| A Patriot Traitor Interlude--With Teabags!
First, the easy stuff, a brief recap of the most recent secessionist moment, the April 15 teabagging moment.
The DKos/R2000 poll on Texas support for secession produced the predictable pattern: Do you think Texas would be better off as an independent nation
or as part of the United States of America?
US IND
ALL: 61 35
REP: 48 48
IND: 55 40
DEM: 82 15
A pattern that's even clearer when it's put this way: Do you approve or disapprove of Governor Rick Perry's suggestion
that Texas may need to leave the United States?
APPR DIS
ALL: 37 58
REP: 51 44
IND: 43 50
DEM: 16 80
The pattern's predictable because we all know about the Civil War, plus we know about the "my way or the highway" mentality that deeply permeates rightwing thinking. And, of course, there was the whoel Teabagging movement that startted it all. We couldn't tell in advance of the Dkos poll what the exact numbers would be, but we knew it was a given that Republicans would be much more into secession than Democrats would. And so it was.
What's behind this, in part, is something I've written about various times before--sequential thinking, which is illuminated by the following passage from Political Reasoning and Cognition: A Piagetian View by Shawn Rosenberg, Dana Ward, and Stephen Chilton, p. 102-103:
Thus, one is a Boston-Tea-Party-style superpatriot simply by putting on the costume and carrying a sign about taxation and representation--even one that ahistorically says "Taxation With Representation Still Sucks". Thinking in terms of specific, concrete observations and conceptual relations that are "synthetic without being analytic" means that one can claim pretty anything that pops into your head, provided you can repeated it often and vividly enough--i.e. make a real impression. And by gum, if repetition counts, and analysis is out, then all that matters is that the Confederates were revolting, too, just like the Boston Tea Party, so traitors really are more patriotic, so there!
Sarah Barracuda
With Palin, the key is to recognize that not only is she engaged in sequential thinking, but she's also guided by her own internal representations. This is what she means by being "mavericky"--she does whatever she damn well pleases and makes up excuses as she goes along, developing and elaborating on favorite narratives as she goes along.
What this means comes sharply into focus in part of Palin's resignation speech that's been a cause of considerable consternation:
Let me go back to a comfortable analogy for me - sports... basketball. I use it because you're naïve if you don't see the national full-court press picking away right now: A good point guard drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her eye on the basket... and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can WIN. And I'm doing that - keeping our eye on the ball that represents sound priorities - smaller government, energy independence, national security, freedom! And I know when it's time to pass the ball - for victory.
This extended is obviously incoherent, as Keith Olbermann observed:
OLBERMANN: Passing it, then running out of the court, out of the gym, through the parking lot and out of town...
But the incoherence has a logic to it that directly connects to Palin's contention that staying in her job would be "quitting", while quitting her job is not. What's the logic? Simple: Sarah's personal ambition. Nothing else is real to her.
This is clear from the initial set-up of the passage quoted. The "national full-court press picking away right now" is now is obviously not picking away at Alaska, even Palin isn't deluded enough to think that. It's picking away at her. Of course this is delusional. The press has treated many, many people much worse than it's treated her, but this sort of incompetent GOP politician self-pity is so old and tired that it's no longer cause for any puzzlement. We understand it all too well.
But then there's this:
A good point guard drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her eye on the basket... and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can WIN.
If Palin's the one feeling the full-court press, who exactly is the team? And who is she passing the ball to? By quitting her office, she is quite clearly passing the ball to her Lt. Governor. But that means the team is her administration, and WINNING would be passing its agenda. But this clearly makes no sense, as there are significant differences between Palin's policies and her Lt. Governor's. Plus, of course, there's the fact that the national press practically never even mentions Alaska politics when talking about her. No, the "team" would seem to be movement conservatives, the GOP, or some amorphous entity approximating one or both of them, although, come to think of it, actually purporting to be the American People, as movement conservatives are reflexively incapable of not doing.
Which would seem to be confirmed by the remaining part of the passage aboce, which is still utterly incoherent in its own right, but that definitely rules out any interpretation that has Alaska as its subject:
And I'm doing that - keeping our eye on the ball that represents sound priorities - smaller government, energy independence, national security, freedom! And I know when it's time to pass the ball - for victory.
Again, there's no consistent metaphorical interpretation that makes sense of that passage, but seeing it as a self-centered narrative of Palin's own heroic sacrifice makes perfect sense, as it's all about her and her self-representation that involves sequential thinking, which is "not abstrat, do[es] not facilitate generalization, and do[es] not support metaphorical thinking."
Indeed, the fact that Palin's rhetoric makes no sense in terms of any coherent extended metaphor, and only makes sense in terms of her own ever-shifting point-of-view is precisely what binds her supporters so tightly to her: to really, really, really support Sarah Palin, you must think like her--not just sort of like her, but exactly like her, because how she thinks shifts arbitrarily from moment to moment with no external logic whatsoever, jumping from one sequence of appealing imagery to another according to the dictates of whatever demons are closing in on her at that particular point in time.
The Secret Life of David Broder
At first, it might seem odd to think of David Broder in the same terms as Sarah Palin, but their virtual identity reached out and slapped me in the face earlier in the week when I read a diary (alas, I know not where!) that quoted the following entry from Paul Krugman, and then added some crucial additional tid-bits, which I will just have to reconstruct from memory. First, here's Krugman:
Al Franken's secret
David Broder has a column this morning calling for bipartisanship. I know, you're shocked. But what struck me was this bit about Al Franken:
Franken, the loud-mouthed former comedian, will be the 60th member of the Senate Democratic caucus ...
Two points.
First, implicit in this characterization of Franken is the notion of the Senate as a decorous gentlemen's club. I doubt that club ever existed in reality; but in any case, these days the World's Greatest Deliberative Body is, not to put too fine a point on it, chock full o' nuts. James Inhofe: I rest my case.
Second, Al Franken's dirty secret is that ... he's a big policy wonk.
I used to go on Franken's radio show, all ready to be jocular - and what he wanted to talk about was the arithmetic of Social Security, or the structure of Medicare Part D.
In fact, the only elected official I know who's wonkier than Al Franken is Rush Holt, my congressman - and he used to be the assistant director of Princeton's plasma physics lab. (The campaign's bumper stickers read, "My Congressman IS a rocket scientist.")
So what will Franken do to the level of Senate discourse? He'll raise it.
To which commentator Mim Song added:
and third, Franken's comedy was certainly not of the "loud-mouthed" variety. Another case of projection, I fear.
while "rhetorical tool" elaborated more fully:
And even as a comedian, Franken was never a "loudmouth." Stuart Smalley? His from the scene news reports on SNL with the satelite dish on his head? His standup? His comedy actually comes from understatement. Sam Kinnison was a loudmouth. Al Franken was the quiet nebish in the corner. If you're going to criticize Al Franken, at least have it make sense, anyone who has ever seen him perform knows he's about the furthest thing from a loudmouth.
This last part, from the commentators, is a good place to start (especially having lost the diary that originally hooked me). Broder's erroneous stereotyping not only reveals projection, as Mim Song so aptly notes, it also reveals lack of attention to empirical facts, as "rhetorical tool" points out: he's got the wrong guy. This hooks back to the missing diary, which had a quote underscoring Broder's bored indifference to actual matters of policy. It's not just that Broder is indifferent to policy outcomes, favoring "bipartisanship" as a matter of principle no matter what the result, he can't even be bothered to care about pretending to know anything of real substance--and he's ragging on Franken for supposedly not being serious!
But on top of everything else I've just noted, this also gets back to sequential thinking. For Broder, all that matters is appearances. The fact that Franken never even was a "loud-mouthed comedian" is utterly irrelevant to Broder. All that matters is that image "loud-mouthed comedian" makes it into the sequence of images that he reels off to his readers.
Broder's entire piece is synthetic--put together--without being analytic--composed of rational, reality-based claims which can be subject to critical scrutiny, Of course, Broder's column looks like it has rational claims in it, but they're invariably just bald-faced lies that have been refuted so many times that many folks can refute them in their sleep. They are, in fact, phrases that look like rational claims, but repeated efforts to get Broder to defend the tripe he writes clearly demonstrate that they are no such thing.
In the column in question, for example, Broder says, without citation, "Scholars will also make the point that when such complex legislation is being shaped, the substance is likely to be improved when both sides of the aisle contribute ideas."
Shortly after that, he switches gears to making "pragmatic" arguments, writing:
The simple fact is that White House outreach to Republicans has not failed. It has yielded two of Obama's most important victories. In February, when the White House was searching for 60 votes to end debate on the economic stimulus bill, Obama was rescued by three Republicans -- Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who later switched to the Democratic Party.
That vote, 60 to 38, with not a single one to spare, gave Obama an important early win. Had he failed, or suffered a lengthy delay, his presidency would have been off to an awful start.
The second big win came just days ago, when the House for the first time passed an energy bill limiting discharges of environmentally dangerous carbon. The vote -- after days of frantic bargaining -- was 219 to 212.
But, of course, those are two perfect examples that directly refute his claim that "the substance is likely to be improved when both sides of the aisle contribute ideas." If this were some unknown personage writing a one-column making these claims, one could plausibly argue he was simply ignorant and mistaken, but nonetheless engaged in rational argumentation.
But Broder's been peddling these same tired old arguments over and over and over again for decades on end, and every time he trots them out the same sorts of glaring contradictions can be found...by any not-overly-ambitious twelve-year-old with an internet connection. His sneering, off-hand mischaracterization of Al Franken was the key to unlocking the code in which he always writes: he is always dealing in trite stereotypical claims, run together without heed to actual evidence or logic. He is a sequential thinker through and theough.
Which, at bottom, is just one more reason that, as Krugman commentator Michael Fallai notes:
I know this is hardly an original observation, but David Broder's idea of bipartisanship is - and has always been - Republicans doing whatever they want and Democrats quietly going along with it.
All the thinking stuff just makes his head hurt, actually. Just like Sarah Palin. |
