Results tagged “politics” from Koax! Koax! Koax!
If you want a translation, luckily I speak fluent Pentagon. So what “disproportionate” means is—well, imagine that you’re watching some little hanger-on who tags along with you get his ass whipped by a bully, and you say, “That’s inappropriate!” I mean, instead of actually helping him. That’s what “disproportionate” means from the Pentagon: “We’re not going to lift a finger to help you, but hey, we’re with you in spirit, little buddy!”Less comprehensive (and funny), but no less informative, is Mark Ames's take on things, and in particular John McCain's delusional reaction to them.
By the way, I don't know if you were watching, but the Russians shut down The Exile back in June. Oh, I'm sorry, they didn't shut it down. They have a free press in Russia, after all. They conducted a surprise audit of the newspaper and scared its investors into backing out. First time they'd done that to an English-language publication, so there's another landmark.
Anyway, Ames was the editor of The Exile, so if there's anyone who'd be likely to take a less than sanguine view of the Russian government, it's him. You'll note he's not cheering for Georgia in this affair.
A movie reviewer who has built a career as a right-wing pundit by crusading for decency, Medved is about as qualified to write about the history of slavery as he is to pilot the Space Shuttle. The result (found here) is comedy gold.
Come with me and we'll take a little trip through what he's calling six "inconvenient truths" about slavery.
1. SLAVERY WAS AN ANCIENT AND UNIVERSAL INSTITUTION, NOT A DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN INNOVATION.
This first section exposes us to the Medved method, which is to assemble a loose set of unrelated facts and organize them so that they're all pointing in the same direction without giving too much thought to their deeper implications.
For instance, he's exceptionally pleased to have found a tribe in South America that not only enslaved its captives but ate them. Well boy howdy, that's something we can hang our hat on: "America: We Didn't Eat Our Slaves!" There's also some great back-of-the-envelope math here (we'll see more of this when he gets into economics), proving that the Islamic world is worse than America because they enslaved more Africans than we did. Which is true, if you don't count children born into slavery among the enslaved, and though it did, as he admits, take them more than a thousand years to accomplish this.
The question he doesn't trouble to ask himself (though David Brion Davis, whom he name-checks, does), is: was there anything distinctly different about the American institution of slavery? And, why, yes, yes there is, and it's the core of a problem that Medved spends the whole piece tiptoeing around: the basis of American slavery was race.
The Greeks and Romans enslaved people they defeated in war. Their justification for slavery was, as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly put it, that there are men with guns, and men who dig. Growing up Corinthian during the Peloponessian War meant you had a pretty good chance of ending up a slave yourself. (The Greeks, whose wars involved a little more commitment than ours do, didn't have a word like "chickenhawk.") But when slaves bore children, those children weren't enemies captured in a war, they were children born in Rome or Athens. And as such, they were free to become citizens.
Not so in America. Our justification for keeping African slaves wasn't that we beat them in a war: it was that we thought black people weren't fully human.
Since they weren't fully human, their children weren't fully human either. Slavery may be a "timeless norm," as Medved blithely puts it. But enslaving people because they were subhuman, that was new and different.
It had lots of implications that didn't exist in the Greek or Roman versions of the institution, too. Romans didn't consider their slaves to be livestock. They didn't try to cross different strains to get better field hands. They didn't breed slaves for sale. The Greeks didn't have words like "mulatto" or "quadroon," either. They didn't need to figure out what race a person belonged to in order to determine what rights the person had.
The American version of slavery is especially arresting because it fixed African captives and their descendants as less than human in the eyes of the law at the very same historical moment that we were founding a new nation based on universal human rights. Those are the two central facts of our nation's history. The American idea is founded on ideals of liberty secured by men who considered non-white people to be subhuman.
This doesn't mean that you should therefore hate America. Far from it. But if you don't understand this central truth, your love for this country is like the love of a wife who tries not to think about what her husband does when he's drunk.
2. SLAVERY EXISTED ONLY BRIEFLY, AND IN LIMITED LOCALES, IN THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC – INVOLVING ONLY A TINY PERCENTAGE OF THE ANCESTORS OF TODAY’S AMERICANS.
Medved is delighted to find that in all the time that the US was a going concern, slavery was legal for 89 years and not for 142. See? We win! We're not bad anymore!
(Here is more of Medved's facility with numbers: the century and a half before 1789 doesn't count, because we weren't America yet. So we get a pass on that. He hasn't really thought this through, either. Let's suppose we let him keep his thumb on the scale. How bad could the world of Islam really be if it took them ten centuries to take more slaves than we did in 89 years?)
He also notes that "slavery had been outlawed in most states decades before the Civil War." This should give you an idea of his qualifications: he doesn't know that this isn't true, and he doesn't know why it isn't true.
Slavery had been outlawed in exactly half the states until exactly one decade before the Civil War. The balance between slave and free states was, for instance, the basis of the Missouri Compromise in 1820: Missouri got admitted as a slave state at the same instant that Maine was admitted as a free state, keeping the Senate balanced between pro- and anti-slavery votes. The only way California got admitted as a free state in 1850 was that the new state sent one pro- and one anti-slavery Senator to Congress. It wasn't until 1858, when Minnesota was admitted as a free state and Kansas's admission as a slave state was blocked, that the balance tipped. Not coincidentally, secession followed two years later.
But that's just ignorance. Let's move on to cant.
The cant is in that bit about the "tiny percentage." America can't be held responsible for slavery today, Medved is arguing, because so few of us are descended from slaveowners.
Look, pal, your nation's history is your nation's history. Suck it up. You'd heap scorn on anyone who said that modern America doesn't get to bask in the glory of Washington and Jefferson because so few modern Americans are descended from them. If you're going to lecture people about morality and honesty, the least you can do is be moral and honest. Which brings us to:
3. THOUGH BRUTAL, SLAVERY WASN’T GENOCIDAL: LIVE SLAVES WERE VALUABLE BUT DEAD CAPTIVES BROUGHT NO PROFIT.
Here the argument takes a decidedly loopy turn. What makes America great? "We're not genocidal, given the proper incentives!" Well, I do feel better about my country now.
Medved is weirdly happy to report that, unlike the short-sighted Nazis, who worked their slaves to death, America had the good sense to keep them healthy enough to breed. This strikes me as a remarkable thing to find worth celebrating.
And, as is so often the case, Medved hasn't really thought through the implications of the "inconvenient truth" that cheers him so. For instance, the same economic motivation that kept slaveowners from indiscriminately working their property to death also led captains of slave ships to throw sick slaves overboard and then try to collect on their insurance. That's the sort of thing that happens when you think human beings are fungible.
4. IT’S NOT TRUE THAT THE U.S. BECAME A WEALTHY NATION THROUGH THE ABUSE OF SLAVE LABOR: THE MOST PROSPEROUS STATES IN THE COUNTRY WERE THOSE THAT FIRST FREED THEIR SLAVES.
Ultimately, sure. In the long haul, producing raw materials isn't going to make as much money as producing finished goods.
But that doesn't mean that the US didn't become a wealthy nation through the abuse of slave labor. The US became wealthy because of the development of its roads, its canals, its ports, and its manufacturies, without which it could neither have produced the goods it exported to the world nor gotten them to market. That development is the basis of all American wealth before about 1875.
What paid for that development was the great influx of foreign capital during the late 18th and early 19th century. Overwhelmingly, that capital came from the exportation of cotton, tobacco, indigo, sugar, and rice.
And guess how we raised all those great cash crops?
5. WHILE AMERICA DESERVES NO UNIQUE BLAME FOR THE EXISTENCE OF SLAVERY, THE UNITED STATES MERITS SPECIAL CREDIT FOR ITS RAPID ABOLITION.
Well, bully for us.
There's so much wrong in this particular piece of his argument that it's hard to know where to start. His characterization of the Civil War as being one between Confederate soldiers, "very few of whom owned slaves," and Union soldiers and sailors "proudly risk[ing] their lives for the emancipation cause" is probably a good one.
Medved's trying to craft a bold new narrative for the Civil War: one in which neither side was defending slavery. This leads him to say, with a straight face, that 364,000 Americans - "the stunning equivalent of five million deaths as a percentage of today's population" - died in the service of freeing the slaves.
No, seriously. That's his argument. The Civil War was a war to end slavery, he says, and we should stand in awe of the number of Americans who died.
Well, I for one do stand in awe of the number of Americans who died in the Civil War. But I recognize that one half of them went to their deaths for the principle that a bunch of politicians in Washington had no right to tell Georgia whether or not it was allowed to keep its Negroes in chains, and the other half of them went to their deaths for the principle that they weren't going to let their country be split in two by the slave power.
How do I know this? Because, as David Cross put it in another context, they fucking said so.
You have to be monumentally ignorant of the Civil War to assert that the Union was moved to war by abolitionism. Even at the dawn of the Civil War, the idea that slavery should be abolished because it was wrong was a crazy fringe movement. Abolitionists occupied about the same place in the political spectrum of 1860 that PETA does today.
Unionists didn't hate slavery because it was morally wrong. They hated it because it provided unfair competition. The whole basis of the Free Soil movement, for instance, was that the decent American yeoman farmer working his land didn't stand a chance against the powerful men south of the Mason-Dixon Line with their armies of slaves.
When Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, with great reluctance, in 1863, what spurred him to action was not the moral imperative of abolition, but the economic necessity of total war. Lincoln set the slaves free for exactly the same reason that Grant, one year later, let Sherman burn everything in his path in the march to Savannah.
But okay, let's put that behind us. Let's move on to an even more impressive demonstration of Medved's acuity. This is good enough to quote in full:
Moreover, the economic cost of liberation remained almost unimaginable. In nearly all other nations, the government paid some form of compensation to slave-owners at the time of emancipation, but Southern slave-owners received no reimbursement of any kind when they lost an estimated $3.5 billion in 1860 dollars (about $70 billion in today’s dollars) of what [David Brion] Davis describes as a “hitherto legally accepted form of property.”That's right. The almost unimaginable cost of liberation. Let us just savor that for a moment. Let us, to use Joan Didion's turn of phrase, enter into the argument on its own spooky level. Wow. $70 billion eliminated with the stroke of a pen. That does sound like an enormous cost for the nation to bear.
Okay, back to reality. Here's some more math that Medved hasn't bothered to do. If you're going to assert that the economic cost of emancipating a million slaves is $70 billion, you are also asserting that the economic benefit of giving a million people their freedom is: $0. This is certainly the way slaveholders looked at the balance sheet. Apparently Medved does too.
6. THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT TODAY’S AFRICAN-AMERICANS WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF THEIR ANCESTORS HAD REMAINED BEHIND IN AFRICA.
For someone who claims to be a crusader for decency, Medved sure has some weird ideas about morality.
I mean, seriously. Let us suppose, for instance, that someone swept up Medved and all of his living relatives deemed useful enough, threw them in a cargo hold with hundreds of other people, and let them spend a couple of months living in their own filth, during which time a quarter of them sickened and died. When he arrived at the destination, we'd take his surviving kids away from him and sell them. If he had a daughter of the right age, we'd clean her up nicely, because they always fetch a good price. His wife might luck out and get sold as a domestic. Medved's best hope would probably to be a field hand on a cotton plantation, where he'd be much likelier to survive than if he got stuck growing sugar or rice. But that wouldn't be up to him.
So, thousands of miles away from everyone he's ever known and everything he's ever owned, stripped away from his people and his language and his family, Medved would then spend the rest of his days doing back-breaking work. Eventually, at the end of his days, he might learn to stop thinking about who bought his daughter and wondering if any of the new quadroon girls his owner just came back from New Orleans with were his grandchildren
The thing is, this is all okay. Because one of those quadroon girls is going to have a grandchild of her own someday. And that grandchild might go to college.
Just so that we're clear on what a beastly and immoral assertion this "inconvenient truth" is.
This "inconvenient truth" carries the odor that permeates Medved's whole argument. He doesn't want to face up to this, but everything he's saying here derives, one way or another from a central idea: black folks are just like you and me, only worse.
Breeding them and selling their children: hardly worth mentioning. Writing their fundamental inhumanity into the Constitution: not worth our notice. Setting them free: a big economic negative for the poor slaveowners, but what are you going to do? And look at what a dog's breakfast they made of Africa.
We knew going in that Medved wasn't qualified to write about the history of slavery. What this piece reveals is that he's also not qualified to write about decency.
From President Bush's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars today:
One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like "boat people," "re-education camps," and "killing fields."
The killing fields were not a "price of America's withdrawal." What brought the Khmer Rouge to power, and made the killing fields possible, was the secret bombing of Cambodia.
American forces, with the approval of Prince Norodom Sihanouk (who wanted the NLF out of his country), conducted a four-year-long strategic bombing campaign on the Ho Chi Minh trail and the NLF's southern headquarters. This operation, in which over 11,000 bombing missions were flown, killed something on the order of 100,000 Cambodian peasants, though given what happened in its wake it's hard to assess the accuracy of that number.
What's not hard to assess is the campaign's result: the bombing drove the rural farmers of Cambodia directly into the arms of the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge's anti-urban ideology did not just come from the bits of Marx and Mao that Pol Pot picked up while he was at the Sorbonne, it came from the fact that urban Cambodia had, by proxy, declared war on rural Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge came to power because the Cambodian monarchy had delegitimized itself by allowing foreigners to kill tens of thousands of its subjects.
Not only did American withdrawal not cause the killing fields, it helped end them. When the Khmer Rouge were driven from power in 1979, it was not by the freedom-loving West, but by Communist Vietnam, who, no longer engaged in driving a foreign enemy out of their country, had the resources to put an end to the worst humanitarian crisis in the history of Southeast Asia.
The "killing fields" that Bush cites were not a consequence of American withdrawal from Vietnam. They were a consequence of the American presidency circumventing Congress. The Nixon administration lied to the House and Senate Foreign Relations Committees and falsified Air Force records to conceal the campaign from Congress.
It was, in fact, the secret bombing of Cambodia, and not the war in Vietnam, that motivated Congress to pass the War Powers Act. The War Powers Act is what galvanized young Republican staffers and attorneys like Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and David Addington. The guiding philosophy of the Bush administration, from before it even took office, has been to undo the constraints on the Presidency that this law imposed.
So it is deeply ironic that the President of the United States should make a speech justifying his actions in Iraq by pointing to the killing fields of Cambodia. The killing fields of Cambodia were a direct result of the central policy of his presidency.
This post started out life as a rant on the WELL, in a discussion of the thing that is Ann Coulter. A WELL denizen who has been lamely championing her for years wrote:
I continue to find curious and telling the vociferous hooting and hollering disapproval that someone somewhere might find Ann or an ethnic joke funny.
My response (which I've edited a bit — the original was written off the top of my head and wasn't as clear in places as it could have been) is below.
It's neither curious nor especially telling that civilized people recoil from things that are recognizably inimical to civilization. Especially if those things have no other qualities.
Coulter is not so much a psychopath (though I think she's that too) as she is the product of direct incentives. For producing what, as Geoffrey Nunberg has observed, is essentially smut, she has become famous and wealthy. The curious and telling question is not "why are people mad at Ann Coulter?" but rather "what is the source of these incentives?"
Who benefits when smut dominates the public sphere? Smut, having no other purpose or effect than gratifying base impulses, provides no platform on which to build. But its effect is more pernicious: When smut crowds out that which is not smut, nothing gets built.
We are in a time of great decadence. Our nation has turned its back on its greatness and its destiny. Our legislature is corrupt and depraved, and its depravity has made it weak and cowardly. Our judiciary is inept and marginal. Our executive branch is in the hands of men who have seen clearly that all they needed in order to seize imperial power from this situation was the will.
These men have taken a nation that was once a beacon to the world and transformed it into something to be reviled. We are now a nation who kidnaps, tortures, and murders people without even troubling ourselves to determine that they are truly our enemies. We are an aggressor nation, an invader, an occupier, a conqueror.
Since such a role is so alien to our character and our history, we are also terrible at it, which is why we're losing the war in Iraq. Corrupt and evil our leaders may be, but our military and our populace cannot bring itself to truly be a nation of conquerors. We can't do to Iraq what Russia did to Chechnya. Some of our troops are, we are beginning to find, learning how to be ruthless conquerors instead of professional soldiers. But the disconnect between who they are and what their leaders want to employ them as remains great.
How can incompetent people wield unchecked power in a representative government that has been structured from its very beginning to prevent even competent people from doing so?
First, it is necessary that the branches intended to check their power be co-opted or corrupt.
Second, it is necessary to persuade the populace that change is undesireable.
Third, it is necessary to persuade the opposition that change is impossible.
The first condition is well established. Our legislature is so thoroughly corrupt that even if the administration's party didn't control both houses it's hard to imagine it taking any kind of effective action. The judiciary, whose complaisance has been evident from the moment it elevated this administration into power, is no check either.
The "war on terror" is constructed to accomplish the second condition. Its fundamental aim is not to put an end to terror, but to put an end to constraints on executive power. Its goal is to persuade the populace that preventing the men in power from doing whatever they choose is suicidal.
And it is the final goal, persuading the opposition of the impossibility of change, that brings us to Ann Coulter.
The content of her message is not so important. (Though its content, that any and all who would raise their voices to check the power of the executive branch are evil — treasonous, self-interested, hypocrites, Jews, etc. — is certainly in line.) What is important is that her message appeals to passion, not reason.
Reason is the enemy of the men in power. They recognize that reason has the capacity to bring them down. Not destroy them — there's no way this will end with David Addington hanging by his heels in a public square being beaten with baseball bats or Dick Cheney having his last heart attack in the cell where Slobodan Milosovic had his final stroke — but restrain them.
Reasonable people who have access to the facts are this administration's worst enemy. And as this administration and its allies take great pains to suppress the facts, they also takes great pains to suppress reason.
And there is why Coulter has received her reward. Why we have a Fox News. How we have come to have a mainstream media that consistently fails to follow arguments to their logical conclusions and insteads presents "both sides," as though truth and falsity are of equal weight. How it is that our national discussion about the education of our people focuses on the obsessions of a religious sect.
Reason is the enemy of the men in power and their friends, and they have dedicated themselves to extirpate it from the public sphere.
Civilized people see this happening. While they may not perceive it in its totality, they recognize its depravity. They recognize that not only is Ann Coulter's "humor" shallow and hateful, it is harmful. Not because it hurts the 9/11 widows to be described as money-grubbing media whores, but because when such a thing is what we're arguing about in our public sphere, reason has fled.
To choose smut over reason — to allow the thrill of "sticking it to the liberals" or the shiver of hating "the repuglicans" be what our public sphere is for — is to labor, however unwittingly, in the service of the men who are destroying this country.
This is why I despise Ann Coulter so. Not because what she says is
offensive to me, but because every five-minute segment the "Today" show
dedicates to her offensiveness is five minutes that it's not spending
talking about what's happening to us. That is what she is for.
I'm beginning to worship Gary Brecher, who writes the "War Nerd" column for The Exile. (Which, weirdly, is a web-based publication for English-speaking expats in Russia.)
He's a hard guy to worship.
As he'll happily tell you, he's an extremely unappealing man. From his picture, and his descriptions of himself, you'd expect him to have his fingers permanently discolored by Cheetos dust. He files his dispatches from the not-at-all-romantic and even-less-a-nexus-of-global-strategy town of Fresno, California. And his perspective on war and warfare, well, it isn't that fun.
His columns are entertaining and interesting, frequently shocking, and they often provoke revulsion. Oh, you think, that's a little beyond the pale.
Of course, what he's writing about is the organized and systematic annihilation of human beings through violence. What's beyond the pale is being interested in this. And his "oh, admit it, you're interested in it too" attitude reminds me of what William S. Burroughs said about capital punishment: let them see what's on the end of that long newspaper spoon.
It was a good career move for John Keegan to write about war with the civility and detachment he did. (No knock on Keegan, a clear-headed and open-minded man who sought out the answers to questions that very few people had thought to ask.) Brecher is, well, a little rough. He is interested in war the way that some people are interested in porn featuring obese women: he recognizes that it's shameful, but his interest is strong enough that he doesn't bother defending it. (Also, unlike porn featuring obese women, warfare intrudes on millions of lives around the world, and however you might feel about p.f.o.w., wouldn't it be nice if the positions were reversed?)
Here's an excerpt (thanks to Google's cache; the original is no more) from UPI's interview with Brecher:
Q. When journalists like Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times op-ed page describes various wars in Africa as "senseless," are they making sense?
A. That's the best question you asked. No, it's absolute BS but nobody calls them on it. If you guys were doing your job, they couldn't get away with it, but they do. When Kristof says "senseless," he means he doesn't WANT TO KNOW about it. He won't even try to think like the people doing the fighting. Try doing that and see if it still seems senseless.
Here you've got one kind of war, the "sensible" kind with uniforms, "rules of war," and big battles like Jena or Verdun. That kind means you stand up and walk into cannon fire, grapeshot or machine-gun fire and massed artillery, and all you get out of it is a few dollars a month, and if you decide to quit on your own, they hang you. How is that sensible?
Now take African war. You have these neighbors you hated since forever, and you decide to do something about it. You get together quiet with the rest of your tribe and jump the enemy village while they're sleeping and kill everybody except maybe the cute girls, then you take all their stuff and burn their houses and take the girls home to be slaves.
Maybe I'm crazy, but that sure makes more sense to me than getting your head blown off for the glory of king and country. Kristof makes a living not even trying to understand how there are people in the world who don't think like him. Nobody wants to see how other people think, it's disgusting.
His columns taken as a whole are bracing and occasionally seem a little unhinged. His hatred of Victor Davis Hanson, for instance:
In his last column for the Fresno Bee, he sneered at people who don't have Ph.D.'s for daring to have opinions about the war in Iraq: "What do a talented Richard Gere, Robert Redford and Madonna all have in common besides loudly blasting the current administration? They either dropped out of, or never started, college. Cher may think George Bush is 'stupid,' but she - not he - didn't finish high school."
Since I never even finished my AA degree, I took that kind of personally. I guess it's my fault for not getting into Yale on pure merit like Bush did. That column got me so furious I daydreamed about driving down Highway 99 to Hanson's farm and setting all his orchards and vineyards on fire. I kept thinking of what the Spartans said when one of their neighbors threatened them: "Your cicadas will chirp from the ground," meaning, "We'll burn your fucking olive orchards if you mouth off again."
There you have Gary Brecher in a nutshell: he's all pissed-off and demotic and man-on-the-street college-dropout, and then he drops that business about the Spartans in there to remind you that when it comes to warfare, he knows what he is talking about. (And boy, does he make Victor Davis Hanson look bad. Really, go take a look.)
He may be full of shit. But really, just about everything you read by everybody on the war in Iraq is full of shit. At least Brecher understands what shit is.
This means that the grocery store is the worst-case scenario for a certain kind of modern sensory overload: being sold to. It's incessant. Everything your eyes light on in a grocery store is for sale. And while there remain a couple of holdouts to old-style utilitarian packaging (the meat counter comes to mind), for the most part, everything that your eyes light on, from the "artisanal" Safeway baguettes to the SUPER EXTREME NACHO FUCK YOU RAGGED Doritos, is crying out "Buy me! Buy me!"
And then you come to the checkout stands, which, being the primary site of the impulse buy, take this visual assault about as far as it can be taken. What you see there is, for the most part, scraps of a kind of folklore, yelling at you in inch-high yellow-on-red sans-serif headlines about how Brad isn't really the father of Angelina's child, and Jessica has a new date, and all of the other doings of our brain-damaged Olympian gods.
What made last night's slog through the Safeway at 16th and Bryant especially hard to endure was another logical consequence of the low-margin grocery business: understaffing. In this case, there were four checkstands running to service (by a conservative estimate) a hundred customers. It took me, no lie, forty minutes to check out.
And that's not forty minutes having your feet massaged and sipping cognac. No, it's forty minutes of the Kodak kiosk telling you that you, even YOU, can figure out how to use it. It's simple. Just touch the screen to get started. Now. Touch it. Touch it. And then the music (tonight's selection is the Eagles' "Heartache Tonight," oh yes) gets interrupted by the bright voice of a woman telling you about a product that will make you happy, that you need, that's so affordable anyone can have two. (I don't remember what it was.) And to the left, I see the cover of TIME, consisting entirely of a head shot of al-Zarqawi with a red X drawn over his face.
Back during Reagan's first administration, I had the insight that as a nation we were at a turning point. I saw two possible courses. In one, we could collapse into Italy: we could become a once-great nation of discontented grumblers whose government was so terrible all we could do was laugh at it. In the other, we could collapse into the Soviet Union, which would be much the same, only no one would be laughing and the food would be terrible.
It seemed clear to me, trudging in this joyless line last night and picking my way through a landscape of propaganda too ridiculous to believe and too ubiquitous to ignore, what course we have chosen.
It's easy to think that what you're seeing is ideologues at work. But it's not that. Not at all. Ideology is just another tool for the destruction of meaning. It doesn't matter to this administration whether or not evolution gets taught in schools. What matters is that we get accustomed to the idea that truth gets decided by consensus. Because they can't rig the truth, but rigging a consensus is child's play to them.
Even if their ends are not evil -- and I believe they are -- their means are evil. Democracy is predicated on the notion that the voice of the people is both morally and pragmatically superior to the voice of the despot. They are doing everything they can to get the voice of the people to babble about nonsense. And they have had great success.
