A couple of hot-shot commentators hit the target on Chris Matthews, but neither hits the bullseye. To do that, we need to take a trip back to a classic Seinfeld episode....
Yesterday, both Dday at Hullabaloo and MissLaura at DKos commented on a particularly bizaare piece of cable tv political threatre on Hardball, which was pointed out by Media Matters.
Here's the Media Matters summary:
On Hardball, while remarking on Sen. Barack Obama's reported request for orange juice after being offered coffee at an Indiana diner, David Shuster asserted: "[I]t's just one of those sort of weird things. You know, when the owner of the diner says, 'Here, have some coffee,' you say, 'Yes, thank you,' and, 'Oh, can I also please have some orange juice, in addition to this?' You don't just say, 'No, I'll take orange juice,' and then turn away and start shaking hands." Host Chris Matthews agreed, "You don't ask for a substitute on the menu."
DDay made a fairly solid point:
Now, this isn't limited to Democrats, actually, here's a recent report about how McCain couldn't fold his pizza in half like a real New Yorker. The difference is that those quick hits on Republicans don't usually make that metaphorical leap to turn some random event about bowling or orange juice into a symbolic manifestation of the candidate and Democrats in general. I mean, if this did hit Hardball, someone would say that everyone knows McCain's a real man and he just isn't used to New York's way of chowing down on pizza but he made a game attempt and isn't it great that he tried? What a guy!
And MissLaura got down into the wonky details of Dinerland:
Third, "substitute" doesn't mean what Matthews thinks it means. So I'm going to school him on that one. (But first, to establish my regular-guy authority to speak of diners, I will note that in each of the last two towns I've lived in, there's been a diner waitress who knew my regular order.)
A substitution is when you're ordering a meal and ask to have one of the components of said meal replaced with another. Perhaps you ask for fresh fruit to replace the bacon in your lumberjack breakfast, to choose a hearty-regular-guy-eating-a-big-meal example that I predict will send a thrill up Tweety's leg. Asking for orange juice as a stand-alone order? Not substituting.
And if your waitress likes you -- an experience Tweety may never have had -- you damn well can substitute.
No, those idiots are the ones who don't know how you work a damn diner. Shoot, they apparently don't know how you order in one.
But both, I fear, missed something quite essential here. For what Tweety & Co were talking about was not how one behaves in a diner, but how one performs there-specifically, how a candidate performs the act of being a "regular Jo(e)" in a diner. And, as it turns out-Surprise! Surprise!-performing authenticity is quite another thing than actually being authentic.
Truth and lies have switched places: Lies continually repeated function like the truth, while truths that go unuttered function as if they were lies. A prime example of this in the 2000 election was the conventional wisdom that Gore was a serial liar, while Bush was a man of great integrity-a straight-talker.
Taken to the extreme, things that cannot possibly be so have taken the place of fundamental truths. A prime example of this is the so-called "war on terror"-something that makes absolutely no sense, if you stop and think about it.
Verbal formulations are used that are inherently non-sensical and cannot be used rationally-at least in the existing total environment. "Supporting the troops" is a prime example of this.
"Supporting the Troops" As An Inherently Deceitful Formulation
Sending soldies off to die in a worse than meaningness, counterproductive war is "supporting the troops." Trying to end that counterproductive war, and bring them home alive is "not supporting the troops." Sending them off to war without adequate body armor, medical care, and R&R is also "supporting the troops." Trying to ensure that they do have adequate body armor, medical care, and R&R is not "supporting the troops," it may even be "not supporting the troops." If they come back badly injured mentally, giving them bogus discharges for previously undiagnosed "personality disorders" is "supporting the troops." Trying to stop this heinous practice is not "supporting the troops," and even, very likely "not supporting the troops."
In sum, "supporting the troops" is supporting whatever Bush wants to do. But we don't say, "supporting whatever Bush wants to do." We say "supporting the troops," instead, because Bush has a long, long history of hiding his failings behind other people's reputations and virtue
Clearly, something very odd is going on here, and while many bloggers have commented on this over the years, I'm not aware of anyone who I think has fully nailed it. I'm not going to nail it either, because I think it might well take a 300-page book to do it justice, but I am going to add something useful, I hope.
Truth and lies have switched places: Lies continually repeated function like the truth, while truths that go unuttered function as if they were lies. A prime example of this in the 2000 election was the conventional wisdom that Gore was a serial liar, while Bush was a man of great integrity-a straight-talker.
Taken to the extreme, things that cannot possibly be so have taken the place of fundamental truths. A prime example of this is the so-called "war on terror"-something that makes absolutely no sense, if you stop and think about it.
Verbal formulations are used that are inherently non-sensical and cannot be used rationally-at least in the existing total environment. "Supporting the troops" is a prime example of this.
Part 1 explored the first idea. Now it's time to examine the second one:
(2) Taken to the extreme, things that cannot possibly be so have taken the place of fundamental truths.
The most obvious, and dominant example of this is the so-called "war on terror," which started off as the "war on terrorism"-a very different concept. Terror is a state of mind. Terrorism is a strategy, though the adjective, terrorist-as in "terrorist attack"-more frequently refers to tactics that are part of a terrorist strategy. Neither is the sort of thing that one can fight a war against. Wars on abstract nouns generally do not turn out well, for the simple reason that abstract nouns can never surrender. The fact that the "war on terrorism" imperceptibly morphed into the "war on terror" is indicative of how vacuous and non-sensical the entire enterprise is.
We are way past Orwell's 1984 here. At least Oceana and Eurasia were the sorts of things that could have always been at war with one another. But neither terror nor terrorism are this sort of thing. Indeed, it's not simply false to say "we are fighting a war on terror" (or "terrorism"). It is worse than false. It is meaningless.
The great 20th Century physicist Wolfgang Pauli coined an expression that is applicable here. Having looked at a paper by a young physicist, he remarked that it "wasn't even wrong," meaning that it didn't even get the problem right, much less the solution. And such is the case with the "war on terror/terrorism," as well-although actions taken in its name, such as the Iraq War, can be much worse than meaningless, by greatly worsening the realworld situtation that "war on terror" so meaninglessly mis-describes.
In a diary Friday, Matt asked for help in understanding something significant:
I've become fascinated by the effects of honesty/dishonesty in a culture. I live in DC, and I'm beginning to think that there are characteristics of those in power that are more reflective of a mass psychological disorder or strange cultural affinity for self-deception than 'money in politics', bribery, or corruption can explain.
This got me thinking, and revisiting some ideas I've been kicking around for a while. Here are three of them that I think are closely connected:
Truth and lies have switched places: Lies continually repeated function like the truth, while truths that go unuttered function as if they were lies. A prime example of this in the 2000 election was the conventional wisdom that Gore was a serial liar, while Bush was a man of great integrity-a straight-talker.
Taken to the extreme, things that cannot possibly be so have taken the place of fundamental truths. A prime example of this is the so-called "war on terror"-something that makes absolutely no sense, if you stop and think about it.
Verbal formulations are used that are inherently nonsensical and cannot be used rationally-at least in the existing total environment. "Supporting the troops" is a prime example of this.
I'm going to discuss all three in diaries today, beginning with the first point on the flip.
