| Tuesday, October 28, 2003 |
11:51 - Angry Young Men
http://www.techcentralstation.com/102703A.html
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This TCS column by Arnold Kling has some interesting observations, ones that I don't find surprising these days:
I did not feel this sort of discomfort in 2000, which was the one other year when I attended Pop!tech. Back then, a conservative or libertarian attending the conference felt like a Jew among a group of tolerant Christians. This year, a conservative or libertarian felt like a Jew among a group of Christians whose main topic of conversation was the despicable nature of Jews.
I'm in the midst of a heretofore quite pleasant e-mail conversation with someone (met through a channel that would probably have led him to believe I'm way more liberal than I am) whose LiveJournal consists alternately of long, passionate, emotional, artistic soliloquies about the nature of beauty and the beauty of nature and so forth... and vitriolic revulsion toward the Right and its icons. "I tend to view anyone or anything bearing a Bush/Cheney logo in much the same way that I view biohazard labels -- they are warnings that the contents therein are likely to be volatile, unstable, antithetical to human life, and quite possibly lethal," he says. "This public safety notice brought to you by Citizens Who Still Know How To Think Clearly."
(I haven't told him my horrible secret yet. I dread the inevitable day when I will.)
A few days ago, he told me that "In these terrible times, I would probably be arrested for treason for speaking the mildest of my views, so I usually just shut up."
And I turned to the TV, where there was C-SPAN coverage of thousands of protesters gathering on the Mall in front of the Capitol ("the U.S. Parliament", that is), dancing around effigies of Bush's head on stakes planted in the ground, chanting "Fuck George Bush!" on national TV.
Anybody catch the estimates of how many were arrested, how many beaten or killed by police?
No?
Darn.
For the curious, here is an extensive photo-blog of the event.
And here's what happens to dissenting opinions (held by pregnant women, no less) who dare to show their faces.
And I'm left not feeling angry, not hateful, not sad... just bewildered. What has happened here?
How is it that the Left, with its vaunted compassion for the "common man", can have so little respect for the average Joe on the highway that a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker (or, horrors, a Christian one) is grounds for automatically dismissing the person-- his life lived to date, his opinions, his accomplishments, his career, his family, his military service or charity work or lack of any of those things-- as "volatile, unstable, antithetical to human life, and quite possibly lethal"?
It's okay-- he's just a "mass", right? And the masses understand nothing.
Discouragingly, I'm seeing more and more evidence that there's some kind of rolling wave of illogic and thoughtlessness taking a grip on this country. There are plenty of people on the Left who are thoughtful and reasonable people, who acknowledge the good of the removal of Saddam while they criticize the success of the post-war rebuilding, for example. But such people would have found find few like minds in the crowds sponsored by International ANSWER and the Workers' World Party in Washington, D.C. this past weekend.
For them, logic and morality and reality itself all take a backseat to the paramount importance of being right:
I'd also like to mention that I wrote this last May, when Iraq war supporters were still confidently insisting that weapons of mass destruction would be found. Well, guess who was right? That's right. The liberals were right about this. Ha ha.
Meanwhile, the Iraqis have nothing but contempt for the UN and the Western "peace protesters" who, for all their supposed compassion toward the Iraqi people, would only have succeeded in keeping Saddam in power. These protesters are doing no favors to anybody but themselves-- certainly not to Iraq. And I'll bet the Iraqi man-on-the-street would simply laugh in your face if you asked him if he was outraged that the weapons of mass destruction hadn't been found yet.
To say nothing of the fact that the implied logic of the above quote is that Bush "lied" his way into war, using a pretext that he knew was false, and that he knew would be revealed to be false... but then he somehow neglected to "lie" in the aftermath, planting some WMDs in order to complete the alibi. I mean, c'mon. A 14-year-old D&D player would be able to figure out how to make the story complete. As a leader, you get to be either an evil genius or an incompetent buffoon. But not both.
Further, the quote assumes that Saddam didn't actually have WMDs, and that a small-voiced but insistent cadre of liberals-- like, oh, Clinton, Chirac, Schröder, Putin, the UN inspectors, John Kerry, Wesley Clark-- had said so all along. It's pure revisionism-- 180 degrees from reality-- to say this, but people are doing it anyway. If they admit that Saddam had WMDs at all, they apparently suggest that he voluntarily and secretly destroyed them in the time since the inspectors were kicked out in 1998, even though doing so could have gained him no conceivable benefit, and was likely only to result in his ouster as he wouldn't be able to prove his disarmament to the UN's satisfaction. The mental gymnastics necessary to support this theory are astonishing. I would not want to try to debug the spaghetti-code inside these people's brains.
And yet, without irony, they call themselves Citizens Who Still Know How To Think Clearly.
Some hold that this raving sect of mentally incoherent logically-impaired sign-wavers is just a fringe, a cult of anti-personality drunk on the camaraderie that arises from the novel prospect of shared mass hatred of a single visible, iconic person. I think it's bigger than that, though. It takes a lot of effort to get people into the streets of the world's cities by the hundreds of thousands. This isn't happening by accident. It's lasted too long to be a fluke.
And I think there's something new going on. A nostalgic romanticization of Vietnam's hippies, perhaps, and the intense need to reduce the world to recognizable, bite-sized caricatures, icons, insightful parallels. Or possibly it's the second- and third-order fallout in the nation's collective mind from 9/11-- first was the shock and horror and patriotism, but then there was the freight-train backlash against it that has so violently uprooted the foundations of so many people's minds that all cognitive consistency is lost.
If this is what 9/11 has done to us in the long term, then bin Laden really did have a plan and a half, didn't he?
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Brian Tiemann
