Isn’t it ironic that the far left, who promote laws against hate (Hate Speech) are so filled with hate? No President in recent memory has been the recipient of more anger, rage, and hatred than George Bush. While not a Bush supporter myself, as a conservative I always became strangely defensive when exposed to the anti-Bush vitriol of friends and co-workers on the left. The blogosphere was and is, of course, filled with angry diatribes from both sides. It’s so easy to attack your opponents anonymously with name calling and slurs when you don’t have to meet them in person. In a review of anthropologist Peter Wood’s “A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now,” George Will wrote in 2007:
Many people who loathe George W. Bush have adopted what Peter Wood describes as “ecstatic anger as a mode of political action.”
Wood . . . says the new anger “often has the look-at-me character of performance art.” His book is a convincing, hence depressing, explanation of “anger chic” — of why anger has become an all-purpose emotional stance. It has achieved prestige and become “a credential for group membership.” As a result, “Americans have been flattening their emotional range into an angry monotone.” (“Anger Is All the Rage,” realclearpoliltics.com, 3-25-07)
In another review of Wood’s book by Stanley Kurtz, Kurtz quotes Wood’s characterization of the New Anger, which he deems is applicable to the blogosphere:
[New Anger involves] deriding an opponent for the sheer pleasure of expressing contempt for other people….New Anger is a spectacle to be witnessed by an appreciative audience, not an attempt to win over the uncommitted….If in your anger you reduce your opponent to the status of someone unworthy or unable to engage in legitimate exchange, real politics come to an end….Whoever embraces [New Anger] is bound to find that, at least in the political realm, he has traded the possibility of real influence for the momentary satisfactions of self-expression.” (“Angry Talk,” eppc.org, January 2, 2007)
The left has long embraced anger: the self-righteous rage of angry feminists, angry demonstrators against war or the latest political cause, “primal scream” therapy. There’s a bumper sticker now that proclaims “If You’re Not Angry You’re Not Paying Attention.” The belief that anger is good probably has roots in Romanticism and the belief that “feeling is all,” expressed fully in the bloodbath of the French Revolution. And now we have the new Romanticism of the Countercultural left. “Rage Against the Machine.” Limp Bizkit and the violence at Woodstock 1999. Rage is good, violence is good. Kurtz maintained in the above article that the “formative political moment” for the New Anger was the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and it took until the Clinton era “to bleed over to the Right.” The Right has tended to favor the old American ideal, “the modest heroism of Gary Cooper’s Sargent York” rather than “something much closer to the Incredible Hulk.” But if the left has its Al Frankens, the Right can now boast its Ann Coulters.
It seems that once Bush was on his way out, the left needed someone else to transfer their hatred and anger to and who better to serve their purpose than Sarah Palin: She looks like the All-American girl, the former prom queen, the girl who wouldn’t date you in high school, as Douglas MacKinnon opined in a recent Huffington Post. A strong woman that could “do it all,” family and career, as a conservative woman she was a poke in the eye to radical feminists, who react like black radicals to a black conservative: any deviation from politically correct gender and racial politics is viewed as a heinous betrayal.
‘It’s not that they’re ignorant. It’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.’
New Yorker film critic David Denby recently wrote Snark, a book that takes a swipe at “snark,” which in my humble opinion (I confess I haven’t read the book although I have seen Denby promote it on Book-TV) typifies the kind of smirky ad hominem attacks perpetrated on Palin by such darlings of the left as Bill Maher or David Letterman. Amazon.com had the following definition of “snark” in a review of Denby’s book:
What is snark? You recognize it when you see it — a tone of teasing, snide, undermining abuse, nasty and knowing, that is spreading like pinkeye through the media and threatening to take over how Americans converse with each other and what they can count on as true. Snark attempts to steal someone’s mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her effectiveness.
I think people like Maher and Letterman prefer or are reduced to ad hominem attacks on conservative figures because that way they don’t have to address conservative arguments. I doubt that either one has ever read a conservative or libertarian author such as the Founding Fathers, Burke, Hayek, James Burnham, Robert Nisbett, or Thomas Sowell. In fact, I doubt that either one has read much of anything that isn’t contemporary book-of-the-month club type pabulum. Their half educated smirkiness doesn’t give one the impression that they’ve ever bothered to read the classics of history and literature. Brent Bozell, in an open letter to Oliver Stone, that well known leftist director of anti-American movies, wrote the following:
You were back on [Bill] Maher’s show the other day talking about historical figures. Maher wanted to know why you haven’t done a film about Ronald Reagan, since “that is the type of character you could do very well with.” God only knows what he meant by that, but when you gave your answer, you were pretty blunt.
“Nixon always said Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch,” you said, and the audience laughed, and you smiled and decided to take that statement further by agreeing with it. So you said, “You know, I think that he was,” and the audience cheered and hooted and applauded.
See what I mean when I say you’re a lousy historian? Don’t take my word for it, Oliver.
I turned to Frank Donatelli, the White House Political Director under President Reagan from 1987 through 1989. I asked him what he thought of your observation. Here’s what he has to say:
“Bill Maher and Oliver Stone have both made careers of ad hominem attacks on their political opponents. As Reagan would say, ‘It’s not that they’re ignorant. It’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.’ The literature as written by conservative and liberal observers is overwhelming in concluding that Ronald Reagan was fully engaged in implementing policies during his presidency that resulted in the longest economic expansion in our history and the end of the Cold War and the defeat of communism. His presidential reputation is growing and history will remember Reagan as one of the great presidents in our nation’s history.”
I went to Richard Allen, Reagan’s national security advisor and asked him what he thought. Apparently he didn’t think much.
“Every respectable academic and popular analysis in the large and growing literature of the Reagan presidency and Reagan’s presence on the national scene proves beyond any doubt the utter foolishness of the Oliver Stone remark. Stone has made an unsuccessful career of falsification, especially when it comes to Ronald Reagan. The actual dumbsumbitch is easy to identify.” (“Oliver Stone, Lousy Historian,” Townhall.com, July 3, 2009)
If you fill your mind with half truths and falsehoods of a partisan political nature, there’s no room left for the real thing. One’s world view becomes one vast self-fulfilling delusion, but because it is shared by others, maybe by everyone you know, there’s no reason to question it. And with enough money to secure a plush lifestyle, reality can hardly intrude; there’s no cognitive dissonance to rear its ugly head. As Harry Stein has written in I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican, many upscale New Yorkers have never met anyone who thinks differently, and certainly not a Republican.
Posted by markamagi 