Eric Blair, at Warblogger Watch, notes that
“Bill Quick is running a most bloodthirsty warblog contest. When I first started up WBW I would have been all over it, but now it just kind of seems desperate and sad. Here are a few highlights, my last word, unless one of these nuts goes postal and starts picking off brown people with a Bushmaster.”
Desperate and sad it may be, but I’m afraid it increasingly represents the mainstream. Reading some of the venom these pathetic ignorants are spouting serves to help us remember what kind of country we live in, if waking up painted blue all over last Wednesday morning hasn’t already done it for you.
Actually, I’m of two minds what significance to place on all this. As FmH readers know, it is a longstanding preoccupation of mine to worry about exactly what influence thoughtful webloggers opposed to the madness can have. Usually it seems to me we fill a universe with discourse, but that the universe is one of likeminded souls only preaching to the converted. This often discourages me (and inspires a shower of supportive comments in my mailbox). But, on the other hand, one of my responses to the fact that I live in a country whose denizens are over and over anally raped, played for fools and convinced to love it enough to beg for more from our elected despots — and then go on in braindead support of the export of our hypocritical tyranny and pillage on the rest of the world — has been to dissociate myself. When people tell me my words can have an influence in the broader field of public discourse, not only am I often dubious but, usually, I’m not sure I want that. You can’t argue about political persuasion any more than you can about religion —indeed, it is usually faith- rather than fact-based! It takes so much energy to debate with deluded ranters; is it worth it?
Why not just live in a different country? In a way, ever since the moral bankruptcy of the Vietnam War, I’ve taken seriously the jeering jingoist yahoos who taunted us to “love it or leave it.” I left. Not literally, not geographically, but I have never felt I lived in America as constituted, not their America. This was apolitical whenever possible, politically involved when an issue of peace, justice or survival made it morally impossible to ignore it. Actually, maybe I live elsewhere geographically too; I’ve always settled in places which are pockets of resistance, university towns, for most of my adult life The Republic of Cambridge or its environs (I’m across the river from there now, but I still have my office there), and could not see relocating anywhere in the Vast Wasteland which still seems painful whenever it is necessary to venture out into it. At least, unlike my aloof beleaguered isolationism of the Reagan-Bush era, the pockets of self-imposed exile in these days of renewed tyranny and permanent war have expanded into cyberspace to assume a continuity and community. It’s a little bit easier to inhabit this America. Let’s hope, with the coming storm, it remains a place of refuge.
Addendum: Two thoughtful responses from FmH readers ensued. One wrote that we must truly contend with a consistently conservative electorate:
The disheartening thing, for those of us on the Left, is how little has changed. Plus ca change, indeed. But while knowledge of the past is key to understanding the future, it is true too that the future is not the past. There is a new reality, a reality that threatens not just Democrats, but democracy.
Florida in 2000 was the paradigm, for our new unpleasant political reality. Florida, and America, is divided right down the middle, between two groups, neither of which care to listen to, much less respect, the other. Democracy has little to say about this state of affairs. It is difficult to see how the rights of the minority are to be respected in this new world, and the truth is, then, that our democracy itself has broken down. The New America is a place where Republicans and Democrats have become the Hatfields and the McCoys, sniping at each other from entrenched positions. Both feeling, with some justification, that they represent the real America, and the others are merely usurpers. This sense of ownership, and the disdain for those who disagree with us that stems from it, that we can hear any day on Fox or talk radio, is going to get worse, before it gets better. It already has. It just did.
Another reader (and Cambridge resident) worries that:
The problem with abandoning the country, especially intellectually, is that you are, in effect, surrendering. …(T)o fail to assert your patriotism, your love of the freedoms that this country gives you, is to allow the right wing to assert that they, and only they, are patriots.
…When the principled left gives up on patriotism, it makes patriotism seem ever more not just the last refuge of the scoundrel, but his natural habitat. This is just not so! America can be many things, and it can be good things, and if you want to have any influence at all, you’ll have to start by reminding yourself that our flag represents “liberty and justice for all” at least as much as it represents military might and manifest destiny.
And, finally, there’s this, that just begs to be posted in its entirety, from the comments to a similar post I put up on Warblogger Watch:
Eliot, that preening little tirade was a classic case-study in the shakey, pretended contempt of the ineffectual left for the big, confusing and scary world outside it’s stale little Trotskist horizon.
It was all there, good lord, like ticking off a list, the self-righteous withdrawal from debate with the excuse of being too good for the heathen mob, the ignorant refusal to aknowledge the validity of other people’s opinions, the timid refusal to engage masquerading as world-weary intellectual superiority, mixed in with childish accusations and insults. Yep, that’s the lot.
Oh and what do you know, you’re some kind of academic? Didn’t see that coming.
You know, the only thing that tempers my disgust with you mental insects is the deep personal satisfaction I derive at the roadkill the real world has made of all your retarded theories and movements. Seen Che Guevara lately, dipshits? Haha!
I’m sorry but you need to learn some new tunes, we had to kill all your widdle commie fwends, now worker’s paradise go bye bye.
You might end up having to actually work for a living, though the ambitious, talented people are going to kick your ass. Maybe better to withdraw into some taxpayer funded academic backwater, retreat from the marketplace of ideas that has so bruised and humiliated your kind. Then you can pontificate from on high while the rest of us ignore you and get on with our lives.
I’m pretty sure you’ll find a way to suck blood from the public purse, just keep telling yourself how much better you are than your productive fellow citizens. Those poor sheep don’t know what they got coming… any day now… goddamn them.. make em all sorry…
Hey Elliot, has it ever crossed your mind we might actually be right?
Oh nevermind. Off you go.
It’s amazing how wrong he gets it — how he concludes that I’m essentially a welfare cheat is a breathtaking leap of faith that is utterly beyond me. And amazing how self-referential his post is. Pretty well hoist on his own petard, ay? [And, no, thankfully, it never crossed my mind that you might be right. Who was it who said that the contempt of the contemptible is a compliment? I don’t make my living as an academic but, forced to choose between them and the anti-intellectualism of this fellow and his cronies, it is no contest…]
