consequences imaginable."  Conservatives have been at war with most of their fellow citizens, sometimes literally, for most of American history.  When Fred Hiatt, editor of the Washington Post editorial page, tweeted "Breaking up families is repugnant.  But hounding public servants in their private life isn't the right response," among the replies he got were these:

Invoking "consequences" is slippery, though.  It's a popular move on the forced-birth Right, when they say that a woman who has sex needs to take responsibility for the consequences of her sin.  I put it ambiguously there because, though they prefer to forget it, most women who get abortions are married and already mothers.  Just having sex, in their eyes, is the offense for which a woman must be punished.)  It was also popular at the height of the AIDS epidemic: if you engage in dirty sodomitical sex, you must live with the consequences.  They never imagine that their own actions might have consequences that make them uncomfortable.

At the same time, I'm wary of using their own move against them, because it relies on the fallacious assumption that "consequences" are always a natural result of someone's action, rather than something imposed on them by the judgment and choices of others.  (It's a variant of the mind game "See What You Made Me Do," identified by Eric Berne.)  Those who want to impose consequences on Sarah Huckabee Sanders or other Trump team members must remember that they (we) are deciding what the consequences ought to be, and take responsibility for their (our) choices.  I can say, more in anger than in sorrow, that I'm not seeing much of that.

It's like karma, which despite all the caveats and disclaimers, seems always to be invoked for other people.  If I understand the concept correctly -- of course there are many formulations -- it includes not only what other people bring on themselves, but on how we choose to respond to their actions.  If I burn down your house because you're a bad person, I might be an agent of your karma, but I'm also building up bad karma for myself.  One could, I think, make an excellent case that the presidency of Donald Trump is the karma not just of America generally, but also specifically of those Democrats who arrogantly assumed that such a loser could never beat Hillary.

With that in mind, and with considerable fear and trembling, I agree that it's appropriate to put the GOP in the hot seat.  Which doesn't mean I'm approving in advance every sadistic or violent "consequence" liberals and progressives decide is appropriate for the Trump team.  Nor should we forget that Trump and his base will strike back.  That's the trouble with starting a fight: your opponent will hit back.  You need to think about how you'll conduct yourself after that happens, and it seems to me that few people do, especially among those who are nominally on my side.

Still, it's worth remembering that the American Right has been at war, sometimes literally, with most of their fellow citizens for a long, long time.  There are many possible responses to them, but it must be remembered that verbal "combat," even pretty heated, is acceptable.  So are shunning, exclusion, refusing service or fellowship.  I wrote yesterday that if Sarah Huckabee Sanders were starving, I would feed her -- but she's not starving.  If she were homeless and living rough, I would favor giving her shelter and proper clothing -- but she's not homeless; she's all too comfortable.  If Donald Trump were lying in the gutter on fire, I would not piss on him: I would try to put out the flames and call an ambulance -- but he's not (alas?) on fire in the gutter.  I think it's important not to trade in irrelevancies, like mocking people's appearance -- but even if someone did, it's not as bad as separating children from their parents and putting them in cages.  I would deplore fat-shaming Sanders, for example, but I'd still have a sense of proportion in my criticism of the tactic.

And I'm worried about the panicky and yet weirdly complacent irrationality I see among many liberals and progressives, even leftists.  It seems that they feel that Trump's crimes license them to do anything in retaliation, without any bounds.  I've quoted before Walter Kaufmann's paraphrase of Freud, "Not only is the criminal a human being like you, but you, alas, are like the criminal."  I don't have my copy of Without Guilt and Justice at hand now, but that sentence occurs in the context of a discussion of the human impulse to punishment.  The law of talion, "an eye for an eye," not only demands punishment, it limits it: no more than an eye for an eye.  Kaufmann noted that historically and cross-culturally, this limitation has often been needed, that people delight in inventing and executing baroque, sadistic tortures on people as a "consequence," as what they "deserve."  He also critiqued the very concept of "deserving," though not only with regard to punishment.  Given some of the gleeful fantasizing I've been seeing in social media the past few days about what Trump, Sanders, and other people "deserve," I worry about my putative allies' lack of self-awareness and its consequences.  This is not because I believe that we should be nice and give warm fuzzies to the Nazis (the straw man so beloved of many), but because failing to think about what we're doing will result in innocent people getting hurt.  We've had enough collateral damage already, thank you very much.  I can believe all this while rubbing RWA1's nose (figuratively) in the dirt and reminding him that Sanders got (a much milder version of) the same kind of behavior she defends and supports for other people.

It's pointless to squabble about "who started it."  I attack the Right for what they say and do, and I won't let them cast themselves as victims.  At the same time, the Mom's response to "He started it!" is "And I'm ending it."  We also need to think about ending this.  We won't get a better society merely by punishing, trampling, humiliating the Right.  Again, this has nothing to do with warm fuzzies, though there's nothing wrong with warm fuzzies per se: the point is that punishing and humiliating your enemy won't work.  You just get a punished, humiliated enemy who will plot revenge, waiting until your back is turned to restart the fight.  (Paradigm cases: the US Civil War and World War I.)  It's even open to question whether humiliating your enemy will make you feel better in the long run.  But leave feelings out of it -- the real challenge is how to end a conflict without just setting up the pieces for the defeated enemy's payback game.

I also remember that any pushback against our not-so-Shadowy Overlords is unacceptable to them and their lackeys.  Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic is busy chiding the uncivil on Twitter right now: "If civility were more highly valued in our political culture Donald Trump would not be president. If it becomes significantly less valued in the next two years he is a shoe-in [sic] for reelection."  When challenged he replied "on the 'civility works better' side I cite Ghandi [sic] and MLK and Nixon’s re-election. What would you cite for 'incivility gets it done'?"

Friedersdorf is conveniently confusing civility with an avoidance of conflict. Civility is how you handle conflict.  Granted, the Civility Police prefer it that our rulers never face repercussions or any kind of pushback at all, but they shouldn't get their way.  He's also buying into the confusion of moderation of tone with moderation of substance, which is beloved of apologists for harmful policies. E.g., it's okay to kill children with drones as long as you do it politely as Obama did, not nastily like Trump does. Since Friedersdorf's a Christian, he should remember a saying that goes "Because you are lukewarm, I will vomit you out of my mouth." Or look at MLK's remarks about extremism in the letter from Birmingham jail, addressing white moderates who sounded a lot like Friedersdorf does today.

His citation of Gandhi (why is that name so difficult for many people to spell, by the way?) and King is actually absurd. Both men were radical troublemakers whose activism was seen as extremely uncivil by the nice, moderate public servants they opposed and by their servants in the media.  The civil disobedience King practiced was deplored by reasonable moderates while he lived -- I mean, the sit-ins, interfering with Bidness, so extreme and uncivil!  I feel sure that if he'd been active then, Friedersdorf would have lectured him on it.  King embraced the label of "extremist" in his letter from the Birmingham jail, and his rhetoric there, while free of "fuck" and "cunt," was anything but conciliatory.  It's only in retrospect, with considerable deliberate amnesia, that King and Gandhi can possibly seen as "civil" by Friedersdorf's standards.  It might be possible to make a good argument against the Red Hen owner's ejection of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but so far I haven't seen one.

Two Words: Accurate Analogies. You Won't Even See Them Coming.

Jon Schwarz returned last week to a subject he's addressed before, the apparent scarcity of conservative comedians:

This is a Weird Opinion, but I believe there's a connection between conservatives' inability to construct accurate analogies and the near-total lack of competent conservative comedians. That's because constructing accurate analogies is a key comedic skill.

Well, um, you know, I don't think so.  First, I don't think that analogies have to be accurate for audiences to find them funny.  Humor is not a rational, evidence-based phenomenon.  I also don't think that, as a group, liberals or leftists are any better than conservatives at constructing accurate analogies.  But the accuracy (weird word, actually) of analogies isn't an either/or matter anyway.

Take what I hope is an easy example; certainly, it was at Jon's blog, A Tiny Revolution, that I first encountered it.



Writers from The Daily Show reportedly helped Obama write his routine, so even if you don't consider Obama a liberal (I don't), even if you want to deny that the people who laughed at his performance are liberals  (I don't), I think this counts against Jon's theory.  I'm not even sure where an analogy comes in: the point of contact would be death by predator drone, but aside from that, what?  The Jonas Brothers correspond to American children?  One commenter under the blog post drew an analogy between the Jonas Brothers and a 60-year-old Brit slavering over a teenaged girl at a wedding.  (No permalink; just look for N E, a reliable Obama toady at that site.)  The weakness of any analogy involved didn't keep a lot of liberal Obama fans from finding the gag a kneeslapper, though they've mostly preferred to stuff it down the Memory Hole in years since. 

One commenter on the YouTube video wrote, "It IS a dark joke... but if Bush can joke about not finding WMDs (and thus mocking all the people he sent to their deaths based on a lie), then Obama can joke about this." That's exactly the point: people who criticized Bush for joking about not finding WMDs defend Obama for joking about killing kids with predator drones. It's contemptible. It also says something that the commenter focused on "the people he sent to their deaths", presumably US troops, rather than the many more Iraqis he killed: only American lives count.

Of course there are other examples I could give; Hillary Clinton's "We came, we saw, he died," for one.  Clinton's not a liberal either, but liberals didn't object, either to the terror bombing of Libya (disastrous for Libyans, not so much for the US) or to the lynching of Qaddafy.  The analogy in this one is clear: Clinton is casting herself as Julius Caesar, not a great example of democracy or human decency.

Several responses to Jon's remarks from liberals and leftists struck me as clueless.  Such as this exchange:

"Modern conservatives"?  Like conservatives were any better in the past?  Vastleft's reply is even odder.  Smarter people than I have been trying to discover and explain the nature of humor for millennia, but there's considerable acknowledgment that humor isn't empathetic, it's mean even when it's playful.  As Mel Brooks says: Tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

Dayv also wrote:

Much depends on who's the target of the satire.  Was "A Modest Proposal" empathetic toward the English?  No; it was savage to them.  And I have plenty of reason to doubt that liberals or progressives understand what satire is anyway.  Personally I think that good satire should make me wince (whether as author as as consumer) as I laugh, but I also think that's a refinement for pansy-ass intellectuals like me or Dean Swift.  The base of satire is mockery, and any empathy involved is used to make the target squirm harder.

As Ellen Willis wrote in 1979, "Humorless [is] what you are if you do not find the following subjects funny: rape, big breasts, sex with little girls.  It carries no imputation of humorless if you do not find the following subjects funny: castration, impotence, vaginas with teeth."  But that's about as predictable as it gets.  Quite a few men, including me, find her definition funny.  Others, like my Right Wing Acquaintance Number One, pull a long glum face at it.

RWA1, significantly, was extremely upset by Michelle Wolf's performance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner a few weeks ago.  (Transcript here.) It was tasteless, it was awful, it was going to hurt the Democrats' chances of getting Trump out of the White House.  Concern-trolling again, you see.  It wasn't even his ox that was being gored -- he hates Trump as only an establishment Republican Never-Trumper can -- but I suppose that was the problem: true, she mocked Trump, but she also mocked establishment Republicans and Democrats, Hillary Clinton, the #Resistance, and the respectable media, which was Inappropriate, So Unnecessary, and definitely Going Too Far.  He seemed not to have noticed that the White House Correspondents Association was as unhappy as he was. Personally, I think he was revolted by all her references to lady parts, which always make him queasy.

Does the widespread disapproval of Wolf's performance indicate that her analogies were inaccurate, or that they were accurate?  I thought she was on-target most of the time, but obviously not everyone agrees.  The accuracy of analogies is as subjective, I would argue, as humor itself.

I could also mention the popularity among liberals and progressives of fag jokes about Trump.  If I were feeling charitable, I could suggest that their motivating impulse is at base conservative, but I'm not feeling charitable.  What I think bothers me most about the distinction Jon drew is that it buys into an assumption that "conservative" and "liberal" refer to actual discrete types of human beings, perhaps reflecting innate biological differences: They are fundamentally different than Us.  Their many errors can be blamed on their nature, as our adherence to Truth is due to ours.  Something wrong with that; call it a failure of empathy.

Incidentally, today is the eleventh anniversary of this blog.

Kicking Away Tiny Tim's Crutch Because His Father Voted for Trump

Just last week I realized that it has been less than a year since Donald Trump became President.  It seems like so much longer.  And we have at least three years more to go.

Today Corey Robin, whom I've begun following lately, posted this on Facebook, referring to this tweet from Eric Alterman.  (Doug Henwood also noticed the tweet.)  I'm glad I'm not the only person who's noticed the behavior he's talking about:

I'm surprised when liberal writers and journalists say they're fine with Trump voters losing their jobs, health care, access to potable water, and so on, because they had it coming to them. Since jobs, health care, and clean water are critical to one's survival, such calls are essentially an endorsement of death on the installment plan for one-half the country. Imagine the reaction of these very same writers and journalists if the radical left were to call for—or endorse—the death of their domestic political enemies.

Or if the radical right were to do so.  Recently my Right Wing Acquaintance Number One gleefully linked to an article about child malnutrition in Venezuela, sneering at that country as a "worker's paradise."  Of course, those children had voted for Chavez and Maduro, so they had brought their misery on themselves.  A day or so later RWA1 linked to a story about Roy Moore's attack on the gay son of his victorious opponent Doug Jones; RWA1 declared that Moore, like the late Fred Phelps, was of Satan.  I commented that RWA1 needs people like Moore and Phelps so that he can pretend to be a moderate while he does a happy dance at the plight of starving brown children.  I might also have pointed out that child malnutrition is a serious problem in the United States, thanks to the policies of both parties over the past few decades; but I doubt RWA1 cares about that either, since those children probably voted for the "aspiring Mussolini" Barack Obama.

Robin's post sparked some discussion, with a few people actually defending Alterman's remarks.  Some denied that anyone besides him had expressed such sentiments; a couple doubted that he or any other liberal could actually mean such a thing.  That excuse could probably be made for many Trump voters, though.  Later in the thread Robin added:

This country has had a large anti-democratic element since its founding. If anything, I would say the size of that element is considerably smaller (and less violent) today than it was the year I was born. I also think comments like the one I posted are not symptoms of populism; they're symptoms of tribalism. Party tribalism, where your team is the good guys and the other team is the bad guys. Even tribalism is too fancy: it's just groupiness and cliques. That again is why you see a lot of heated rhetoric from this quarter but no action.

I was glad to see that he too has noticed the limitations of the word "tribalism."  This, as Henwood noted, is why liberals are so popular, and as one of Henwood's commenters remarked, it's how to win elections.

Unlike Corey Robin, I'm not all that surprised by Alterman's sentiment, since I've seen so much of it already -- just extremely pissed off. But it also makes me feel a bit more hopeless, because it means that the people who are supposedly, nominally, on my side are really not, which means that there may be hardly anyone to make common cause with. In the US at least. As a result, I get called a nihilist, which is funny but stupid - and also depressing since it comes from people who are nominally on my side. Well, you live and learn.

Moderation

The worst thing about Donald Trump is the same as the worst thing about the late Fred Phelps: he's so obnoxious that other extremists can use him to seem moderate and reasonable by comparison.  So, for example, Senator Lindsey Graham has just denounced Trump as a "race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot" who "doesn't represent my party."  Now, any observer of the American political scene knows that race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigots are the backbone of the GOP, which deliberately wooed them away from the Democrats during the Nixon administration.  Just to limit myself to Graham, in 2010 the New York Times called him "this year's maverick," which is corporate media code for a frothing, shamelessly warmongering bigot that the paper wants, for some reason, to cultivate.  So, of course, my Right Wing Acquaintance No. 1 linked to Graham's denunciation of Trump, adding, "Trump is, indeed, a fascist."  RWA1 likes people like Trump and Phelps, for the same reason: he can use them to present himself as a reasonable, moderate person.

The second worst thing about Trump is that he's a safe target for liberal Democrats, who are flooding the Intertoobz with abuse of him.  As my new meme, above, suggests, this no doubt makes them feel better, but has no useful effect that I can see.  Admittedly, it's hard to know what would have a useful effect.  But I saw one enlightened soul refer to Trump as a "retard" the other day, thereby showing his vast moral and intellectual superiority to Trump and his supporters; a fair amount of the anti-Trump stuff does help drag down the level of discourse in our nation, as if it weren't already low enough.

Here's a better reaction to Trump, from an interview with the leftist Anglo-Pakistani writer Tariq Ali on Democracy Now! this morning.  Amy Goodman asked him what he thought of the move in Parliament to ban Donald Trump from England.  Ali replied:

And I, myself—Amy, I have to say that, you know, I’m not in favor of banning people, because once you start banning people from the right who are mouthing extreme-right rubbish, this then leads to similar bans against progressive people, people on the left accused of being terrorists, etc. It’s better to debate these people out rather than to ban them. That’s my opinion.

Mine too.  It's funny to imagine Trump hoist on his own petard, but liberals never seem to remember that the repressive actions they favor will eventually be used against them.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

It's almost funny, in a horrible way.  Of course you all know that there's trouble in Iraq.  Last night my Right-Wing Acquaintance Number One was fretting over it, linking to an article from the Christian Science Monitor, which is a better source than NRO or The Daily Caller.  The "original invasion," RWA1 conceded, "was very badly handled," rather like an Obama cultist admitting that the President has in some ways been a "disappointment."  One of RWA1's friends advocated another US invasion of Iraq and of Iran and Turkey, to divide them by ethnicity and bring peace to the region; this, he said, would be "the best way we could help."  What could possibly go wrong?  It's good to be reminded that there are people even farther out of touch with reality than RWA1.

This morning I saw that liblogger Roy Edroso was having another hearty laugh at the Right's expense on this issue.  And true, there's plenty to laugh at.  Edroso quoted Slate columnist Reihan Salam, who wrote:

So why did the U.S. leave Iraq at the end of 2011? Part of it is that many within the Obama administration simply didn’t believe that U.S. forces would make much of a difference to Iraq’s political future.

Edroso invoked the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by the Bush/Cheney junta in 2008, which was the main reason the US left Iraq at the end of 2011, more or less, if you overlook the remaining American troops and mercenaries.  In other words, it was the Bush administration, if it was anyone, who "didn't believe that U.S. forces" blah blah blah.  But Edroso neglected to mention that Obama tried to modify the SOFA to allow US forces to remain in Iraq past the negotiated date.  (I looked over the first 70 comments on Edroso's posts, and none of his readers mentioned the facts either.)  The Iraqi government refused to grant "legal protection" to US troops who committed atrocities and other crimes, so Obama had to keep his campaign promise to end the war, which must have been painful for him.

The facts are unpalatable to either party.  Obama fans have made much of his supposedly ending the war, trying hard to forget that the end was negotiated by the Bush administration.  Republican Obama opponents have tried to forget that the end of the war was Bush's doing, not Obama's.  As in so many other areas, the parties have constructed a fantasy version of recent US history.  We live in the United States of Amnesia, darlings.

Richard Seymour posted his take on the matter:

I see it's time to get back into Iraq. It's been a while and, let's be honest, we've all felt the absence of imperial omnipotence registered in daily beheadings deeply. Last time, the US promoted some Iranian clients, installed them into a new patrimonial state, trained up their death squads - and then complained like fuck when Iran seemed to make some strategic gains in the situation.

True.  I guess things have been too quiet lately, or something.

At The American Conservative, Daniel Larison did a neat dissection of one writer who called for immediate US intervention in Iraq:

Jeffrey leans very heavily on creating the impression of impending catastrophe, but that appears to be alarmist exaggeration aimed at scaring people into endorsing the very dubious idea of sustained military action in Iraq for months and perhaps years to come. Once we think through what Jeffrey is proposing, we should all be able to see that an air campaign would be just the sort of stupid, knee-jerk reaction to a crisis that the U.S. should strive to avoid.

Of course we should, but will we?  Our rulers are looking desperately for another chance to use our superb military, which requires ginning up popular alarm.  It's a harder sell than it used to be, but sooner or later they'll find a workable pretext.  ISIS is an imminent threat to America!  If we don't act now, these scary Islamic terrorists will pour across the undefended US/Iraq border and conquer us, raping our cattle and stealing our women! These dirty pacifists don't care how many innocent people are massacred by the bad guys (as opposed to the good guys, namely us). We've got to do something! 

I'll be back home in the morning, after an overnight flight from San Francisco.  I don't know how long it will take me to get back in the groove, but I'll do my best.

Identity Politics and the Limits of Tolerance

My Number One Right-Wing Acquaintance posted a link on Facebook yesterday to this Fox News puff piece on a right-wing gay Republican, Carl DeMaio, who's running for Congress from San Diego, California.  The article is graced with the gag-making cliche "Straight talk about gay Republican Congressional candidate Carl DeMaio" for a title, but that's probably an improvement over what the URL suggests it was before: "No one puts gay Republican Carl DeMaio in a corner."

According to the article, DeMaio is an orphan who put himself through "a top-tier college" before "building and selling two multimillion-dollar companies."

Thus financially secure, he decides to dedicate himself to public service and runs for City Council.

In his first term he works across party lines and four years after his first election he passes major pension reform that saves the city money and protects the retirement savings of thousand of people. 

I was already suspicious at this point: since when do Republicans care about either "public service" or "major pension reform" that doesn't mean depriving people of their pensions?  Right-wing media like Fox News only talk like this when they're misrepresenting something.

DeMaio even "feature[d] his partner in his campaign literature"!  He ran for mayor of San Diego, suffered a solid defeat, and decided to go for a Congressional seat.  The author of the piece, Dana Perino, claims that liberal gay groups sabotaged DeMaio's mayoral candidacy, which may be true, but she doesn't mention that DeMaio's right-wing backer, Doug Manchester, published an editorial in his newspaper slamming him.  Maybe that's less important than the failure of gay organizations like the Victory Fund or Human Rights Campaign to support DeMaio, though I don't think it's irrelevant.  It makes me wonder what else Perino is leaving out.

Perino has nothing to say about same-sex marriage, for example, which is odd in a piece about a partnered gay politician.  It appears that in 2008, DeMaio depended on support from prominent advocates of Proposition 8, and (therefore?) said nothing about the issue, and "Only recently has he rather meekly acknowledged a tepid support for same-sex marriage."  Marriage isn't an important issue for me, but it is for many gay people, so it's not exactly surprising that DeMaio's collaboration with supporters of Prop 8 has hurt him with gay voters and gay political organizations.

"Isn’t his story what everyone who fights for equality says they’ve been fighting for?" Perino cries.  Well, no, it's not.  Despite Perino's sneer at "identity politics," it seems that she thinks that gay political organizations should support DeMaio and gay people should vote for him, just because he's gay.  His platform, his politics, his positions on other issues -- any issues at all -- should evidently be ignored simply because he's gay.  Perino's article barely touches on his platform.

“Our economy is in the tank. We’re in a national debt crisis. The progressive agenda in D.C. is not producing results. Washington politicians from both political parties can't defend their broken programs, so they have to play the shiny object game on social issues,” he says.

That's all, and it hardly inspires confidence in this candidate.  DeMaio is still pushing the bipartisan Republican-Democratic line that did serious damage to the American (and world) economy and hurt the majority of Americans.  It sounds to me like he would support the next Republican attempt to shut down the Federal government if he is elected.  I know there are numerous gay people who'd agree with the nonsense Perino quotes from DeMaio, but they'll vote Republican anyway.

For instance, DeMaio has been the target of homophobic attacks. But where are those attacks coming from? It’s not always from the far right social conservatives you’d expect; rather, it’s been from DeMaio’s left – the liberal and Democrat-affiliated groups that you’d think would be proud that an openly gay successful businessman has decided to run for office. 

You'd think that only Republicans were "successful businessmen."  But given the virulent political stupidity expressed by numerous CEOs and other successful businessmen in the past few years, why should I as a human being (let alone a gay man) be proud that one of them is gay and running for office?  And even more, why should I vote for a fool simply because he's gay?

I haven't tried to verify Perino's allegations about unethical conduct by Democrats with respect to DeMaio; they may very well be true.  Those of us with ill-disciplined memories will recall how, during the 2008 primaries, Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign attacked Barack Obama in racial terms, and Obama's campaign made sexist attacks on Clinton.  I'm not a Democrat, so I'm not going to cry "Say it ain't so, Joe!" over such things; I have plenty of other good reasons to distrust the Democratic Party.  But I also have plenty of good reasons to distrust the Republican Party.  That's the trouble with a two-party system: it encourages the assumption that if one side is bad, the other must be good -- when both are pretty bad.  What concerns me here is that there are few things funnier than Republicans playing the victim card when Democrats use their own tactics against them; Carl DeMaio needs to stop whining and, as the saying goes, man up and grow a pair.  Just as funny is the spectacle of Republicans trying to co-opt touchy-feely liberal (or "politically correct," as they call it when anyone else does it) rhetoric about "diversity."

RWA1 added to his link a vague remark about "an interesting exception to expected stereotypes"; I jeered that the article itself is full of stereotypes; he replied that "stereotypes or not, feminists and gays often betray their own for a left-wing agenda, which seems to override all other claims."  (Notice how he tried to evade the fact that he'd invoked stereotypes to begin with.  As if gay conservatives in American politics were some kind of novelty!  Once again RWA1 flaunts his willed ignorance about the contemporary scene.)  Oh, I said, unlike the Right?  And I linked to this blog post by the National Organization for Marriage (heterosexual-only, of course), which attacks DeMaio as a stealth "radical" whose "idea of reform" involves "Support for same-sex 'marriage,' abortion, gun control and marijuana."  The post continues ominously:

DeMaio's latest campaign finance report shows that he's raised nearly $1.5 million, a lot of it from Washington insiders and gay activists. Among his key supporters is Ken Mehlman, who has donated thousands to his race.

Does the name Ken Mehlman ring a bell? He's George Bush's former campaign manager who also served as Bush's White House political director and the former Chairman of the Republican National Committee. Mehlman is gay and, like Carl DeMaio, wants to impose same-sex 'marriage' on the nation. Mehlman was instrumental in raising the funds that fueled the push to redefine marriage in New York, a huge coup for gay 'marriage' activists that generated international media attention and gave our opponents a great deal of momentum.

Mehlman has since been a key person in mobilizing the corporate community and Republican officials like Jon Huntsman and Meg Whitman to endorse gay 'marriage.' He even filed a brief with the US Supreme Court in the Proposition 8 case and told a reporter he hoped the Republican members of the Court would see that "conservatives" support gay 'marriage.' A majority of the Court — tragically including Chief Justice John Roberts (appointed to the bench by George Bush) — went on to issue a ruling that let stand a lower court ruling invalidating Proposition 8.

If Ken Mehlman is supporting Carl DeMaio, you can count on DeMaio becoming another tool in his arsenal to redefine marriage.

But wait -- there's still hope.

Fortunately, there's a true conservative running against Carl DeMaio who stands a chance of upsetting DeMaio in the upcoming primary election.

Kirk Jorgensen is a highly-decorated former Marine officer who served tours of duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan where he led human intelligence, counterintelligence and force protection missions to thwart terrorism, espionage and sabotage against the United States and allied forces.

But Kirk Jorgensen is more than a military hero. He's a loving husband and a devoted father who will be a champion for all the issues we care about, especially preserving marriage as the union of one man and one woman...

I'm not going to kid you — Kirk Jorgensen is an underdog fighting the Washington machine that is backing Carl DeMaio. Still, Kirk has raised nearly $250,000 and if we all band together to support him we can make this a real race.

But he needs each of us — you and me — to make a sacrificial gift right away so that he has the funds needed to expose the DeMaio agenda that will destroy the Republican Party and unalterably damage America.

We Americans love the underdog, so I'm considering making a contribution to Jorgenson's campaign -- not a "sacrificial" one, just a token -- to help split the Republican vote against DeMaio's Democratic opponent -- and preserve "diversity" in the Republican party.

The Least of These

Today a friend and I had dinner at a local restaurant.  Since it's semester break and between holidays, the town is quiet, and there weren't many other people present, so I noticed a group of people sitting nearby.  They were two men and two women, all in their late 20s, and a baby about a year old. The adults were college types, possibly young professionals.  I noticed that the men were holding and playing with the baby, and I supposed they were two heterosexual couples out for the evening.

But gradually I noticed that the men never handed the baby to the women: they handed him back and forth between them, bouncing him and cuddling him, and though I couldn't make out most of what they were saying, they were both talking about him and his crotchets in a familiar manner. The women commented occasionally but didn't seem to be contributing stories of their own about his sleeping habits, diaper usage, how often he ate, or the like.  Gradually it dawned on me that while they were two couples, they weren't heterosexual couples: rather, they were a gay male and a gay female couple, and the baby was the son (adopted, I presume) of the two men.  When they finished their meal and got up to leave, the baby stayed with the men; the women didn't even hold him for a moment.  The men carried him out to their car, strapped him into his car seat, and drove away.  The women went off to their own car.

This wasn't the first time I've seen gay parents in the field, so to speak, but it's still a relative novelty in Bloomington.  It inspired a complex mix of feelings, but I think foremost in my mind was protectiveness.

I think one reason I've been so inactive lately is that I've been trying to decide whether or not to write about the fuss over the Duck Dynasty "patriarch" Phil Robertson.  I imagine most of my American readers know the background by now, but I do get some traffic from overseas, and it's possible that those readers might not have heard.  The controversy was summed ably by the blogger Ampersand at Alas, a Blog:

Phil Robertson, a long-bearded dude from a hugely successful A&E reality show makes racist and homophobic comments during a GQ interview, leading to objections from various lefties and lefty organizations, which A&E responded to by “suspending” Robertson (although the suspension may be “just for show“), which led to various right-wingers objecting to left-wing totalitarianism and blah blah blah you get the gist of it.

Ampersand went on to sum up the issues involved quite well, saying most of what I thought about the "kerfluffle" (the word I'd have used for it), so I'll just refer interested readers to that post.  Or to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote two excellent posts focusing mostly on Robertson's warped perspective on American race history, without slighting what he had to say about homos.  And, as Americans who pay attention to things also probably know, A&E lifted the suspension on Friday, which can hardly have surprised anyone.

I think the main reason I couldn't bring myself to write about all this was that I was horribly depressed by the Floodgates of Stupid opening once again.  On most sides.  Rod Dreher began grinding out warnings that Christians were being persecuted by Teh Gey, just as he had so often predicted; I stopped reading after the first two or three.  I would not have minded so much the gibbering of the Christian Right, complaining that Robertson was being persecuted just for bearing witness to the teachings of the Bible.  I had some fun pointing out that Robertson and his supporters are clearly Cafeteria Christians who ignore Biblical teachings that don't interest them, such as the apostle Paul's declaration that long hair on a man is shameful.  The Robertson men are walking, talking, embodiments of shame, going against nature according to Paul, who spoke with divine authority.  The conservative Christians I mentioned this to ignored it, thus showing how devoted they are to Scripture.  No surprise there.

The responses of most liberals, gay and straight, were just as dispiriting.  Many of them spoke piously of the sanctity of contract: Robertson had entered into a solemn binding agreement with A&E, and he'd broken it by saying things they didn't like, so he had no right to complain.  Such people didn't have much to say when I asked them if this meant that they were okay with employers controlling every aspect of employees' lives?  The First Amendment protects citizens' free speech from government interference, however inadequately, but big corporations are at least as big a threat to civil liberties as big government.  Did these people think it was okay for MSNBC to fire Phil Donohue for being too skeptical of the Bush Administration's rush to war in Iraq?  I mean, he was an employee too.  Again, there wasn't much response to this question.  As usual, the reaction was mainly partisan: only people on Our Side, whichever side that happened to be, have the right to say controversial or offensive things.

My Right-Wing Acquaintance Number One did not disappoint: he was furiously indignant about Robertson's suspension.  Like numerous rightwingers, he thought that Robertson shouldn't be penalized (or, apparently, even criticized) for saying what many sincere people believe about homosexuality, and after all, that's what the church teaches.  Another of his Facebook friends asked him what he thought about Robertson's comments about contented darkies in old Looziana, and he admitted he hadn't read that far.  After checking, he answered sullenly that not many churches support racism anymore, which was a charming non sequitur.  True, even Bob Jones University has fallen from its former fierce Bible-based defense of racial separation, but a good many American whites still subscribe to the belief that Jim Crow wasn't that bad, that Southern whites viewed their black servants as family, and that now that Those People have their rights, racism just isn't a problem anymore.  Robertson was surely talking for about as many people in his remarks on race as he was in his hysterical condemnation of buttsex.  I didn't think to ask how many churches have to teach a particular doctrine before it becomes exempt from public criticism; I wish I had.  RWA1 went on to link to a post in defense of Robertson's bigotry by Camille Paglia, whom he called a "righteous broad", and he claimed that the attack on Robertson's statements was motivated by an outbreak of class hatred.  This from a man who declares that American culture is going down the toilet because of commercial culture, which would surely include Duck Dynasty's white trash aesthetic!  It's also instructive to compare RWA1's reaction to Robertson to his condemnation of the Westboro Baptist Church; as I've pointed out before, WBC mainly functions as an extreme, compared to which other bigots can declare themselves moderate.  And though RWA1 defended the right-wing doctor Ben Carson, who said similarly stupid and bigoted things about homosexuality, he was silent when the liberal actor Alec Baldwin got into trouble for using homophobic epithets.  As I said, partisanship is obviously the deciding factor.

All this confirms my general sense of the inadequacy of American political / cultural discourse, which is nothing new but is still depressing when my nose gets rubbed in it.  (I reached a similar point a little over a year ago, during the 2012 election campaign, for the same reason.)  I don't think this is anything new, as I've said before, but I still believe that it can and must change.  I kept thinking I should write about it, but it seemed like too big a subject, and yet for just that reason I couldn't seem to motivate myself to write about anything else.  For one thing, I often have the feeling that I'm repeating myself, taking on the same cluster of topics over and over again, just because they become prominent, over and over again, in what passes for the national conversation.  Or maybe just the parts of the national conversation that I see.  I haven't started yet another post on The Modern Concept Of Sexual Orientation and Gender Binary for the same reason: I've written plenty about it before, and don't really have anything new to add.

But seeing those two dads and their son in the restaurant made me think of something else, which makes me think I should call this post "Why We Fight."  In the last analysis I'm not all that offended by Robertson's remarks about queers; they're predictable and tired, and they don't, by themselves, do me any harm.  And I've often griped about liberals' overwrought reaction to offensive speech -- Oh, how can you say such awful things!? -- which I see as self-stroking, self-displaying, self-righteous outrage not very different from that of the bigots.  It certainly does nothing to foster dialogue or debate with those who differ from us; but as I've also observed, most people anywhere on the political spectrum aren't really interested in debate or dialogue.  It can't be because they've tried it and they're tired of it: those I observe have never engaged in dialogue or debate that I know of.  I've done it much more than most people, for all the good it does.

What has concerned me since the 1960s, when I first began delving into these issues -- the Civil Rights and antiwar movements at first, then the gay movement and feminism -- is that other people should not be hurt.  I don't want to be hurt either, but I've suffered relatively little.  And once I could speak up, it seemed important to do so, so that other people could be emboldened and feel less alone.  Just standing together isn't enough -- I think of Stephen Vizinczey's remark about the anti-Semite who "wouldn’t look for a Jew to fight, only for a Jew to mob" (The Rules of Chaos [McCall, 1970], 208).  Alas, most liberals aren't looking for fundamentalists or bigots to fight, only for one they can mob.  Even in a controlled, structured situation, they can't carry on a discussion.  This doesn't distinguish them from their right-wing counterparts, of course; that's the trouble.  Both groups can throw up prefabricated, predigested opinions on their Facebook timelines, but if they're challenged about the content or the ideas they can only retreat to abuse and self-pity.

And yet I can't withdraw from the struggle.  There are plenty of people who would feel fully justified in taking that little boy away from his fathers.  Such things have happened before.  They will happen again.  I don't know where Phil Robertson would stand on an issue like that.  Instead of throwing hissyfits about how awful he is, someone should ask him, in public.  If he wants to be grossed out by the idea of two men having sex, that's his right, but I want to know what he proposes to advocate about public policy.  The same goes for opponents of same-sex marriage when they pretend that they don't object to gay couples, they just want to reserve the sacrament of marriage for one man and one woman.  The same thing goes for someone like Pope Francis, who talks a nice non-judgmental line about gays, but I want to know what that means in practice.  Would a male or female couple with a child be welcome in his Church, or its facilities?  I don't think this is that hard; finding out that it apparently is too difficult for the reality-based to handle is what depresses me.

Dis-Illusioned

A blogger at The American Conservative pointed me to this post at The New Yorker today, on "the death of the novel."

(Incidentally, I'm a bit bemused by the fact that I'm finding a lot of intelligent writing at The American Conservative.  But I find that somewhat reassuring.  RWA1 and other right-wingers have lamented the stereotype of conservatives as, well, not too bright.  RWA1 himself complained about this on Facebook a few weeks ago: What, he wailed, about the great minds of the Right, like "Russell Kirk, Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich Hayek, Harvey Mansfield"?  Why don't you libs talk about them?... I'd be happy to, but alas, RWA1 never links to them.  Instead he routinely serves up such second- and third-raters as Thomas Sowell, Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., George Will, Jay Nordlinger, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Peggy Noonan, Joe Rehyansky, and the Op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal.  Oh, and these persons.  ["A different kind of feminist," he called them, but he doesn't know shit about feminism.]  And he evidently believes that the late Andrew Breitbart was anything but a crooked hustler ... But I digress.  The point, and I do have one, is that there are people on the Right today who can think.  I don't agree with them on most things, probably -- Daniel Larison, for example, is evidently opposed to same-sex marriage, but that's not what he writes about -- but I'll read them, link to them and quote them when they say something useful.)

Anyway, that post at The New Yorker.  It's a reply to Tim Parks, a novelist and writer who posts at the New York Review of Books blog.  The New Yorker writer says:

The essay is diaristic, and this is part of what makes it interesting: there is something forlornly personal in its lament. Parks’s repeated distrust of novelistic wisdom seems telling. Latent in the life devoted to literature is the promise—although we don’t perhaps know where this promise comes from—that books will, in time, arm us with experience and maturity. But what if the solace of wisdom fails to arrive? Parks relates meeting with a former mentor who, retired and confined to a wheelchair, confessed that once-beloved novels by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, and others had come to appear like “empty performances.” There may seem to be a lie inherent in works of realism that, in the final reckoning, fail to prepare you for what reality actually brings. And how futile it must feel, as a writer, to inexorably repeat that lie in each forthcoming book.

It's a common mistake to confuse one's own life-cycle changes with what everybody else thinks.  I'd been wondering recently if I'd lost interest in contemporary movies for just that reason.  After you've watched enough movies over many years, you may lose the ability to be surprised by them. Movies from the 50s and 60s I loved as a kid, for example, are often painful to watch now, with their wooden dialogue and stereotyped acting.  An acquaintance I met at the library today pointed to the Sean Connery James Bond DVDs on display nearby, for example, and asked what I thought of them.  I'd watched some recently, and couldn't get through them, with their mindless sexism, racism, and Cold War politics, but also their dated music and sensibility, the Playboy mentality that assumed the exemplary coolness of rich white guys with sports cars, hi-fi stereo systems, and Jazz music lps.  I've also watched movies with some unsophisticated friends who laugh delightedly at slapstick violence and other devices that didn't work for me, and I found myself wondering whether they weren't better off than I, since they could still enjoy them.  But I still wouldn't give up the experience of having watched and enjoyed a far wider range of films than they can, or of having read a similarly wide range of books, or listened to a wide range of music.

On the other hand, this past week I watched two recent movies, This Is the End and Europa Report, and was surprised at how much I enjoyed them.  Europa Report is a small-budget science fiction flick about the first "manned" expedition to the Jovian moon Europa to see if there's life there; This Is the End is about the End of the World, featuring various bro-movie stars (Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, James Franco, et al.) playing versions of themselves as Los Angeles collapses and is invaded by demons.  Both had their flaws, but I didn't worry too much about them, just enjoyed the expert playfulness at work in them, their joy in telling stories and creating illusions.

Which brings me to something else that occurred to me as I read Sam Sacks's response to Parks, though it's not something he said explicitly in the piece: Sacks did talk about Parks's "disillusionment" --

What about brilliance, beauty, truth? Parks doesn’t deny that these qualities exist in today’s literature; he merely contends that they have ceased to carry meaning. That in itself should point up the severe limitations of world-weariness as a guiding philosophy. If brilliance and beauty are traps, then consciousness itself is a trap, and the world, as Hamlet famously opined, is a prison; but even Hamlet understood that he was, to some extent, full of it.

 -- and it occurred to me that all art and entertainment involves the making of illusions and require suspension of disbelief.  Sometimes we lose the ability to suspend disbelief, it's true, but that's to do with us, not necessarily the works we're taking in.  When I first saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for instance, I fell in love with the visuals as well as the story and characters.  Watching Zhang Ziyi and Michelle Yeoh run and leap across rooftops took my breath away.  I knew it was fake, but the actors were able to create a sense of conviction about the fantasy.  (The much younger friend I saw it with griped about the wirework, despite director Lee's cutting-edge use of the technology; but you should see the movies he could take seriously.  I recall many geekboys who reacted to Crouching Tiger by celebrating movies like Ong Bak that didn't use wires (or so they thought; they were often mistaken), just "natural," "realistic" fighting (clearly they were unaware of the intricate planning, choreography, rehearsal, and multiple takes required to get that "realism" -- even Roger Ebert, who should have known better, thought that the sound effects of men falling from a tree at the beginning of Ong Bak were simple realism, no doubt from live mikes during the shoot).  Similarly I've had some interesting exchanges with people who insisted that nothing is needed in fiction but simple, direct, natural begin-at-the-beginning storytelling -- but there's no such thing.  (Starting a story in the middle or near the end of the plot, for example, is ancient; see The Odyssey or Oedipus Rex.)

Art is never natural; it's always art, in the old sense of the word which means objects (material or immaterial) constructed by human effort and skill.  And it always involves illusion, whether it's sculpture, drawing, poetry, fiction, drama, film, photography -- what you think you're seeing isn't really there, but to enjoy it and be affected by it you have to pretend for a while that it's there after all.  Where is the "meaning" in a poem?  In the words?  Between them?  Between the lines, in the white space?

But beyond this, the contempt for illusion and the ephemeral has bothered me for a long time: the belief that nothing has any value unless it's eternal and immortal.  It requires the fantasy that something is eternal and unchanging, but leave that aside.  Language itself is an illusion, the illusion that the noises we make are charged with immaterial "meaning," whatever that is, and strung together they make bigger, more serious meanings, so that you can talk about the meaning of a poem or story that is in the words, on the page.  Those meanings are in our minds, just like the meanings we construct from music or films.  I can sympathize with Tim Parks's loss of the ability to lose himself in fiction, whether as writer or reader, but it's his failure, not the failure of the works.

Operatic Justice

To my surprise and pleasure, our local public radio affiliate reversed its decision to remove the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts that have aired every Saturday afternoon for many years.  It turned out there was more support for the Met than had at first appeared, and station management had to back down.  Not too surprisingly, they weren't happy at having lost this battle, and I'm sure it was totally coincidental that an IU Music School alum and former music director and "director of new media," whatever that means, for the local station, wrote a letter to the editors of an online magazine "for people in public media" to denounce the reversal.

The reversal may have been a victory for classical-music lovers of Bloomington, but I see it as a serious setback to the station and new evidence that WFIU is being held captive by a small group of listeners who put their own interests over the station’s public-service mission ...

Bloomington is a well-educated, mostly affluent, highly connected college town. But WFIU broadcasts to a large swath of southern Indiana, with translators extending its reach to largely rural communities such as French Lick. Many of these communities are, or are in the process of becoming, news deserts, with limited local news coverage, lower broadband penetration and less access to online news. Over-the-air broadcast still really matters to these communities.

Even if we ignore the metrics-based, hard-business case that calls for WFIU to introduce more news coverage to its broadcast service and focus solely on its public-service mission, the station management’s decision to devote more of the weekend schedule to news and information was the right one.

In principle this sounded reasonable enough, until I remembered that the programming changes had little or nothing to do with "news and information": rather, they involved replacing the opera with mostly game-show programming -- middle-brow game-show programming, to be sure, but still hardly the noble mission the writer tried to make it seem to be.  If the station management wanted to go by a "metrics-based, hard business" criterion, why not add some sports programming?  Why not a hip-hop program?  (That would probably have caused strokes among the largely geriatric Met fans, creating some openings on the Community Advisory Board.)  I'm sure there was no ventriloquism from the Bloomington affiliate's management to the Director of Technology of the Investigative News Network in Columbus Ohio; this is just a matter of number-crunching technocrats thinking alike, and control-obsessed managers outraged that the rabble dared to challenge their decisions, and won.  The divide between his pious pretensions and the actual new programming was a giveaway of the extent of management's distance from the ethos of public media.

My Right Wing Acquaintance Number One, one of the classical-music mavens who led the opposition the change, was furious.  He linked to the letter on Facebook, and fumed:

This is outrageous. If the Saturday programming had actually been "news" instead of the pop cultural swill that it was, it would not have been so bad. Dinner Party Download? Really?!!! How in the world does that suport [sic] the educational mission of Indiana University?

The link set off some discussion in comments, and in answer to one of his friends who hadn't bothered to look for the letter-writer's biographical information -- listed not only as a note but in the body of the letter -- RWA1 wrote that the writer

was once a music student and WFIU techno person who has gone full time into a variety of media consulting. I think he has been seduced by the dark side of IT and techno people and forgotten his roots. That clown posse seems to be determined to dismantle western civilization brick by brick until all we have left is ragged shreds of "light classics" barely covering an emaciated torso of half-educated "wits" and chattering news mavens. Public radio forsooth! For this we are to be paying taxes when there are hundreds of channels of half-wit entertainment and political chatter? Fie!

That's a mind running on autopilot.  I called RWA1 out a week or so ago for this kind of frothing, quoting one of his own rants back at him: "Apocalyptic hysteria is always cropping up, but the conspiracy fantasies are really getting out of hand with the internet."  As you can see, RWA1 is fine with apocalyptic hysteria and conspiracy theorizing when he's the one doing it.  (But who isn't?)  So we have a "clown posse" on the "dark side" seducing innocent music-school graduates into "dismant[ing] western civilization brick by brick," etc.  I considered posting an allusion to authentic frontier gibberish to the comments, perhaps modifying it to something like "authentic right-wing gibberish," but I realized that such sniping, while fun, wasn't really what I wanted to do.  This time.

As I ruminated on this while out for a walk, though, I tried to figure out where the gap between reality and fantasy lay here.  In general, the kind of people RWA1 was attacking don't see themselves as trying (or wanting) to dismantle western civilization.  The letter writer began his polemic, predictably enough, by professing his love for classical music, and I believe him.  He probably doesn't see Western art music as RWA1 does; when he attended the Jacobs School, it was probably as a performer -- and classically trained musicians see their music very differently than their audiences do.

But then I remembered that many people on the American political right do hate "Western civilization."  If they profess allegiance to it, they're generally coming from a position of profound historical and cultural ignorance, preferring edifying myths about both history and culture.  Remember the Right's ebullient contempt for "old Europe" when European governments didn't fall eagerly into line with Bush/Cheney's war on terror?  Lawrence W. Levine showed in The Opening of the American Mind (Beacon, 1996) that educated, elite Americans have always been ambivalent about Western civilization, and often tried to cast America as a new, independent cultural force in the world.  And there's always been a strong streak of philistinism in American society, combined with a vague feeling that art is good for you, like sunshine.  You don't have to understand it, or think about it -- thinking is dangerous, and probably leftist -- but just being exposed to it builds strong bones.  (But hey, it can also cause cancer.)

In particular I thought of the Right's campaign against the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Though its public-relations arms focused on scandalous avant-garde work like Andre Serrano's "Piss Christ" (whose title alone could cause the veins in Republican foreheads to throb painfully) or exhibits of Robert Mapplethorpe's photography, a lot of public support for the arts goes to local-level arts education.  Shakespeare, for example.  Katha Pollitt wrote in The Nation in 1996 that

The Bard's popularity is not entirely due to his own fabulousness, after all: A rather elaborate network of educational and community resources has ensured that hundreds of thousands of students in secondary school are introduced to the plays in an exciting, intelligent way.  Around the country, though these programs -- the teacher-training projects of Massachusetts's Shakespeare & Company and the Folger Shakespeare Library, which also runs a celebrated monthlong summer Teaching Shakespeare Institute; the school performances of Washington's Shakespeare Theatre -- are struggling under federal and state cutbacks, including major slashings at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Education.

These federal agencies are held in horror, of course, by canon defenders, who fought long and hard and apparently successfully to delegitimize them in the public eye.  Defund the left -- remember that slogan -- by defunding education?  Talk about destroying the village in order to save it!  But who points out that Lynne Cheney and other canon conservatives are depriving students of the ability to appreciate the very literature they claim to care about?  [reprinted in Katha Pollitt, Subject to Debate (The Modern Library, 2001), 101].

But the ginned-up hysteria (NSFW!) over Mapplethorpe's "Man in Polyester Suit" (ditto!) was really just cover (see, I've got my own conspiracy theories, but this one is a fairly open one) for a general attack on the Commons, on public institutions and services generally.  The Right doesn't care whether American public schools are failing: they oppose public education altogether.  The Right doesn't care if public broadcasting is too "liberal": it opposes public broadcasting altogether, though right-wingers have been happy to use PBS when it gave them a podium.  (Much as RWA1 is willing to put up with NPR's fantasized liberalism in order to get his taxpayer-subsidized opera fix.)  Ratings-obsessed managers and consultants would probably have gained a foothold in public radio stations in any case, but the Right's successful campaign to cut support for public broadcasting -- thus throwing it on the mercy of corporate "donors" -- helped them to legitimize their perspective.

So RWA1 is experiencing the backwash of his party's war on the Commons, much as the Tea Party's corporate sugar daddies are worrying now about their beneficiaries' shutdown of the US government: they are perfectly happy to attack the government, as long as it doesn't hurt their business.  Since they are inextricably tied to and dependent on government services in myriad ways, there is no way a failure of the government could fail to hurt them; but it never occurred to them that their creatures would ungratefully injure the Libertarian billionaires who helped them get started.  Attacking public broadcasting was bound to affect the cultural products that people like RWA1 value, but No One Could Have Foreseen that.  Elitists always imagine that they'll be taken care of, and usually they are.  They enjoy siccing the mob on competing elitists, because it never occurs to them that the pitchforks and torches might someday appear outside their doors.