Most of you probably know this one: A man is wandering around under a street light looking down at the ground. Another man comes up to him, and asks, "What's going on?" The first man says, "I lost my car keys, and I'm looking for them." The second man says, "Here, let me help you. Where did you lose them?" The first man points up the up the street a bit, "Over there," he says. The second man looks at him, puzzled. "But, if you lost your keys over there, why are you looking for them here?" he asks. The First man scoffs at him," It's dark over there. Can't see a thing. The light's much better over here."
I first read this in a book of Sufi stories by Idries Shah. Supposedly, it's ancient, much, much older than cars and modern street lamps. And I believe it. It speaks to an incredibly common foible: look for the solution that's easy to see, comfortable to look for, regardless of whether it relates to the problem. I thought of that story last weekend, as Vastleft did his best to hijack a comment thread in a global warming diary to once again bash Open Left for not fanatically supporting single-payer--even though all of us feel that it's the only practicable solution in the long run. It began with this comment by selise:
"not politically feasible" and "
The real problem, of course, is that--just like with health care reform--there's way too much money being made and to be made by those who are causing the problem in the first place. So actual solutions are not really wanted--so much so that they are simply dismissed as "not politically feasible."
i love this quote and plan to use it frequently, but i'm also reminded of something you, paul, wrote in your previous post:
...civility is not the answer. Civility would be just fine, if accountability were for the wealthy and powerful and not just exclusively for the rest of us, along with more than our fair share of blame.
Rather than civilly adjusting our public expenditures to the private penury of the post-1973 world, we should be quite rudely fighting to restore--and even improve upon--the broad prosperity of the pre-1973 era. Nothing less than that deserves to be called "progressive." Nothing less than that deserves to be "justice." Nothing less than that deserves to be "humane." Nothing less than that should be our bottom line.
these two quotes and what i think you are saying we need to do, seem, at least to me, directly at odds with what we are actually doing here... what i'm referring to is the recent banning of people who were insufficiently civil in demandinng a fight for just and humane healthcare.
how can you write:
Nothing less than that deserves to be called "progressive."
and then not defend the people who were saying EXACTLY that?
There's a big difference between disrupting your true enemies and disrupting those who would be your allies, if only you could stop demonizing them.
In this case, "those who would be your allies" refers specifically to other single-payer supporters who see that goal as something that--unfortunately--we can only achieve in stages. But the principle expressed is far broader than that.
In trying to paint Drum as a bigot, Lind was engaged in the age-old Southern strategem of misrepresenting northern disgust with Southern bigotry as itself constituting a kind of bigotry. Necessarily overlooked in this "clever" inversion is the fact that Southern bigotry is based on skin color and alleged group attributes that no individual can change. Northern criticism is based on Southern political culture, and individual behavior, which millions of White Southerns in fact have changed.
Bit of a difference there.
In fact, Lind has a multitude of problems thinking straight about individual and group attitudes, as revealed in his column--a characteristic that's quite typical of effects of white supremacy. This is not to say that Lind is a white supremacist. I don't believe that for millisecond. But as historical works such Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory have clearly demonstrated, whenever anyone tries to accommodate themselves to Southern white supremacist ideologies--whether actively or passively--the end result is inevitably a tangle of contradictions, and wholesale abandonment of reality. However innocently one begins--such as Walt Whitman's ministering to those wounded in battle--the end result of the attitudes and narratives that emerge are inevitably pernicious in the extreme, and they are as pernicious to logic and truth as they are to human dignity.
This is what we behold at work in Lind's arguably well-meaning attempt to focus on the need for building cross-racial, cross-regional solidarity for an economic populist agenda. My previous diary, "Michael Lind Secedes From Reality: Mixing Up Race, Class, And Party ID In The South", showed that Lind was mistaken in his very premise--the Birthers are not primarily representative of the White Southern working class base he wants us to reach out to. They primarily represent better-off White Southerners who want to buttress their higher socio-economic position with a veener of moral superiority as well. And Lind's "hands-off" admonitions would only help them in this quest.
But there are a multitude of other confusions as well, as indicated by the preceding diary on Lind's misrepresentation of Kevin Drum. In comments, Gray quickly pointed something I was saving for this diary as a sort of jumping-off point: Lind generalized wildly to "liberals" in general based on a single post by a single blogger. Even if he hadn't misrepresented Drum, that's a mighty small data set. But it's perfectly consistent with the imperative to defend "Southern honor." More fun and games along these lines on the flip.
Palin Calls Media Criticism of Her Smears of Obama A First Amendment Threat!
Of course it goes without saying that Palin is utterly clueless about the First Amendment. But what tickles me most about this is how utterly typical of the rightwing bully mentality it is. Everything's fine until someone dares lift so much as a pinky finger in response to her bottomless venom. ABC reports:
Palin Fears Media Threaten Her First Amendment Rights
October 31, 2008 11:25 AM
ABC News' Steven Portnoy reports: In a conservative radio interview that aired in Washington, D.C. Friday morning, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin said she fears her First Amendment rights may be threatened by "attacks" from reporters who suggest she is engaging in a negative campaign against Barack Obama.
Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama's associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks. Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate's free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.
You remember this from third grade, right? The way the schoolyard bully burst into tears when someone finally stood up to them and popped! them one in the old schnozzola?
My, my! John McCain, flip-flopping to engage in baseless character attacks! No one could have foreseen....
ACORN to McCain: Have You Lost That Loving Feeling?
Senator Allied with ACORN as Recently as 2006, Now Turns Cold Shoulder
October 13, 2008, Miami, FL - U.S. Senator John McCain's recent attacks on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), are puzzling given his historic support for the organization and its efforts on behalf of immigrant Americans. As recently as February 20, 2006, Senator McCain was the keynote speaker at an ACORN-sponsored Immigration Rally in Miami, Florida at Miami Dade College - Wolfson Campus....
Bertha Lewis, Chief Organizer of ACORN, said, "It has deeply saddened us to see Senator McCain abandon his historic support for ACORN and our efforts to support the goals of low-income Americans. Maybe it is out of desperation that Senator McCain has forgotten that he was for ACORN before he was against ACORN; he was for immigration reform before he was against immigration reform; and he was a maverick before he became erratic. We were thrilled to partner with him to help reform the outdated immigration laws in this country, and were pleased to work closely with him on this issue." [Emphasis added.]
The beauty part here, of course, is letting all the wingnuts know how close McCain has been to ACORN in the past.
We now have additional information about the McCain supporter at the McCain forum in Lakeville, MN who said "Obama is an Arab" ["terrorist" cut off], which McCain quickly corrected. Her name is Gayle Quinnel. Here's the video:
And on the flip is the transcript of a post-event interview from Noah Kunin, Senior Political Correspondent from The Uptake. Also participating are Adam Aigner of NBC News and Dana Bash of CNN. You can view the inverview here.
Earlier this week, my diary "Ayers Attack 'Ridiculous,' 'Nonsensical,' 'Silly'--Former GOP IL State Rep" highlighted an NPR story debunking the notion that William Ayers was some sort of sinister figure when Barack Obama first crossed paths with him politically. This morning, my previous diary, "The Discourse of 'Terrorism' - Thinking The Unthinkable", cut more deeply, questioning even the notion of casually labelling Ayers a "domestic terrorist" and the larger framework of "terrorist" discourse behind such labelling. I now want to take a similarly broad look at how ACORN and Ayers are both being used in building a demonizing narrative against Obama, which we should expect to be used to try to delegitimize him, just as the GOP worked feverishly to delegitimize Bill Clinton in the 1990s. I had hoped to do it in a single diary, but that's not really possible, so here's the first installment.
Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer, began blogging in October 2005, shortly before the New York Times revealed the program of illegal NSA wiretaps begun shortly after 9/11. He wrote about the program and the lawless philosophy behind it in his first book, the Times bestseller, How Would A Patriot Act. Shocked as he was at the Bush lawlessness, he became increasingly shocked at the media's indifference, and seeming inability to even grasp either significant details or the profound moral and political issues at stake. His ongoing analysis of Republican misrule and the complicity of the media in either ignoring or misreporting it has grown deeper, and drawn increasingly more attention, particularly since his blog moved to Salon in February 2007.
His focus in Great American Hypocrites is the national scene, where an adoring press lionizes one would-be conservative moral giant after another, following the template created by John Wayne--a thrice-married, alcoholic, drug-addicted draft-dodger, considered a heroic figure because of the roles he played, particularly during WWII when bigger stars than he were fighting overseas. In California, we have our own John Wayne knock-off as governor, and equally ga-ga press that never seems to notice the enormous plot-holes in his script, such as his continued alliances with polluting industries against the health and environmental welfare of harbor area communities. By illuminating the larger, national pattern, Greenwald's new book illuminates a great deal about state and local politics as well.
"Just as drag queens must use wildly exaggerated female costumes, makeup, and gestures to mask their masculinity, rightwing leaders must use increasingly flamboyant warrior disguises--and an increasingly war-hungry agenda--to obscure what really lurks behind those disguises."
--Glenn Greenald, Great American Hypocrites, p. 110
Note: This is a blogosphere review, written for folks with considerable online experience and refernece points. I also did a print review in Random Lengths News that's available for other alternative newspapers to run, here.)
Don't let the title fool you. Hypocrisy is not the point of this book, it's merely the hook. The point is the role of the hypocrisy, and the larger politics of dissembling and distraction that it is a part of. To understand it is to destroy it... or at least to start the process.
Greenwald begins by noting a striking disconnect--on the one hand, voters broadly favor Democratic Party positions over Republican ones across a wide range of issue, but on the other hand, Republicans have won more elections. The reason?
The most important factor, by far, is that the Republican Party has used the same set of personality smears and mythical psychological and cultural imagery to win elections. These myths and smears are amplified by the rightwing noise machine and mindlessly adopted by the establishment media. Right-wing leaders are inflated into heroic cultural icons, while Democrats are demonized as weak and hapless losers. These personality-based myths overwhelm substantive discussions and consideration of the issues.
For most of us deeply immersed in the blogosphere, who see examples of this pointed out and discussed virtually every day, this may not seem like such a striking revelation. But even seeing it on a daily basis doesn't mean that we fully appreciate its significance. To the contrary, we're so immersed in it that it's difficult to put into perspective. This is, to my knowledge, the first book to argue that character attacks on Democrats and contrasting idealization of Republicans constitute a core explanation for Republican electoral success over the past three decades. It's this central thesis that gives Greenwald's book a larger significance that deserves attention from everyone concerned about politics, including dedicated policy wonks.
The recent behavior of Congress approaches the level of clinical insanity. This is not snark. It's reality-based observation. And such observation is vitally necessary in order to not sucked into the insanity ourselves. I want to explain precisely what I mean, and I want to present some reference points, so we may appreciate how deep and long-standing this insanity is.
Otherwise, quite frankly, the French Revolution option starts to look mighty good. And we all know how badly that turned out. Just because we are ruled by an imbecilic, out-of-touch, gang of narcissistic twits does not mean we should kill them all. Actions have consequences. They may not know it, but damn sure better. And so it behooves us to find a place of sanity from which to observe, analyze, and start to correct this sea of madness that threatens to engulf us.
And make no mistake, it is a sea of madness. One that we have all been swimming in from at least 1995, when the GOP took over Congress. If we think it started with 9/11, we are deluding ourselves, and one consequence of that delusion is that we expect Beltway Democrats to recover their sanity mush faster than they are actually capable of. Of course, it's eminently reasonable to expect to be governed by people who are sane. But we have not been a reasonable nation for a very long time now.
